Dear Yoad,
You’ve asked an important question with respect to the definition of design – “Did you mean ‘implementing’ or ‘designing’ a corporate identity program?”
To unpack this and respond properly requires a long answer, nearly 2,000 words. If that’s too long for anyone, or too boring, please move on past my reply. Those who stick with it will hopefully find some value here, particularly with respect to the topics of this thread – definitions, why they matter, and now to deploy them.
If we use Simon’s definition of design – “devis[ing] courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon 1996: 111) – then implementing a design program constitutes a design act. For that matter, so does following a recipe.
For me, Simon’s definition is useful because of its great covering power. It covers all instances of design. No other definition does this as well or as comprehensively. The English language has adjectives to describe different kinds of design practice – engineering design, industrial design, graphic design, service design. It also has adjectives to describe levels of design practice – senior designers create corporate design programs and junior designers implement them. Finally, there are numerous adjectives to clarify qualities or attributes of design – creative or formulaic, professional or amateur, even human and existential.
Despite the length of this reply, a full answer requires an article-length comment. Rather than do that here, I point to a book chapter in which I define design as I see it and analyze the word since it entered the English language in the 1500s.
The first written citation to the word “design” dates to 1548. The word meant “to conceive and plan out in the mind; to have as a specific purpose; to devise for a specific function or end.” This fits Simon’s perspective. One may design, plan, or intend all sorts of things, grand and complex things requiring expertise or humble and everyday things that anyone may plan and carry out.
If you’d like to read my analysis of the word, please check the chapter I wrote titled, “Creating Design Knowledge: From Research into Practice,” (Friedman 2000: 9-12) at URL:
http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
The chapter explains my analysis of the word design.
One consequence of using Simon’s definition is that we must to distinguish among several propositions. Simon proposes, “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon 1996: 111). This leads to several corollary propositions: some who design do so using higher order skills and creativity than others; some design as professional problem-solvers for others who employ them to do so. There is a wide range of distinctions. For example, the concept of co-creation means that many people who have problems can help to define a desired preferred state for professional designers. Professional designers work with co-creating clients to realize the preferred state that clients define.
One reason I disagreed with the notion of tying shoelaces as an example of “design thinking,” is simple. Tying shoelaces may be a design act, as brewing tea might. The point of Wittgenstein’s language games approach is an effort to describe the real way that people use words.
If one assigns numbers to every possible meaning of the words “design” and “thinking,” one might imagine a vast range of mathematically possible propositions to describe the phrase “design thinking.” The real use of the term is far more limited, though still vague and imprecise. Even so, there are limits. We can assign the number 5 to a flashlight, the number 7 to a cucumber, and the number 12 to a steak. We can add 5 and 7 to get 12. But we can’t add a flashlight and a cucumber to get a steak.
Now let me move to your proposition that implementing a corporate design program is not a design act. Who is it that does this work?
Some successful corporations use successful design programs created long ago. Their design manuals may have been updated and refined several times over the years, but they implement the successful design program they have used for many years. They do this to extend and build on corporate identity. That is what textbook design management says they should do.
Some corporations hire external design firms to handle their brochures and marketing materials. These firms do so according to the corporate design program. Other corporations use an internal design group. This group also implements the design program.
In a sense, the corporate design program is a recipe. The question is: who is doing the design work? I’d argue that designers who implement the design program do the design work. Their scope of decision authority is relatively limited. Nevertheless, when corporations hire people to do this work in their own design departments, they hire them as designers and pay them as such. When corporations use external firms, those firms bill for design services.
This is why I found Chuck’s distinction useful. “There is a distinction,” he wrote, “between purposeful thought – tying your shoelace, and design thinking – seeking improvement to how shoes are secured on a foot. Purposeful thought is more limited in its possibilities (problem solving) – than design thinking (problem seeking, exploration, analysis, and expressive resolution).”
Simon’s definition meets the criterion of design as purposeful thought. This is quite close to the earliest uses of the word design in the English language. The definition that Chuck provides for design thinking meets the criteria for a higher level of design.
Tying a shoelace, brewing a cup of tea, or implementing a corporate design program are cases of “design” in the sense of “creating a preferred situation.” This is the case, even without improvement to the art of tying the shoelace, even without changing the recipe for brewing tea, and even without amending, changing, or attempting to improve a corporate design program. In fact, it is generally young and unskilled designers who attempt to amend an agreed corporate design program, substituting their ideas for the look and feel of the client’s design program with generally unsuccessful results.
Tying a shoelace is a preferred state. Having tea rather than no tea is a preferred state. Having a properly implemented design program on a brochure, in an ad, or on the side of a new company car is a preferred state. Many kinds of design are quite modest attempts to seek a modestly improved preferred state.
Achieving some preferred states is often a matter of habit and implementation. Many design acts therefore involve habitual learning or acting from instructions and recipes. This is also the case when a master musician performs a score. If you’d like to read a magnificent account of the artistry and creativity required to implement a recipe in its depth, read Eric Siblin’s (2009) account of how Pablo Casals transformed our understanding of the Bach Cello Suites. We once saw them as student exercises. Today, we see them as masterpieces of Baroque composition. And yet, mastery is built on practice, practice, practice – habituated learning applied to a score with deep reflection and transformative power.
In examples of design involving habitual behavior, we employ learned skills to create preferred situations. That is what junior designers do. As their skills, judgment, and demonstrated ability to meet client needs become visible, their effective range of responsibility increases. They move from implementing design programs to playing second chair on a new corporate design program. When they reach the level of senior designer, they begin to create full corporate design programs in the first chair.
Earlier in the thread, I was interested in distinction between all instances of design – purposeful thought – and those higher level skills, virtues, and attributes that involve design thinking. This involves doing something and reflecting on how to do it better.
With respect to the basic word design, I do indeed include implementing a corporate identity program as well as designing one.
If you start with a different definition of the word design, then you may reach a different conclusion. For me, adjectives and qualifying phrases distinguish among the many kinds, purposes, levels, and qualities of design.
Design is an existential human attribute. Some designers refine this attribute into a high-level skill. Professional designers are paid to use their skill to solve problems for individuals or groups who own the problems designers help to solve. The skills of professional designers instantiate in a wide range of specific design professions. All design acts share some overlapping attributes with all other design acts. Each specific design profession is differentiated from all others by unique activities that differentiate one design profession from another. Even then, some professionals are better than others.
One virtue of using Simon’s definition is that it requires us to recognize these differences. In design schools and other institutional settings, some folks prefer to pretend that all designers are creative, much as all the children in Lake Woebegone are above average. Bill Starbuck (2009: 110) discusses the problem of what he labels “ceremonial good faith.” While he discusses this with respect to universities and research, he also notes that the problem of ceremonial good faith applies to the professions – “Some teachers generate more learning than others do, some lawyers win more cases than others do, and some physicians cure more patients than others do. Yet, people struggle daily with the conflict between their wish to believe that expertise is substitutable and their awareness that it often is not. In this instance, is this expert sufficiently expert?” This is certainly the case for designers.
(You will find added thoughts on the problem of ceremonial good faith in Meyer and Rowan 1977).
I hope this explains why I prefer Simon’s definitions and the consequences that follow from using it. This definition gives us greater coverage. It allows us to think more deeply about the different kinds of design and the different attributes of designers. It also requires us to be more precise in our understanding.
If you want to examine my analysis of the word “design” and the way that it evolved, please read “Creating Design Knowledge” (Friedman 2001) on Academia.edu.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Home Page http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design> Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman About Me Page http://about.me/ken_friedman
Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China
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References
Friedman, Ken. 2001. “Creating Design Knowledge: From Research into Practice.” In Design and Technology Educational Research and Development: The Emerging International Research Agenda. E. W. L. Norman and P. H. Roberts, eds. Loughborough, UK: Department of Design and Technology, Loughborough University, 31-69. URL:
http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
Accessed: 2013 September 4.
Meyer, John W., and Brian Rowan. 1977. “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony.” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 83, No. 2 (Sep., 1977), pp. 340-363. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2778293 . Accessed: 2012 September 5.
Simon, Herbert. 1996. The Sciences of the Artificial. 3nd edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Siblin, Eric. 2009. The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
Starbuck, William H. 2009. “The constant causes of never-ending faddishness in the behavioral and social sciences.” Scandinavian Journal of Management. Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 108-116.
doi:10.1016/j.scaman.2008.11.005
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Yoad David Luxembourg wrote:
—snip—
I would like to comment on Ken’s examples:
Did you mean “implementing” or “designing” a corporate identity program?
Since identity is something that is communicated to a certain group of people and others excluded from it, thinking up or planing a corporate identity program can be considered as an act of design. In my humble understanding of the verb to implement, following such a program - meaning implementing the actions called/outlined by that plan - is not an act of design.
Regarding acts of design performed as a part of habitual behavior, in the cases like brewing tea the result is communicated by smell, taste, sound and vision. That is only if, as chuck has correctly suggested, the one doing the designing has an intentional stance toward the circumstances of interest - meaning also a wish to communicate through the designed work a “message” to those who will interact with it.
I must again state that there is a difference between following actions outlined in a recipe, and making a variation on a recipe and cooking something original. that is in same sense that actions of copy and imitation are different than acts of variation and origination.
—snip—
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