Richard raised the question of whether a better term for design is needed.

What comes to mind is that a better definition of design must exclude as
well as include.

Often design activity is unhelpfully conflated with other activities that
happen at the same time or relate to parts of the training of designers.

This lack of exclusion can be a serious problem for design researchers and
theorists trying to create sound design theory, even though it often offers
helpful (lazy) reduction in cognitive load for others.

An example is the problematic conflation of engineering design and
engineering analysis by definitions of design that ambiguously include both.

Engineering analysis is in essence the modelling of engineering situations
(usually by mathematics) to be able to predict outcomes.

In contrast, engineering design is the activity by which designs (drawings
and other specifications) are created for use as part of a legal contract
to produce a product.

An engineering analyst may never in their life be involved in engineering
design activity. However, an engineering designer may at sometimes need to
do some engineering analysis (if they can't get software or someone else to
do it). I suggest when an engineering designer is temporarily acting as an
engineering analyst this is not design activity.

A better definition of design can help by clearly differentiating between
design activity and other activities that happen at the same time or are
part of useful theory from other fields.

Another example, in designing a social program, it is helpful to distinguish
between the design activity of creating a description of a social program to
be rolled out, and the research into social, economic and political theories
on which it is based. The latter being different from design activity.

Another example, a design definition should be able to separate the activity
of designing computer chips from the theories of physics.

The above all seem obvious.

Closer to home it gets more interesting.

A good definition of design should also be able to differentiate between:

The activity of designing and the activity of sketching. Designers sometimes
do sketching in the way that engineering designers sometimes do engineering
analysis. But they are different activities. In other words, sketching
isn't design and design isn't sketching.

Similarly a good definition of design should be able to differentiate
between design activity and creating Art.

More prosaically, and easier, such a definition of design that is capable of
accurate exclusions would exclude Design History as being different from the
activity of designing.

There are many other examples.

In following this path to creating a definition of design, and any formal
review of definitions of design, uis likely to require at least four forms
of analysis:

. Textual analysis (who wrote what, where and when)

. Semantic analysis (the meanings and implications of the texts)

. Conceptual analysis (the explicit and implicit unique and
unambiguous concepts and their boundaries found in the above textual and
semantic analyses)

. Meta-theoretical analysis (how the texts, meanings and concepts
found in the literature relate to and are justified by different theories
across design fields and, more importantly, other fields).


Finally, the above view on the excluding aspect of a definition of design
presents a challenge to the validity and usefulness of umbrella definitions
of design that attempt to include everything that needs to be included, but
without excluding all those things that are helpfully excluded.

Examples of such problem umbrella definitions of design include 'Design is
problem solving' and Simon's definition of design as ' To design is to
devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into
preferred ones.'

The problem with the latter occurs because of the way that in ambiguously
offers some the excuse to include everything and the cat and changing one's
socks, art and embodied cognition. That is, whilst Simon focused on ensuring
he included everything that could be design, he failed to exclude things
that others might have an interest in unhelpfully including.

Best regards,
Terence
==
Dr Terence Love,
School of Design and Built Environment, Curtin University, Western Australia
CEO, Design Out Crime and CPTED Centre
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks, Western Australia 6030
[log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]
 +61 (0)4 3497 5848
ORCID 0000-0002-2436-7566
==


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