Design

• 1. Introduction

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  Design is a concept or proposal for an object, process, or system. The word carries a quiet ambition. It refers to something intentionally created by a thinking agent. The same word also describes the inherent nature of a thing, its design, the shape it ended up with. As a verb, to design means to develop that plan. So one short word covers a sketch, a finished circuit diagram, and the act of imagining either one.

  Herbert A. Simon offered a definition that widens the field dramatically. He wrote that everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. Under that view, a parent planning a route and an engineer drafting a bridge are doing the same kind of work. So what separates the professional designer from the rest of us. And if everyone designs, why do scholars still argue about how design actually happens. The answers run through schools founded two centuries ago, through a fight between two rival models of the design process, and through a long list of approaches that each insist design should serve a different master.

• 2. Everyone Designs

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  People who produce designs are called designers, and the term usually points to someone working professionally in a design field. The word rarely travels alone. It is qualified by an area of practice, so we get fashion designer, product designer, web designer, or interior designer. The label can also stretch to cover architects and engineers. Even direct construction of an object without an explicit prior plan, as in arts and crafts, can count as design.

  Nigel Cross pushed the boundary further than the professions. The design researcher argued that everyone can, and does, design. He described design ability as something everyone has to some extent, because it is embedded in our brains as a natural cognitive function. That claim reframes designing as ordinary mental equipment rather than rare talent. The sequence of activities a designer uses to produce a design is called a design process. Some practitioners employ named methods such as design thinking, while a single process can run from a quick sketch to a long effort full of research, negotiation, reflection, modeling, and re-design.

• 3. Naming A Discipline

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  The study of design history is complicated by a basic disagreement: what even counts as designing. Some historians, such as John Heskett, look to the Industrial Revolution and the rise of mass production. Others begin their narratives in prehistoric times, counting pre-industrial objects and artefacts. The discipline grew out of art history and coalesced in the 1970s, when interested academics worked to recognize design as a separate and legitimate target for historical research. Early influential figures include the German-British art historian Nikolaus Pevsner and the Swiss historian and architecture critic Sigfried Giedion.

  Institutions for design education in Western Europe reach back to the nineteenth century. The Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Art Industry was founded in 1818. The United Kingdom's Government School of Design followed in 1837, and Konstfack in Sweden in 1844. The Rhode Island School of Design was founded in the United States in 1877. The German art and design school Bauhaus, founded in 1919, greatly influenced modern design education. That teaching has traditionally prepared students for professional practice through project work and studio, or atelier, methods. The growth of design in general education in the 1970s pushed scholars to identify what they called designerly ways of knowing, thinking, and acting.

• 4. Two Rival Models

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  Dorst and Dijkhuis acknowledged that there are many ways of describing design processes, then drew a line between two dominant views. One sees design as rational problem-solving. The other sees it as a process of reflection-in-action. The two researchers suggested these paradigms represent two fundamentally different ways of looking at the world, positivism and constructionism. Each view collects several names. The problem-solving side answers to the rational model, technical rationality, and the reason-centric perspective. The alternative answers to reflection-in-action, coevolution, and the action-centric perspective.

  Herbert A. Simon developed the rational model independently of two German engineering design theorists, Gerhard Pahl and Wolfgang Beitz. The model holds that designers optimize a candidate for known constraints and objectives, that the process is plan-driven, and that it unfolds in a discrete sequence of stages. It underlies the waterfall model and the systems development life cycle. The typical stages run from a design brief and analysis through specification, problem solving, and presentation, then into development, product testing, implementation, and a redesign step that can repeat any stage at any time. Critics answered on two grounds. Empirical evidence shows designers do not actually work this way, and the model's assumptions are unrealistic because goals are often unknown when a project begins.

• 5. Improvising A Solution

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  Creativity and emotion drive the action-centric perspective, a label given to a collection of concepts antithetical to the rational model. Here the process is improvised, and no universal sequence of stages appears. Analysis, design, and implementation are contemporary and inextricably linked. This view rests on an empiricist philosophy and sits comfortably with the agile approach. Substantial empirical evidence supports its account of how real designers behave.

  Framing, making moves, and evaluating moves are the three activities of the reflection-in-action paradigm. Framing means conceptualizing the problem and defining goals and objectives. A move is a tentative design decision, and evaluating one may lead to further moves. A second account, the sensemaking-coevolution-implementation framework, names its three activities directly. Coevolution is the process where the design agent simultaneously refines its mental picture of the design object based on its mental picture of the context, and the reverse. Anderson describes a related idea, the design cycle, as a circular time structure. It starts with an idea, expresses it through visual or verbal design tools, shares and perceives the expressed idea, then begins again with critical rethinking, which highlights how the means of expression are also means of perception.

• 6. Design With A Conscience

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  Conscious design treats the long-term impact of objects and environments on human well-being and ecological health as the priority. It is an intentional, systems-aware approach that goes beyond aesthetics by folding in circular economy principles, ethical material sourcing, and psychological health. Sitting near it, ecological design prioritizes the environmental impacts of a product or service across its whole lifecycle. Ecodesign research focuses on barriers to implementation, ecodesign tools and methods, and how the field intersects with other disciplines.

  Critical design turns the designed artefact into an embodied critique of existing values, morals, and practices in a culture, sometimes making the future physically present to provoke a reaction. Participatory design, originally co-operative design and now often co-design, tries to actively involve all stakeholders, from employees to citizens to end-users, so the result meets their needs. Recent research suggests designers create more innovative concepts within a co-design environment than they do alone. Scientific design draws on scientific knowledge, so a scientific design of face masks for COVID-19 mitigation might rest on investigations of filtration performance, thermal comfort, biodegradability, and flow resistance. User-centered design keeps the needs, wants, and limitations of the end-user in view, with ergonomics as one of its aspects.