"Richard’s proposal is puzzling. He proposes that we should: “retain [the term] ‘design’ to deal with tangible objects and service design and create a term for the areas on the margins that seem to be about social systems? Or is that already covered by communication design?” First, service design involves designing social processes. I can’t see why we would categorise services with tangible objects. The textbook definition of a service is that it is intangible, generally produced and consumed any the same time."
There is no need to be puzzled. Design plus an adjective seems in line with what Ken suggests e.g. industrial design, transport design, service design. What is called social design is where the word "design" seems to be over-extended. Some "social design" is service design; some of it is not.
I need to try to make a stumbling effort towards a delimitation. Social design has sneaked in the door on the coat-tails of its approximate association to service design. The activity called "social design" extends out from its contact with design and like the solar system doesn´t end at a clear boundary, where you can always seem to make one more tiny step away from design and still claim it is of the same class as "design plus an adjective".
Much of what is called social design belongs in another category of problem solving/dealing with the world even if some parts of the problem solving process could be shared with people who design, more narrowly defined.
What am I trying to do here, Richard?
I am trying to help a useful term "design" retain its meaning by being delimited.
It would be preferable if we could say which prefixes "design" could be attached to design and it still retains meaning. And it would be preferable if we could be certain some prefixes were meaningless. Do we allow "writing design" (which I imagine could be using design methods to write texts?)
Do we allow "sandwich design" (Herbert Simon indicates we can, which for me is deeply problematic). Do we allow "song design" which is about solving the problems of having no song to sing?
Partnership design? (That´s a service to help people find a partner of some sort).
"Sound design" is a term used in the film business. Wikipedia (valuable as a folk reference, excuse me) already says that one is in use: " sound design is the art and practice of creating sound tracks for a variety of needs. It involves specifying, acquiring or creating auditory elements using audio production techniques and tools."
Some of these things have a term already so why borrow the glamour of design´s polo neck and Charpaks?
It seems to me that by being attachable to almost anything the word "design" has become meaningless. It seems that what has happened is that when everyone realized how impressive the term "design" was (shall we say the 1990s) it started to get appended to other problem solving activities and marketing ("design your own salad!" is a buffet). At the same time, more and more types of problem were attended to by designers as they realized how everything was connected to everything else. Designers did not maintain their discipline's fence and the discipline spread out whilst the world came inward.
While in no way detracting from all the good things people do with Post-It notes, brain-storms, mind-maps and "tools" for x and y, much of it is way beyond service design and is about every other possible social problem and either is communication design (fine) or management (not design).
I don´t for one moment want anyone to change their behaviour or feel I am running down the good problem solving they are doing . I am offering this as my view that maybe these tasks need a word of their own so we can better understand their nature.
(I realise I have dodged a question of what makes service design design and not outside the remit. I will leave that for another day).
The headline for this series was " Help! Our field needs a new name: "Design" is far too misleading for much of what we do."
I realise it could read " Help! Other fields need a new word: "Design" is far too misleading for much of what they do."
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