I'm grateful to Ken for his characteristically careful and thorough
response. If only I had been so careful in my earlier post. For someone
who harps on about language use as much as I have, it is more than
fitting to be called up on my own use of it. I freely concede the
points Ken and Terry make about the important distinction between
devising courses of action and executing them, and accept that the
rather flippant examples I gave were plucked from the latter when they
should have been taken from the former.
The examples I gave were an attempt to suggest that Simon's definition
which I only partially quoted includes many activities we would not
ordinarily call design. Ken's post takes each of my examples in turn.
Perhaps I am alone here, but I still find the suggestion that planning
to tie my shoelaces is a design process (provided it entails devising a
course of action intended to change the current state to a preferred
one) a little hard to swallow. I agree with Ken that on Simon's
definition, it is. As yet, though, I remain unconvinced it is all that
helpful, for the reasons I presented in my post.
Kind regards,
Ben
On 16 Aug 2007, at 17:13, Ken Friedman wrote:
> Hi, Ben.
>
> One difficulty so many people seem to have with Simon's definition is
> not that it covers all design processes, but rather they feel it
> covers too much.
>
Ben Matthews
Assistant Professor, PhD
Mads Clausen Institute
University of Southern Denmark
Alsion 2
Sønderborg 6400 Denmark
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