design
This is intended to be a collection of writing about design, and this article is no exception. Writing is (foremost) a means of communication or structuring ideas, and people understand a lot of things by "design", so let's start at the beginning. The kinds of things I've been entrusted with designing and the practices of design that I've been drawn to have largely involved computer systems, or ways for people to organise themselves in relation or opposition those systems (maybe that's vacuous in a digital economy; I mean I am not primarily a visual or industrial designer). To understand which common features of those things and practices – what shared properties or behaviours – constitute design, it's helpful to have a shared definition. Even if the definition is wrong (and many definitions are), we at least know what we're all talking about.
Herbert Simon, in The Sciences of The Artificial (1969) tells us that:
Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.
While I've found this definition to be immensely valuable, it feels to me like a round about way to talk about designers without saying the word, so let's rephrase slightly:
Design is the practice of devising courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.
In either case, these definitions demand a practitioner, an active subject – doer/knower – something which I don't mean to elide by removing "everyone" from the sentence. "Everyone" likewise makes clear that there is not some priest class or particular area of activity within which one can design. Everyone's doing it, everywhere.
But what else does our definition demand? Although we've rearranged our definition to place "design" on the left hand side, we still have to jump over "courses of action" to consider the existing situation. There is a state of things, and we must have some means of identifying it.
To prefer some alternative situation, we must be able to judge or evaluate the situation we've identified and further be able to imagine one which is somehow both comparable and preferable to it. Lastly, as Marx has said, having interpreted our present situation, the point is to change it.
Change implies that our medium – whatever comprises the present situation – is not simply static, but is governed by some form of dynamics, it can be acted on in order to make it otherwise. This implies any number of things that might be important to us in devising a course of action. We must have some knowledge of the actions avaialble to us. We should have the ability to predict – or at least evaluate – the outcome of performing any given action, ideally without it moving us further (potentially irretrievably!) from our preferred situation.
So, in order:
Design is the practice of evaluating a situation, understanding how we would like it to be different, assessing our options for changing it, and formulating a plan to do so.
Perhaps less pithy than Simon, but each step follows the last.
Again, the point isn't to select or affirm the singular correct definition of "design" – there are innumerable situations in which this might be a useless or even harmful definition. The point is to identify a point of departure from which we can work.
That is: I (the subject) have experienced frustration in being able to articulate the intuitions and informal practices of design I have accumulated throughout my working life. I would like to be able to explain those intutitions to others such that we might usefully discuss them, and set them out so that I can personally better understand, apply, and improve upon them. And having understood those frustrations and aspirations, I have set out to bridge the two.
This is one such design.