Dear Karel,
Thanks for your posts. I'm still working on something, but I want to
offer two quick clarifications on Simon.
Simon (: 111) defines design as the process by which we "[devise]
courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into
preferred ones." He doesn't not define "good" design or effective
design in his one-sentence definition. This is a definition of what
design is -- as such, it defines purpose and intentional behavior,
not consequences or outcomes.
Intention is the point of the definition: "courses of action _aimed
at_ changing existing situations into preferred ones." As you (and
Victor) have been pointing out, we've still got to evaluate
consequences. And we may even have to evaluate whether the aim or
intention is good. Human beings design many things quite
successfully, achieving the consequences they aim at, even though
most of us would question the virtue of the goal. The designers and
engineers who planned and implemented the Nazi holocaust were quite
successful in creating death factories that fulfilled their goals
with extraordinary efficiency despite the fact that the goal and its
consequences were evil.
Simon's definition does not propose any given purpose. It simply
states that the designer intends to change a situation from a current
state into a preferred state. The actual value or virtue of the
preferred state depends on the person whose problems the designers
solves.
This issue, by the way, is the point of the Nuremberg Trials. The
Nuremberg principles state that there are some things that we CAN
design and implement that we MAY NOT ethically design and implement.
If we do, we take on the the full responsibility of the consequences,
just as though we had ourselves decided on the preferred outcome.
This is a contrasted with the purported claim that we can simply
follow orders in matters of a certain kind of ethical importance. A
waiter who brings a soup or salad on the orders of a customer takes
on no ethical baggage. A soldier who participates in a massacre by
following illegitimate orders that are impermissible under the
articles of war takes on the full responsibility of the deed as
though he himself had ordered it. Between these two extremes are many
gray zones and many clear examples.
Simon's definition does not address this. He simply says what design
"is." We define running a marathon as running a race of a specific
length under certain rules. The person who runs a marathon for a
world record time runs a marathon. When I run a marathon and straggle
in at eight hours, fifty-three minutes, I have also run the marathon.
Other factors deal with how we ran and what our achievement meant.
The definition of what it is to run a marathon remains the same for
both of us.
What I like about Simon's definition is that it covers all instances
of design known to me. The reason I prefer it to any other definition
is that I have never found another definition of what it is to design
that covers all instances. Simon's definition has more robust and
complete coverage than any other definition.
We cannot be sure that any specific effects, results, or consequences
are worthwhile until we examine them. We can SOMETIMES be sure that
the effects, results, or consequences are going to be bad if we
understand in advance that the purpose is bad, f.ex., dumping
radioactive waste in an urban area.
Sometimes, the results of our actions remain unclear for years. One
of Winston Churchill's most reflective speeches emphasized this
point. It was his funeral oration for Neville Chamberlain, a
political opponent with whose policies Churchill (1940) often argued:
"It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise
life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large
extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have
been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a
few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all
stands in a different setting.
"There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History
with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying
to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale
gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this?
"The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his
memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very
imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are
so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our
calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we
march always in the ranks of honor."
Basically, Churchill is acknowledging -- admittedly in a different
context -- what you and Danny and Victor have said. This is that we
must understand the political issues inherent in a negotiated
outcome. When Churchill spoke, nearly everyone was by then aware that
Chamberlain's disastrous effort to achieve "peace in our time" with
the Munich agreement actually hastened World War II, perhaps even
making it inevitable. But as strongly as he had argued against it,
Churchill never blamed Chamberlain for his goals -- "courses of
action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones." He
faulted him for failing to see that Hitler was a dishonest man who
would cheat Chamberlain, ultimately betraying Chamberlain's purpose
while seizing the Czech arms industry to hasten his own war
preparations.
I've gone to a specific example of a failed political design
specifically because Churchill addresses one of the problems inherent
in political negotiation, and because this is one of the great cases
of world history. Of course, Churchill himself made many mistakes in
his long life, and he could well have been speaking for himself. I've
always found it interesting that two of the twentieth century figures
I admire most, Churchill and Gandhi, were opponents during most of
their careers, both wrong so often, and often wrong for perfectly
good reasons.
This usage of design leads me to a second key point. You've misread
Simon on his definition of design, and you have changed his meaning
by inappropriately cutting his sentence to focus on the words
"material artifacts."
Simon said that the design process of planning a medical procedure or
a political policy is THE SAME AS the design process that creates
material artifacts.
Please read the entire paragraph. This will clarify Simon's (1998:
111) definition of design:
"Engineers are not the only professional designers. Everyone designs
who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations
into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material
artifacts is __no different fundamentally__ (emphasis mine) from the
one that prescribes for a sick patient or the one that devises a new
sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state."
But Simon does more. He explicitly defines design as the broad-range
human activity of planning action to achieve preferred states, and he
describes many kinds of designers.
"Design, so construed," he continues, "is the core of all
professional training; it is the principal mark that distinguishes
the professions from the sciences. Schools of engineering, as well as
schools of architecture, business, education, law, and medicine, are
all centrally concerned with the process of design."
Simon says, as I do, that medical practice is a design profession.
The distinction Simon raises is a distinction between design and
analysis. (Design research often involves analysis rather than
practice, that is, we analyze design and design issues rather than
practicing them.)
Here, you can say that the professional application of homiletics in
the ministry is an art form, designed with certain goals in mind. The
analytical study of historical sermons for their theological content
-- say, the comparative study of sermons by Jonathan Edwards and John
Calvin -- is part of the analytical science or discipline of
theology. But USING Edward's doctrine of linking the speculative with
the practical in the art of preaching becomes an applied science and
a form of design research.
I don't mean to be flippant here -- I'm offering a genuine example
that runs outside what most people consider design to illustrate
cases of design that are examples of the immaterial professional
practices that meet Simon's definition. To design, in that
definition, is to "[devise] courses of action aimed at changing
existing situations into preferred ones."
The next question -- evaluating effects, results, consequences -- is
not a matter of design, but analysis and axiology. Design is the
doing of it. Analysis evaluates what we do. Axiology offers us a way
to study the values and qualities we seek.
Best wishes,
Ken
--
References:
Churchill, Winston. 1940. Neville Chamberlain. November 12, 1940,
House of Commons. URL:
http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=421
Simon, Herbert A. 1998. The Sciences of the Artificial. 3rd ed.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press.
--
Karel van der Waarde wrote:
--snip--
[quoting Ken] "So I'd have to say that SOME professional designers do
practice surgery and preaching."
Ok. What are the effects, results, consequences of these activities?
How can anyone be sure that this work is worthwhile?
--snip--
It is essential to include Simon's subsequent phrase 'The
intellectual activity that produces material artefacts ...'. Usually,
plumbers, automobile repairers, surgeons and preachers do not engage
in the intellectual activity that produces material artefacts.
--snip--
--
Prof. Ken Friedman
Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language
Norwegian School of Management
Oslo
Center for Design Research
Denmark's Design School
Copenhagen
+47 46.41.06.76 Tlf NSM
+47 33.40.10.95 Tlf Privat
email: [log in to unmask]
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