Month: April 2018

Definition and Demarcation

“What is design?” seems like an increasingly silly question to me. When people were asking “What is science?” and “What is not?” the impetus seems to have been quite different. They wanted to know how to construct reliable knowledge, who we should believe and who not, in effect. And consequently, who should receive special status and privilege and who shouldn’t. We don’t seem to have these problems in design.

First of all, “design” is such a broad field, spanning people pursuing such differing goals, that it almost moves to the same category of questions as “What is love?”. I mean, it’s an interesting question to ponder and perhaps to try and discuss philosophically, but it’s not going to be of practical consequence anytime soon.

What problem would answering the question “What is design?” solve? One answer might be that having a clear and correct answer would help us in the activity of designing. But whether science ‘works’ is a logical, fundamental question; whether a design method ‘works’ is a question of efficiency. When it comes to effectiveness, we do not have a problem. People are perfectly capable of designing things.

A Project on the Logic of Design

What I might do is to first, study how designs are justified and argued for, second, to analyse this logic of design, and third, to see what implications this might have for how we publish designs, present design proposals.

Designs always come with an argument. In professional practice, you almost always say “here is our design, and here’s why you should invest resources to produce it”. In academia, you say a subtly different thing, “here is our design, here’s what makes it new and unique, here’s what it’s good and bad at, why you might want to make something similar, etcetera”. It’s much less a proposal than a set of claims in academic work.

Come to think of it, I’d be curious what the answers would be if you simply asked engineering designers at universities the question “why do you publish your work?”, “Apart from being cited and adding to your list of publications, what would you like the effect of your publications to be?”, “What function does it serve to publish designs?”

Then again, do we really publish designs? Or is it that we publish about our designs? Yes, the basic principles and construction methods are usually described in a paper, but it’s far from the design information in patent applications, let alone from open source software.