Design methods
Introduction
Design Methods is a broad area of study focusing on:
- Exploring possibilities and constraints by focuing critical thinking skills to define problem spaces for existing products or services—or the creation of new categories.
- Defining the specifications of design solutions which can lead to better guidelines for traditional design activities (graphic, industrial, architectural, etc.);
- Managing the process of exploring, defining, creating artifacts and then continually managing the design process over time;
The goal of design methods is to gain key insights, or unique essential truths that can create more holistic solutions to improve products & services as well as creating better experiences of users. Insight, in this case, is a clear or deep perception of a situation (through design methods) and grasping the inner nature of things intuitively.
Background
History
Design as Art, Design as Industry
Designers and the act of designing originated within the trades of art and architecture. Much of the knowledge to be a craftsman came from the well established apprentice system, where young children would work with a craftsman for years until they could demonstrate a degree of skill, and then became craftsman themselves. Precident was an important factor and innovations were incremental in nature. There was no writings on the philosophy of designing, because design was not viewed or recognized as a seperate activity.
William Morris of the arts and crafts movement in England became a pivotal voice for the role of the craftsman in the industrial age. More importantly, Morris' writings commented on the role of craftsman and designers and linked their activities to wider social, political and economic issues of the time. The effects of industrialization, the transformation of the agrarian economies and the growth of both cities and increased world trade, all were seen by Morris as having detrimental impact on the crafts. He related design to values, not just production and experimented with craftsman colonies where a nurturing environment was orchestrated for a convivial atmosphere that was fair for craftsman and moved their goods to the market to receive a fair price.
In Germany, Peter Behrens was the first modern design director of the giant German industrial combine AEG (Allgemeine Elektrcitäts-Gesellschaft) in 1907. His single minded vision of creating a unified vision for a company (products, identity, architecture, etc.) was a precursor to the post-World War II development of corporations with a unified imagistic panorama – by design.
World War I, and its destruction of Europe, caused the art and intellectual community to search for meaning and reject the pre-war notions of stability and social rigidity and founded diverse art movements such as DaDa, Futurism, Surrealism and other movements that explored the effect of the unconscious mind and industrialized society.
The Bauhaus, originally a craft school, moved to integrating design education within modern industrial production systems and was instrumental in transforming what William Morris and Peter Beherns had started. Walter Gropius, and other faculty created the notion of the "Bau" in the center with all associated applied design professions surrounding it to create an integrated environment.
The word design began to be viewed both as a "noun" and a "verb"—or both a skill to create artifacts as well as a framework for understanding. Therefore design, in the widest sense, was recognized as a basic human activity that addressed the need to create and transform the environment to serve the needs of the human condition. Design and designers, conversely went from being a trade where craftsman took others aspirations and interpreted them into physical objects and was emerging as a legitimate activity in its own right. The industrial revolution and modernity was transforming design as a separate activity within new product and production processes that could differintiate one product from another.
World War II, and its destruction of Europe caused the art and intellectual community to again search for meaning. With the rapid development of science and technology to rebuild Europe, there was a tension between "progress" and "quality of life." Specializations in all fields fragmented a larger understanding of integrated solutions. Design as a field was exploring how it could be part of the post-war reconstruction and reconstitution of society. Tomas Maldonado, an Argentinian architect and director of the post-war design school, Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, strove to link design to improving the social dimension as well as designed products to improve it. Certain design programs were being developed not just in art schools, but schools of technology and engineering (like IIT, Chicago). He realized that design, as an applied art, was a synthetic discipline that borrrowed heavily from other disciplines. He wrote in The Education of Vision (Gyorgy Kepes, Editor):
"There is nothing less comfortable than being obliged to exercise an unlimited profession in a world of strictly limited professions: in other words to exercise a profession whose beginning and end, whose own territory and that of the neighboring profession is unknown . . . he cannot ever rid himself of the unconfessed feeling of illegitimate appropriation."
Architecture, urban planning, engineering, and product design created unimaginative and impersonal forms that could have been interpreted as not improving the quality of life from a humanistic perspective. It is from this world that the 1962 Design Methods conference wanted to address.
Directed Discontent, and an Opportunity
John Christopher Jones was born in 1927, in Aberystwyth, Wales. He studied engineering at Cambridge University, and went on to work for AEI in Manchester, England. Collaborating with engineers, Jones advocated ergonomics and user based issues that were not part of engineering skills - or attitudes at the time. When the results of his ergonomic studies of user behavior were not utilized by the firm's designers, Jones set about studying the design process being used by the engineers. Jones was also frustrated with the superficiality of industrial design at the time and and become involved with ergonomics.
Design Methods was driven by:
- Inability to balance individual, group, societal, and ecological needs;
- Lack of purpose, order, and human scale;
- Aesthetic and functional failure in adapting to local physical and social environments;
- Development of materials and standardized components that were ill suited for use in any specific application;
- Creation of artifacts that people did not like
Jones wasn't actually addressing design as presently conceived. He set out an entirely original philosophy of design -- one that questioned the aims, goals, and purposes of designing. He stated that one of the reasons why he focused on design methods was “. . . it’s not another way of doing design, you see, it’s a way of doing what designers don’t do at all.” At the end of the 50s he published an article "A Systematic Design Method" articulating ways to integrate ergonomic data into the engineering design process. His emerging ideas about design methods was to integrate both rationality and intuition – a common thread in the formalization of design methods and how it was interpreted by other groups. He also realized that designers needed to move out of focusing on expression and modes of production and beginto address the definition of a problem to be solved. He commented that "the future job of a designer is to give substance to new ideas while taking away the physical and organizational foundations of old ones. In this situation, it is nonsense to think of designing as the satisfaction of existing requirements. New needs grow and old needs decay . . ."
Formulation of Design Methods
Design Methods originally drew from a 1962 conference (called The conference on systematic and intuitive methods in engineering, industrial design, architecture and communications, London, September 1962). This event was organized by John Christopher Jones, Christopher Alexander with invited participants from the fields of engineering, town planning, architecture and industrial design. They were bound by a dissatisfaction with the way their modern, industrialized world was being created.
Participants Peter Slann – Lecturer in aeronautical design at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London; D G Christopherson – Vice-chancellor of Durham University;
L S Jay – Planning officer, East Sussex County Council;
William Gosling – System designer in the aircraft industry;
G M E Williams – Head of the department of production technology and control engineering at Northampton College of Advanced Technology;
D G Thornley – Senior lecturer in architecture at Manchester University; Joseph Esherick – Professor of architecture at UCLA;
Christopher Alexander – Architectural fellow at Harvard University;
K W Norris – Director of Norris Brothers, consulting engineers;
Gordon Pask – Director of System Research Ltd and known for original theories and experiments in cybernetics
B N Lewis – Psychologist working at System Research Ltd on adaptive teaching systems; Robyn Denny & Howard Hodgkin – Painters, and lecturers at Bath Academy;
Roger Coleman – Art critic;
E F O'Doherty – Professor of logic and psychology at University College, Dublin;
J K Page – Professor of building science;
Anthony Froshaug – Graphic artist and theorist
The participants also recognized that the lone designer producing design products did not work with the complexity of post-industrial societies. Designers must work in cross-disciplinary teams where each participant brings their specific skills, language, experiences and biases to defining and solving problems. It would take the development of the Internet and the integration of design and technology for a critical mass of designers to embrace collaborating on solutions in which they were one skill of many skills. Throughout the book Design Methods, emphasis is on integrating creative and rational skills for a broader view of design.
Articulations of Design Methods
Formalization of Design Methods
From the 1962 conference, the participants began to take their group discussions forward individually. Of note, Christopher Alexander went on to write his seminal books Pattern Language and A Timeless Way of Building. Jones went on to articulate design methods as a way of doing, which was based on the following principles:
- It is exploratory;
- It provides a framework for exploring and categorizing (pattern);
- It takes the best ideas from a number of disciplines;
- It bridges direct observation with deeper fact finding;
- It is humanistic (qualitiative), yet integrates measurement;
- It is not proscriptive (outcome), it provides options (ingredient)
The focus was on developing a series of relevant, sound, humanistic problem solving procedures and techniques to reduce avoidable errors and oversights that could adversely affect design solutions. The key benefit was to find a method that suits a particular design situation.
Expansion of Design Methods
It seemed as if many different groups latched onto John Christopher Jones book Design Methods, with its alternative message of using design as a framework for exploration and improvement. Engineering, computer science, psychlology and and related fields began to embrace the principles of design methods – though not always as how either John Christopher Jones or Christopher Alexander expected. Three "camps" seemed to emerge to integrate the initial work in design methods:
- Behaviorism interpreted design methods as a way to describe human behavior. It's clinical approach tended to abstract design methods within the abstraction of behaviorism – analogus to taxonomic activities.
- Reductivism interpreted design methods from a scientific approach, breaking design methods down into small constituent parts. It's scientific approach tended to abstract design methods within the abstraction of science – analogus to epistemological activities.
- Phenomenology interpreted design methods from an experiential approach, describing design methods as human experience. It's approach tended to abstract design methods within the world of perception
All three camps built upon design methods in their own way in the late 1960's and 1970's. The Environmental Design and Research Association EDRA is one of the best known entities that continues to try to integrate designers and social science professionals for better built environments. There are many questions how effective EDRA has been since its founding by Henry Sanoff in 1969 and its ability to affect both policy and methods of collaborative design. Both John Christopher Jones and Christopher Alexander interacted with EDRA and other camps in an organic dialogue. However, both seemed to at a certain point reject these camps and their interpretation and application of design methods. Jones and Christopher also questioned their original thesis about design methods.
Victor Margolin, a leader in the definition and practice of design studies has articulated the difficulty in defining design due to "design's inherent multi-disciplinarity has mader it hard for a single research community to lay claim to it's investigation . . . (which is) ungoverned by any single set of disciplinary values". (p. 128, Design of the Artificial). What Jones may not have realized is that his work in rehabilitating engineering by introducing design methods created an opening for many social science disiplines to enter into the discourse bringing their culture and language and overlaying it on design. This has created a huge challenge to creating any common perspective on the practice of design methods, or of design itself. We shall see this accelerate with the advancement of the internet in the 1990s.'
This was amplified by Richard Buchanan who discussed the discourse of design by stating "The assumption is that design has a fixed or determinate subject matter that is given to the designer in the same way the subject matter of nature is given to a scientist. However, the subject matter of design is not a given. It is created through the activities of invention and planning, or through whatever other methodology or procedures a designer finds helpful in characterizing his own work." Buchanan
The Emergence of Design Research and Design Studies
After the 1962 conference, many of the participants began to publish and to define an area of research that focused on design. The Design Research Society was founded in 1967 with many participants from the Conference on Design Methods in 1962. The purpose of the Society is to promote "the study of and research into the process of designing in all its many fields" and is an interdisciplinary group with many professions represented, but all bound by the conviction of the benefits of design research.
An interesting shift that affected design methods and design studies was the 1968 lecture from Herbert Simon, the Nobel laureate, who presented "The Sciences of the Artificial." He proposed using scientific methods to explore the world of man-made things (hence artificial). He discussed the role of analysis (observation) and synthesis (making) as a process of creating man-made responses to the world he/she interacted with. He characterized design as "wicked problems" in which every solution created new problems. Simon's concept had a profound impact on the discourse in both design methods, and the newly emerging design studies communities in two ways. It provided an entry of using scientific ideas to overlay on design, and it also created an internal debate weather design could/should be expressed and practiced as a type of science with the reduction of emphasis on intuition.
Victor Margolin has written extensively on this issue. He stated that "Since design is related to a practical activity—designing—at least part of its accountability should derive from its usefulness to practicing designers of all kinds, not necessarily in the narrow sense of informing technique but also in the larger sense of contributing to the development of consciousness and values." (p. 7, Design of the Artificial) In addition to connecting the activity of design to culture and society-at-large, hence his phrase product milieu to capture designers' collective impact on the every-changing artificial landscape, Margolin described the role of designer as facilitator, navigating and aggregating diverse domains of information in order to reach an informed platform. Inherent in this role is the reliance on methods to nurture dialog with other practitioners and their respective points of view: "What is needed is a middle ground between intuition and science, a distinctive method of deliberation and presentation that is suited to the special knowledge and perspective of the designer and to the special ability of the designer to make concrete practical connections among diverse bodies of formal and tacit knowledge." (Introduction, Discovering Design)
Nigan Bayazit, professor at the Istanbul Technical University published an excellent overview of the history of design methods. She stated that "Design methods people were looking at rational methods of incorporating scientific techniques and knowledge into the design process to make rational decisions to adapt to the prevailing values, something that was not always easy to achieve." The following is what design research is concerned with:
- Design research is concerned with the physical embodiment of man-made things, how these things perform their jobs, and how they work.
- Design research is concerned with construction as a human activity, how designers work, how they think, and how they carry out design activity.
- Design research is concerned with what is achieved at the end of a purposeful design activity, how an artificial thing appears, and what it means.
- Design research is concerned with the embodiment of configurations.
- Design research is a systematic search and acquisition of knowledge related to design and design activity
Nigel Cross has been prolific at articulating the issues of design methods and design research. The discussion of the ongoing debate of what is design research and design science was, and continues to be articulated by Cross. His thesis is that design is not a science, but is an area that is searching for "intellectual independence." He views the original design methods discussions of the 1960's as a way to integrate objective and rational methods in practicing design. Scientific method was borrowed as one framework, and the term "design science" was coined in 1966 at the Second Conference on the Design Method focusing on a systematic approach to practicing design. Cross defined the "science of design" as a way to create a body of work to improve the understanding of design methods—and more importantly that design methods does not need to be a binary choice between science and art.
The Role of Design Practitioners
Conversations about design methods and a more systematic approach to design was not isolated to Europe. America was also a magnet for practicing design professionals to codify their successes in design practice and backing into larger theories about the dynamics of design methods.
American designers were much more pragmatic at articulating design methods and creating an underlying language about the practice of industrial and graphic design. They were tied to the economic systems that supported design practice and therefore focused on the way design could be managed as an extension of business, rather than the European approach to design methods which was based on transforming engineering by design.
Industrial design was the first area that made inroads into systematizing knowledge through practice. Raymond Lowey was instrumental at elevating the visibility of industrial design through a cult of personality (appearing three times on front cover of Time Magazine). Henry Dreyfuss had a profound impact on the practice of industrial design by developing a systematic process used to shape environments, transportation, products, and packaging. His focus on the needs of the average consumer was most celebrated in his book Designing for People, which was an extensive exploration of ergonomics.
Paul Rand, one of the most influential practitioners of graphic design from the 1940's to the late 1990's, at first rejected philosophizing about design, but ended up writing some of the best books that used his work and that of others to animate the underlying dynamics of design, moving into an articulation of how design should be practiced. Charles Eames, and his lifelong collaborator Ray Eames, was one of the most prolific American designers in the 1940's to 1970's articulated issues about integrating design into business and that design was just as much about constraints as possibilities.
Jay Doblin one of America's foremost industrial designers, worked for Raymond Lowey and co-founded Unimark International, the world’s largest design firm of the 1960's with offices in seven countries. In 1972, Doblin formed Jay Doblin & Associates in Chicago, a firm which managed innovative programs for Xerox Corporation and General Electric. Doblin was just as prolific at developing a language to describe design. One of his best articles was "A Short, Grandiose Theory of Design", published in the 1987 Society of Typographic Arts Design Journal. In seven pages, Doblin presents a straightforward and persuasive argument for design as a systematic process. In this article he described the emerging landscape of systematic design:
- For large complex projects, it "would be irresponsible to attempt them without analytical methods." and rallied against an "adolescent reliance on overly intuitive practices."
- He seperated "direct design" in which a craftsperson works on the artifact to "indirect design" in which a design first creates a representation of the artifact, separating design from production in more complex situations.
Doblin and others were responding the increased specialization of design and the complexity of managing large design programs for corporations. It was a natural process to begin to discuss how design should move upstream to be involved with the specifications of problems, not just in the traditional mode of production which design had been practiced.
Design Management
Design is an applied art that supports the economic systems which use designers skills. While this relationship has been identified, it was not universally recognized or accepted by diverse design communities. Designers have a strong connection not just to clients, but the end users that consume products and services.
Design as a function within corporations, or as independent consultancies have not always collaborated well with business. Clients and the market have traditionally viewed design as an expressive and production function, rather than a strategic asset. Designers have focused their skills and knowledge in the creation of designed artifacts, and indirectly addressed larger issues within this creative process. Designers have been uneasy about articulating their value to business in terms that business could understand.
There were moves to bridge this gap. In England, the British Design Council was founded in 1944 by the British wartime government as the Council of Industrial Design, with the objective "to promote by all practicable means the improvement of design in the products of British industry'.
Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke of the Container Corporation of America founded the Aspen Design Conference in the United States after WWII as a way of bringing business and designers together–to the benefit of both. In 1951, the first conference topic, “Design as a Function of Management,” was chosen to ensure the participation of the business community. After several years, however, business leaders stopped attending because the increased participation of designers changed the dialogue, focusing it not on the need for collaboration between business and design, but rather on the business community’s failure to understand the value of design.
While designers were trying to make connections to the business community, there were business people that were trying to make connections to the design community. Individuals from both communities began making connections between the goals of business and how design could be a subject in the management suite. Design management's foundations are European in nature and one of the strongest early advocates was Peter Gorb, former Director of the London Business School's Centre for Design Management.
Design methods initially was focused on how design could be integrated into engineering and grew to recognize the multidisciplinary nature of solving contemporary complexity, in all its forms. Design Management had similar goals, but focused on how to define design as a business function and provide the language and method of how to effectively manage it. In the late 1960's and into the 1970's Gorb and others began to write articles that were drafted to designers to learn about business, and to business professionals to understand the untapped potential of design as a critical business function. “And what designers need to learn, and this is the most important thing, is the language of the business world. Only by learning that language can you effectively voice the arguments for design.” — Peter Gorb
The Design Management Institute is an international nonprofit organization that seeks to heighten awareness of design as an essential part of business strategy. Founded in 1975, DMI has become the leading resource and international authority on design management.
Alternative View
Some designers and design historians have challenged or rejected the idea that design supports the goals and objectives of the economic systems they find themselves in. Victor Papanek (1925-1998) was a trail blazer in the definition of sustainable design and addressing social issues through design. His book Design for the Real World in the late 1960's articulated a world for design to use less resources and address local social issues for ecologically sound design to serve the poor, the disabled and the elderly.
Victor Margolin has addressed the inherent role of the design communities supporting an economic system, which he called the "expansion model", where “the world consists of markets in which products function first and foremost as tokens of economic exchange. They attract capital which is either recycled back into more production or becomes part of the accumulation of private or corporate wealth.” Margolin describes a “sustainable model” as having “ecological checks and balances that consists of finite resources. If the elements of this system are damaged or thrown out of balance or if essential resources are depleted, the system will suffer severe damage and will possibly collapse.” (p82, Design of the Artificial)
The Role of Design Groups
Emphasis by design practitioners such as Doblin on design methods and their place in enterprise influenced many design organizations. Particularly since 2000, design methods and its intersection with business development have been visibly championed by numerous consultancies within design industry.
A firm that continues to be associated with promulgation and effectiveness of design methods is Palo Alto-based IDEO. Their current approach, aptly titled Methods, incorporates a four-phased process of Observation, Brainstorming, Prototyping and Implementation. It begins with examining people interacting with objects, flows and/or spaces in order to glean experiential factors—whether physical, cognitive, or emotional—with potential for incorporation into design specifications for an enhanced or new product or service.
Chicago-based GravityTank's process of Integrated Product Definition makes use of design methods, especially collaborative brainstorming. This type of co-creating method is also exercised by Doblin in their innovation diagnostic workshops.
The continuity of approaches to design projects by these representative firms is the generation of inputs incited by the human condition in varied contexts. These approaches utilize a sustainable methods-based mode of making that takes into account critical analytic and synthetic skills toward more informed and inspired specifications grounded in:
- Direct investigation of human circumstances to draw out impressions
- Engagement by client-side and end-user participants in design process
- Open articulation by practitioners of multiple disciplines facilitated by design
Resources
In terms of online resources, they are diverse, home grown and can be somewhat opaque. There are many design methods references in engineering and computer software development references since many of the original participants were in aerospace and computer engineering.
Articles
- Roberts, Melody, Border Crossing: The Role Of Design Research In International Product Development, (September 2001)
- Morello, Augusto, "Discovering Design" Means [Re-] Discovering Users and Projects (1995)
Books
- Jones, John Christopher, Design Methods (John Wiley & Sons Inc, August 1, 1992), 2nd edition (Van Nostrand Reinhold, August 1, 1992), 2nd edition
- Jones, John Christopher, Designing Designing (London: Architecture Design and Technology Press) 1991
Conferences
- Students at IIT's Institute of Design produce an annual forum on professional application of design methods and research called About With and For
- Design Research Society's FutureGround international conference
Websites
- John Christoper Jones has a website that has a few original articles about the 1962 conference as well as his thoughts over the years about design methods at Softopia
- Tom Mitchell at Indiana University has an overview of John Christoper Jones life and writings at John Chris Jones
- Hans DeGraff has a good overview of John Chris Jones first book at The Attic
- The Journal of Design Research is an interdisciplinary journal, emphasizing human aspects as a central issue of design through integrative studies of social sciences and design disciplines. It is an electronic journal aiming to publish articles including multimedia applications and hence allowing visual knowledge transfer at JDR