Terry Love wrote:
> The paper I drew attention to also falls into this first category. If you
> are a building systems designer specialising in piping, the content of the
> presentation is useful design information derived from design-focused
> research.
I think the main question here is whether the building systems designer
is designing or calculating when using this data. There are design
challenges in building systems, obviously, but a great deal of the work
involves applying pre-determined standards. A lot of engineering is
concerned with optimising solutions to well-defined problems and
although I don't devalue that work or the skill it takes I don't think
it is designing, we are in danger of allowing the term to be debased if
engineers continue to use it indiscriminately.
My first proper job in industry after I finished my engineering
apprenticeship was called "Designer", working for a well-known company
(Dexion) "designing" warehouse installations. 90% of my work involved
applying well-defined data to come up with a workable solution - using
considerations like beam strength, operating clearances, floor loading,
vehicle turning space etc etc. I did quite a lot of reading about
technical knowledge to help with that work, usually from documents
issued by producers. In this work there was a need to attend to the
nature of the organisation and the buildings in use and that introduced
an element of real designing, but a tiny part of the main job.
Occasionally we came upon a problem where we needed to come up with a
novel solution, either to the way a warehouse was operated or the
technical configuration of the equipment and then we were designing. In
5 years of this work I probably came up with two technical innovations
that allowed something new to be done and maybe a few more new ideas
about operational methods. It was when I realised that this was where
my real interests lay (I was always inclined to invent new systems but I
was the last person in the office to stick with them) that I decided to
train as a real designer. It suited me to do that in an art school
because I'm not so good at difficult maths but there are plenty of real
designers in the numerate fields.
best
Chris
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