topics: |  design | philosophy

Organized as a set of insightful one-page essays. Despite the occasional reference to Heidegger or Foucault, the essays are down-to-earth. Some experiences are specific to design, others may relate not only to design, but to many arenas of expert behaviour.

Martin Siegel on Amazon: "Each essay is to be savored like a fine piece of chocolate."

What is design?

Let's take a group of friends on Saturday night.

Situation 1: They are looking for a good movie in town.
Situation 2: They want to set out and have a party.

1 is problem solving.  2 is design.

Why?
   a) S2 has a pivotal concept - what is a party?
   b) there is no dominant solution for what a party is
   c) S2 requires the use of thought experiments ('Shall
		we go to a club?'
   d) even the tools for solving the problem have to be
		developed - e.g. 'let's vote on this, guys"

[great example, but not completely convincing. but then, such matters
 never are.]

[p.45]

Constraint

Closed design problems are more like puzzles.  If the jigsaw piece doesn't
fit, you imediately know it.

Some design problems are much more 'open' - they require considering a wide
range of possibilities.  You juggle ideas, look at them critically,
reconsider repeatedly.  You gradually learn more about the problem.

There could possibly be two different types of designers. There is creativity
and inventiveness involved in both, though designers often don't see it in
that way.  The 'creatives' who deal more with open problems, tend to look
down on the others.  The 'closed problem' types often downplay their creative
sides.

As the industrial designer Richard Stevens observed: "A lot of engineering
design is intuitive, based on subjective thinking.  But an engineer is
unhappy doing this.  He wants  to test - test and measure.  He's been brought
up this way and he's unhappy if he can't prove something." p.35

The story

When you design, you are actually creating two things in parallel: the design
itself and the story behind it. This story consists of all the choices you
have made during your design project and the arguments that you used in
making them.  It is the justification for the design, which explains [the]
why. p.30

Habitualness in Design

What do you experience when you are designing?

Most of the time you are within a flow of consciousness, more or less
intuitively following patterns of reasoning.
It's only when the flow breaks down that you become aware of the wider
context around you.  It's as if you wake up.

Heidegger [talks] of hammering a nail into the wall.  You never
think about the hammer - you just pick it up and start hammering.  It
naturally acts as an extension of your body.  The only time you think about
the hammer is when it breaks.

The same is true for design.  You are deeply engrossed in exploring a
particular path towards a solution, oblivious of anything else.  The moment
a reasoning track comes to a dead end, you have to step back and choose a new
direction.  83

author bio

Professor Kees Dorst - Dutch design scholar, educator, consultant and
practitioner - presents 175 provoking essays to stimulate designers to think
about what they do, how they do it, why and to what effect. An exploration of
design to inspire and give insight.

Kees Dorst was trained as an Industrial Design Engineer at the University of
Technology in Delft, Holland. He currently is Associate Dean Research and
Professor of Design at the University of Technology, Sydney - and Senior
Researcher in design at Eindhoven University of Technology. He brought about
50 products to market as a product designer for various design firms.

"English editing : Phyllis Crabill"

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