Great Design: What is Design? (First Draft)

In our last episode, I introduced the tentative title "Great Design" for this series of articles. I have something very specific in mind when I use the words "great" and "design," and it's worth spending some time defining it.

First, "design."

You know those gorgeous old brownstones in New York City? With the elaborate carvings, gargoyles, and beautiful iron fences? Well, if you dig up the old architectural plans, the architect would often just write something like "beautiful fretwork" on the drawing, and leave it up to the artisan, the old craftsman from Italy to come up with something, fully expecting that it will be beautiful.

That's not design. That's decoration. What we, in the software industry, collectively refer to as Lipstick on a Chicken. If you have been thinking that there is anything whatsoever in design that requires artistic skill, well, banish the thought. Immediately, swiftly, and promptly. Art can enhance design but the design itself is strictly an engineering problem. (But don't lose hope -- I'll talk more about beauty in future articles).

Design, for my purposes, is about making tradeoffs.

Let's design a trashcan for a city street corner, shall we?

Let me give you some design constraints.

It has to be pretty light, because the dustboys, er, sanitation engineers come by and they have to pick it up to dump the trash in the garbage truck.

Oh, and it has to be heavy, or it will blow away in the wind or get knocked over. (True story: I once got in an accident because a trash can blew in front of our car. Nobody was hurt, not even the trashcan.)

It has to be really big. People throw away a lot of trash throughout the day and at a busy intersection if you don't make it big enough, it overflows and garbage goes everywhere. When that happens, one of the little six-pack plastic ringy-dingies will get in the ocean, and a cute little birdy will get ensnared in it, and choke to death. YOU DON'T WANT TO KILL BIRDIES, DO YOU?

Oh, also, it needs to be pretty small, because otherwise it's going to take up room on the sidewalk, forcing the pedestrians to squeeze past each other, which, possibly, when the Effete Yuppie Listening to His iPod gets distracted by a really funny joke on the Ricky Gervais podcast and accidentally brushes against the Strangely Haunted Vietnam-Era Veteran, can result in an altercation of historic proportions.

Ok, light, heavy, big, and small. What else. It should be closed on the top, so rubbish doesn't fly away in the wind. It should be open on the top, so it's easy to throw things away.

It should be really, really, really cheap.

Notice a trend? When you're designing something, you often have a lot of conflicting constraints.

In fact, that's a key part of design: resolving all of these conflicting goals.

The only goal that usually doesn't conflict is the requirement that whatever you design be really, really cheap.

What is Design?

Design as a Shared Activity

The nature of design is equally as complex as that of technology. Archer wrote that:

“Design is that area of human experience, skill and knowledge which is concerned with man’s ability to mould his environment to suit his material and spiritual needs.” 1

Design is essentially a rational, logical, sequential process intended to solve problems or, as Jones put it:

“initiate change in man-made things” 2

For the term “design process,” we can also read “problem-solving process”, which in all but its abstract forms works by consultation and consensus. The process begins with the identification and analysis of a problem or need and proceeds through a structured sequence in which information is researched and ideas explored and evaluated until the optimum solution to the problem or need is devised.

Yet, design has not always been a rational process; up until the Great War design was often a chaotic affair in that consultation and consensus were barely evident. Design was not a total process. The work of participants in the process was often compartmentalised, each having little if any input in matters which fell outside the boundaries of their specific expertise. Thus, participants explored their ideas unilaterally, with one or another participant, through virtue of their “expertise”, imposing constraints upon all others. In this way, the craftsman has a veto on matters to do with skill or availability of materials, the engineer had a veto on technological considerations, and the patron alone could impose considerations of taste and finance.

During the inter-war years the Bauhaus movement attempted to knit the design process into a coherent whole in that students were encouraged to study design in a way that was both total and detailed. That is, designers were expected to balance all the considerations that came to bear upon the design of particular artefacts, systems and environments. In this way, though, design quickly evolved into a closed activity - an activity in which all but the designers themselves has little if any valid input to make on questions of materials, taste . . . and so on. Designers came to exist within a social bubble, consulting no-one but other designers. The result was that many designs conceived particularly during the immediate post-Second World War period did little to satisfy the needs of users. Such designs were exemplified by the disastrous housing policies adopted by many local authorities in the UK who built residential tower block after residential tower block. These were essentially realisations of dreamy design concepts rather than solutions to the social, cultural and environmental needs of the local populations.

Recent years have marked a sharp reaction against the design movement, which has perhaps been personified by Prince Charles and has crusade against architectural “carbuncles”. Likewise, individuals within society have sought to express their own tastes, their own individuality, personal style and personal self-image through what they use and purchase. Thus it is that design is not an activity solely for engineers and designers but is a shared activity between those who design artefacts, systems and environments, those who make them and those who use them.