Dear Eduardo,
In my view, one does not need to agree with all of Herbert Simon’s views on design to accept his definition of design. The definition itself is statement of what it is to design. This does not necessarily locate design within engineering. For Simon, a wide variety of professions engage in design — but Simon argues that *everyone* designs when they undertake a specific kind of action:
“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”
The action is to plan a future situation that one prefers over against a current situation. The fact that the definition is located within a set of comments on engineers and others does not in itself limit the definition.
The basic definition of the word “design” in English conforms to Simon. The word design entered the English language in 1548, and the first citation — a written usage exemplar — was a verb that has this meaning. Compare the definition I extract from Simon with the definition in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, successor to the original Webster’s Dictionary and the desk dictionary most commonly used by scholarly and scientific journal editors and publishers prior to the era of the great web-based dictionaries. (Merriam-Webster’s in now owned by Encyclopaedia Britannica and integrated within the EB web site; the full Oxford English Dictionary is no longer published in book form, but is solely web-based).
Merriam-Webster’s (1993: 343) defines design as: “1a: to conceive and plan out in the mind, b: to have as a purpose: intend, c: to devise for a specific function or end, 2 archaic: to indicate with a distinctive mark, sign or name, 3a: to make a drawing, pattern or sketch of, b: to draw the plans for, c: to create, fashion, execute or construct according to plan: devise, contrive…”
This definition fits Klaus’s earlier comment on design as a human capacity. It is. Purposeful design and tool usage helped to make us human, as making plans, using language, and domesticating fire did. The first purposeful designed artefacts are hand-made stone tools that date back to homo habilis 2,500,000 years ago — now dated back still further to 3,300,000 years to a hominin species in Kenya at a site known as Lomekwi 3.
I am happy to accept either Simon’s definition or the Merriam-Webster definition. You can’t argue that the lexicographers at Merriam-Webster’s don’t know what a definition is. The pre-human creatures at the Lomekwi 3 site clearly did something to make tools that fits these terms: “1a: to conceive and plan out in the mind, b: to have as a purpose: intend, c: to devise for a specific function or end, … 3c: to create, fashion, execute or construct according to plan: devise, contrive…”
These are neither engineers nor graphic designers. Neither were they professional designers. But these hominins did engage in a design activity, and they were out ancestors. Their behaviour gave rise to the general human capacity for design.
Those who wish to read my extended discussion of these issues will find it in the article (Friedman 2003) I cited yesterday. You will find a copy on my Academia.edu page at:
https://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
Your posted argument with Simon states what you believe the design professions to be. The definition I use covers the verb design — all humans design: “*everyone* designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”
I specify design professions by using the noun “designer,” and I limit one profession from the next with appropriate adjectives.
If you are interested in “the history of what the word design designated, what still designates, started to designate and, in this process, what [it] signifies now,” you’ve got to be willing to look at linguistic evidence rather than simply claiming that people who go to one kind of school and enter one range of professions design. Most languages borrowed the word “design” and “designer” from English — they generally used other words for the narrow range of professions that you describe as “designers.” These words and the narrowing concepts change the “core meaning” of the English-language word that most modern languages took as a loan word. This word differs slightly from the etymological predecessors from which English developed the word “design.” If you study the word itself in current and historical language tools, the word “design” has the meanings I present here.
I am not arguing with your position on the nature of the design profession. I do not agree with you, but this is a post on language and the definition of words.
I am arguing with your representation of what the word “design” means in English and its entailments for some of the languages that borrowed the word “design” from English, using it today instead of their own native words that meant such things as “drawing” or “making things beautiful.” Some forms of design do indeed purpose to make things beautiful. But other forms of design have other ends and other preferred goals.
As I wrote in an earlier response to your proposition that only certain people engage in professional design, you seem to be engaged in an ongoing argument that “designers” are the people who do what it is that “we” do, whoever “we” may be. In this case, the “we” is you and those who graduated from or work in the design schools that Simon failed to mention. If you accept that the definition of the verb “design” in Merriam-Webster’s, the schools they attend and the places they work do not limit the fact that they design. Merriam-Webster’s uses this definition: “1a: to conceive and plan out in the mind, b: to have as a purpose: intend, c: to devise for a specific function or end, … 3c: to create, fashion, execute or construct according to plan: devise, contrive…” (There are also other meanings for the verb — they limit some instances of the verb “design,” but they do not limit *all* instances.
If you don’t accept this as a *definition*, it would help to explain how the lexicographers at Merriam-Webster’s have failed to understand the nature of a definition.
If you accept that this is a proper *definition* that correctly describes linguistic usage of the word *design*, then your argument is based on personal predilections and beliefs, rather than on the scholarship or language.
In an earlier post, I stated why I don’t agree that we can limit the practice of design or the design professions only to people who do a certain job or graduate from a specific school with the title “design” in their diploma.
In this post, I am simply explaining how a dictionary defines the word “design,” and stating why that definition supports Herbert Simon’s definition.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
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References
Friedman, Ken. 2003. “Theory construction in design research: criteria: approaches, and methods.” Design Studies, 24 (2003), 507–522.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0142-694X(03)00039-5
Merriam-Webster. 1993. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. 10th edition. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, Inc.
Simon, Herbert. 1982. The sciences of the artificial. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.
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