Introduction
Design Methods focuses on how design can explore possibilities/constraints, and then actively define and manage the specifications of design solutions. The purpose of Design Methods is for designers to focus critical thinking skills to define problem spaces for existing products or services – or the creation of new categories. This can lead to better specifications for traditional design activities. The goal of design methods is to gain key insights, or unique essential truths that can create more holistic solutions to improve the lives of people who interact with the solution. 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
The concerns about design, its place in society and how design is practiced did not start with John Christopher Jones, or Christopher Alexander. William Morris of the arts and crafts movement in England voiced the role of the craftsman in an industrial age. 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 the 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 to create DaDa, Futurism, Surrealism and other movements that explored the unconscious mind.
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.
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 in 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. 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.”
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 do not like
Jones wasn't actually addressing design as presently conceived. He set out an entirely original philosophy of design -- one that questions the aims, goals, and purposes of designing, as well as presenting new methods of design. At the end of the 50s he published an article "A Systematic Design Method" articulating ways to integrate ergonomics data into in 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 mode of production and address the definition of the 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.
Post 1962 Conference
The focus has been on developing a series of relevant, sound, humanistic problem solving procedures and techniques to reduce avoidable errors and oversights that can adversely affect design solutions. The key benefit is to find a method that suits a particular design situation.
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 "A Pattern Language" 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)
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.
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
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