Dear Keith,
While your note on topics clarifies some issues, it muddies Herbert Simon’s concept of design. You write, “We even find Herbert Simon’s model of making things better through acting on things in the world - that is, design as fixing.”
While Simon’s model *includes* acting on things and fixing things, it is not *limited* to acting on things and fixing things.
For Simon, design involves preferred future states. This is much more than fixing what exists. Design may involve generating future things that do not now exist.
Herbert Simon (1982: 129) wrote that to design is to “[devise] courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” The word design reflects intention, preference, and choice. This can include imagineering and generative concepts. The iPhone did not involve fixing the then-current model of the mobile phone. The iPhone created a new preferred situation different to the kinds of communication tools that existed at the time.
Neither does Simon restrict his definition to things. He speaks of situations. Creating preferred situations may involve designing processes or systems.
One of the most interesting examples of design in the world today involves a simple process that is now used by organizations around the world. While it cost nearly nothing to implement. Nevertheless, it has created trillions of dollars in the value of person-hours saved while adding value to many organizations by rendering them more efficient and more effective.
When I was a youngster, a trip to the bank, buying stamps at the post office, or taking an airline flight meant standing in a line. The system generally required me to choose one among several lines, and it required me to wait in that line until I reached the service desk. I often felt that my line moved far too slowly. Lucky people in a swift line seemed to arrive after I entered my line, yet they were served while I was still waiting. A distinguished mathematician once contrived a logical argument to demonstrate why most of us would always be stuck in the slowest line. Perhaps it was a joke — then again, perhaps not.
At some point in the late 1970s or early 1980s, I went to a bank to find something that astonished me. There were no lines at the windows. Instead, there was a single line. Everyone who entered the bank waited in the first line. We reached the head of the line in the order of our entry to the bank. From there, we went to the first available service desk.
Over the past four decades, this system has dramatically improved the world, but it is not a thing.
Many of the systems that make our world better involve processes and systems. Some of these interact with things — the World Wide Web, for example, is not a thing, but things connect us to it. Computer programs and algorithms are strings of numbers, but they control things and make them useful. James Beniger’s (1986) classic The Control Revolution discusses the far-reaching evolution evolution of many such processes. More recently, William Goetzmann’s (2017) book Money Changes Everything is another example that shows how the systems we create and design shape the civilizations, societies, and nations in which we live.
Many of the systems involved in control and in economics begin in abstract mathematics. When human beings first created many of these systems or processes, they were not things, nor did they fix things. Many were pure ideas invented for the joy of invention — or, for mathematical realists, for the joy of discovery. Only later did people find that they could use these ideas to design — that is, “[devise] courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” Until that time, they were a form of abstract conceptual play.
Herbert Simon was an economist and engineer. His definition of design include things, but it is not limited to things. It includes fixing or improving what exists, and it includes creating, discovering, inventing, and imagining preferred future situations that do not exist today.
Yours,
Ken
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Reference
Beniger, James. R. 1986. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Goetzmann, William. 2017. Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible.
Simon Herbert. 1982. The sciences of the artificial. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press.
—
Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
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