Dear Terence:
This part:
"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."
... is the one striking the loudest chord with me. Simonīs definition included necessary parts of the statement but not all of them and is insufficient.
The odd thing about design is that it requires input from natural science, social science, management (as in people involvement of some sort) and art. Any one of them can be very much missing and still itīs some form of design but not the art part, as in the application of aesthetic reasoning (for want of a better word). Some design is tantamount to art except you can use it (think of a virtually unsittable "statement" sofa or some outlandish fashion item.) The overlapping nature of design leads people from the core of design (where aesthetics are) to the other areas and quietly they have stopped doing design research in any obvious way.
I understand design engineering to at least involve David Pyeīs notion of "useless work" so itīs a very close neighbour of industrial design.
Service design is another close neighbour because it involves determining the subjective experience of an interaction with a system of people and often things. Then we glide down the slippery slope to social design which I feel is where the aesthetic element fades out. Itīs there but so long from being essential to the endeavor that I feel some other term is needed for whatever social design actually is. Definitions or it are very vague.
I hope nobodyīs too bothered by my wanderings along the imaginary boundary of design!
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