July 2017 Archives

On Design as Research

Designing a building or product forces you to solve a range of problems, to answer a set of questions. A car needs an engine cover, doors, a trunk that opens, openings in the body for headlights, etcetera. A building needs a stable structure, doors, windows, insolation, waterproofing, perhaps floor levels, it should provide functional spaces, etcetera. There are issues to deal with at the level of the whole design, and there are parts, fragments, and details to work out.

Dealing with such a set of issues, and their interactions, conflicts, and overlap, leads to a thorough interrogation of the material or technology you’re working with. Some of the answers will be specific to this one design. But a few of them will be of more general value. They could become a standard component, technique, or pattern. A standardized detail, combination of techniques, or construction method, for instance.

Such experiments can test and/or explore. They can ask, does it work? Or they can ask, what if?

Sketching Is Not Communicating

Sketching is not communicating.

Or at least, not where “communicating” means “transfer”.

I cannot look inside your head. The only thing I can see is the sketch. It is a public construction. One that I and you may have different mental models of. But the sketch, the model, is all there is.

You might say that you weren’t able to accurately express what you had in mind. But that tells me nothing, except that you judge the sketch to be a bad or incomplete proposal. Fine. Make another proposal. Change it. Develop it. Iterate. Or make it explicit (and public!) what it is that you find unsatisfactory in the model, or how your ideal might differ from it. Because again: I cannot magically look inside your head.

What Designers Know Depends on What They Want to Do

Designers’ knowledge is organized around typological models. But each discipline has their own way of modelling their subject. In fact, each discipline has a set of modelling languages in which they work.

Not only the kind of modelling is different, the breadth or level of abstraction is, too. Designers’ model knowledge serves not just to understand the world, but it is a tool for creating new artefacts and systems. So the way a designer models the world (relevant precedent) depends on their goal and professional context.