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Ken Friedman wrote: > Simon's description of design as "[devising] courses of action aimed > at changing existing situations into preferred ones" serves many > purposes. In the era BEFORE Simon published this description in the > 1968 lectures that became The Sciences of the Artificial, many people > treated design as a purely practical trade descended from the craft > guilds and dedicated to styling and advertising. I daresay they did and will continue to do so. However the reality is that the disciplined and complex nature of design has been understood by its practitioners since long before Simon chose to propound his elegant but, for me, unhelpful definition. On the one hand, long established disciplines such as boat and shipbuilding have, over centuries, developed and refined complex techniques and bodies of knowledge, both explicitly through industrial ventures and tacitly through craft making (1). They may conform to Simon's definition but their richness illustrates the definition's sterility. On the other hand more recent developments such as the profession of Industrial Design, often characterised as "purely practical", also exhibit a high level of complexity and reflection on principles if one goes back to the pioneers like Raymond Leowy or Henry Dreyfuss. In writing about and discussing their work they may not have conformed always to academic expectations but then they were not academics, they were engaged in inventing a new way of thinking and acting :o). More recent practices in "traditional" industrial design tend to obscure the rich thinking that built the profession - three-dimensional problems have become much more routine and less significant than the "system" problems of contemporary product design. Many of Leowy and Dreyfuss' heirs may be, in effective, technicians but that doesn't make their heritage "purely practical" (1) see Tim Severin's book "The Jason Voyage" (1986) for a fascinating description of what happens when the two meet, illustrating an exceptional level of congruence between the understanding of the naval architect and the "play it by eye" traditional boatbuilder once a suitable communication medium (a scale model) was identified. best wishes from Sheffield Chris ********************* Professor Chris Rust Head of Art and Design Research Centre Sheffield Hallam University, S11 8UZ, UK +44 114 225 2706 [log in to unmask] www.chrisrust.nethes from Sheffield Chris .