good point,
purma,
regarding the generality of creative processes whose products have consequences in the real world.  clearly, we can learn from all of them. but i suggest we should not forget to focus on how we want designers to be positioned in society. definitions have consequences for their users.
klaus   

-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Purma Jukka
Sent: Friday, April 05, 2013 1:28 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Ideas and definitions of what is 'a design' in a broad sense

Kommonen Kari-Hans <[log in to unmask]>  kirjoitti 5.4.2013 kello 17.58:
> 
> Also, compared to your stance, my focus is not on the intentionality of the process, but on the nature and qualities of the outcome. As I interpret you, you think that a process that created something can not be a design process if it was not intentional; I think that if the outcome is "a design", there was a design process, whether it was intentional or not. That is why I am trying to understand what qualities make a design "a design". So you look at it starting from the actor, I from the thing. I am trying to understand what it is, in terms of design, and what can be done with it, in terms of design, but I am not so interested in who made it, or whether it was made by anyone at all.
> 
> In my own opinion, I have good reasons for this, as after they 
> manifest themselves in objects/artifacts, such "designs" have 
> consequences in the world that correspond to their design, and that 
> can be understood, possibly predicted, and built on, based on an 
> understanding of their design, regardless of the nature of the process 
> that created them. But I recognize that this is not the way that most 
> people think, so I have a challenge ahead of me :)

Hi,
In generative linguistics this kind of design as a noun is very relevant; to see human language system as 'design' it allows us to pose questions that otherwise wouldn't make much sense. Does language system aim more to brewity of expression, simplicity of lexicon or learnability of grammar? Is it a simple design? How 'good' it is for its purpose, or how optimal? How does it fail?

Chomsky since early 1990s has been very interest in these optimality questions, how 'perfect' language system is for its purposes (and defining these purposes gets very technical). 

Here is some Chomsky to give a taste how questions of design appear there:

'''Very recently, the issues have come to the fore in the study of language. It has become possible to to pose in a productive way the question of "perfection of language": specifically, to ask how closely human language approaches an optimal solution to design conditions that the system must meet to be usable at all. To the extent that the question receives a positive answer, we will have found that nature has -- in Galileo's words -- "employed the least elaborate, the simplest and easiest of means," but in a domain where this would hardly be expected: a very recent and apparently isolated product of evolution, a central component of the most complex organic object known, a component that is surely at the core of our mental nature, cultural achievements and curious history. (Chomsky, On Nature and Language, 2002, p.58) '''    

Also one of the core minimalist papers from Chomsky is 'Three Factors in Language Design' (Linguistic Inquiry vol.36, 2005, 1-22) which is about those design conditions and known and speculated limiting factors for what language system must be able to do. 

All in all, it is an old research strategy in natural sciences to look at systems as if they were well-designed, and then use design aesthetics like simplicity or elegance to guide hypotheses of what and why. 

Jukka


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