dtagames3 days ago
https://archive.ph/vRkDq
So things like the cotton gin or Ford's use of interchangeable parts don't count as design or somehow didn't change the world?
How is volunteering at soup kitchens more effective at changing the world than interchangeable parts?
And still yet...are you wanting to change the world for the better?
could you frame innovation problems as "design" problems? sure.
was the cotton gin framed as a "design" problem in the sense that it had some sort of epistemological lineage to the "design" discipline when it was invented? I suspect not.
the worst thing design ever did for itself was frame itself as "the" human-centered problem solving discpline. everyone is a human-centered problem-solver in the most general sense, in the same way that everything is a "design" problem in the most general sense.
Central planning is a risky move - you’re essentially putting all your eggs in one basket. When it works well, we all benefit. When it works badly, we all suffer for it.
End of the day, design can be from architects imposing their views or tax collectors and road engineers doing theirs. The worst design comes from the genius planners, the best usually from people working with well defined constraints of money, taxes and build expense.
The state of American architecture and life is almost completely based on tax policy and allocation of resources to roadways. Our cities of vacant office towers are almost completely a tax story.
Also a financial leverage story. Rendering the true market value of these towers would create balance sheet issues at quite a few institutions. No one is keen to rock that boat.
Without the tax incentives people would still have left the biggest cities.
Absolutely not the case. American suburbs are the result of massive planning restriction and financial subsidy.
There are many architects, establishers or followers of certain doctrines, who feel the same way about built structures: That they're designed to solve issues related to human movement, and that there's one right way to build them. That if you build things in that correct way, and ignore the kitsch opinions of the proletariat, people will grow happier or be more effective. (Sometimes despite themselves.)
I don't necessarily agree with these views, but a quick glance at popular American suburban "architecture" -- possibly the worst of all worlds -- is enough to lend it serious weight.
No, it is not. And no, there isn't.
This is exactly the sort of reductive mode of thought the article is calling out.
Sure, there's a predictive aspect to it. What if your opponent zigs instead of zags, etc. But this is basically a matter of forecastable probabilities and can be added to your model. The optimal move still exists, no question about it.
Any problem of bodily motion through space has an optimal solution. In athletic situations, humans often can't think fast enough to find/utilize it, or aren't coordinated enough to move in the optimal way. And a biomechanically-perfect savant may still lose to an opponent vastly physically superior.
The comparison is unintentionally funny because it's the exact same "I can ignore the experience of the people who my work impacts because my models are perfect" mentality that produces unlivable apartments in dead lifeless streets.
Since ultimately, living, and living well, is about values, how do I choose to live, according to which values, science will never be able to capture that dimension.
I feel that scientists and technologists, and designers for that matter, should study more philosophy. It will open up their eyes to the fact that not every question is solvable by science.
Show me.
At this point, people are even modeling figures on Ancient Greek pottery to determine the biomechanical merit of their fighting stances: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4663/12/12/317
The same or similar techniques, of course, can apply to any combination of fighters (or dancers, or swimmers, etc.) at any particular moment. At the highest levels of sport, biomechanics analysts are employed, e.g.: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34402417/
In any case, I don't think that I made any extraordinary claims. There are a lot of unknowns, though, as the most valuable analyses tend to be extremely computationally demanding.
Evaluate your personal utility function over all possible future timelines of the universe, conditional on each of your possible moves.
The move that has the highest score is the best move.
American suburban architecture is pretty bad, but at least it's disposable. Generations to come won't have to live in these things.
In city planning and building design, the problem is even more severe. The planner doesn't know what people are going to settle where, what their desired needs are (or are going to be), and so on. That doesn't mean that there's no such thing as an awful solution, nor that you can't say anything at all. (A house probably needs windows, and you probably shouldn't stick a polluting industrial zone right next to a bunch of them.) It just means that trying to "micromanage" a city or complex building fails - for the same reason that micromanaging an organization fails.
(This is a requisite variety or "seeing like a state" argument.)
The biggest example is of course car dominance, which was great until it isn't, but all sorts of micro details about how humans use space vary on a day to day basis depending on what they're using it for.
Remember when people built apple 30 pin connectors into furniture?
Sure, most of it is ridiculous and stupid, you expect that when you brainstorm. Only in environments where you’re allowed to propose any idea regardless of how ridiculous or stupid they are can you uncover certain types of gems of base ideas.
Mind you, the queues were atrocious and I saw much less than I'd like.
It's a bit like saying 'language is so damaging, every argument I ever had was a result of language'.
TFA: > The solution, though, isn’t to stop trying to change the world. What could a more beautiful, user-friendly, accessible, and egalitarian society look like?
That absolutely is not a job for a designer. Anything about how society works is politics. If a a designer suggests things in this area, they are not designers, they are politicians. TFA notes that en passant as well: Lyons and Ideo didn't have a design problem, but a political problems.
A slight nitpick to the section of Bauhaus - the goal was not industrialization, and in fact in the early days that "group" was completely against industrialization. Gropius was the first director of Bauhaus, but the school existed previously in other forms led by Henry van de Velde, who only left Germany because of WWI and the fact he was Belgian. And in fact, there was a clash in the group already in 1914 at one of their first exhibitions, where one fraction strongly advocated for industrialization and "typed" production. But van de Velde won, and Gropius sided with him. If you visit van de Velde's house, it's clear what he was thinking. The house was designed with his family and his work in mind. In a way that his many children and family could live there and he would have his space and peace and quiet to work. So the idea was to have living conditions adapted to the needs of the people, but it's clear that without industrial scale it would only be available to the rich. But still, "form follows function" is not necessarily industrial. Van de Velde's house is classical in appearance, but still the starting point was function not form.
Personally, I like data-driven design. As in: ask a designer why, and you know why this is good or bad design. The 'why' should be linked to real data and decisions based on them.
From wikipedia. It's like "Foundation Models", they successfully branded the concept but nobody cites them anymore
I worked before with the IBM Design Thinking Field Guide [2]. That offers some hands-on examples to work with users and stakeholders. Now, when i think about this, you may use Design Thinking to solve social-problems. With all the benefits and issues (like feature creep) you have in software engineering.
[1] https://web.stanford.edu/~mshanks/MichaelShanks/files/509554.pdf
[2] https://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring18/cs130/hw/IBM-Design-Thinking-Field-Guide-v3.4.pdf
It's largely an ivory tower ego playground for the financially elite, but with a creative side. It's a lot of relentless self-marketing with a generous helping of whatever buzzwords are in at the moment.
The designers are easy to spot. They wear boldly coloured look-at-me glasses and clothing. It's like a menagerie of rare birds. Find them at international Expos, Bienalles and design festivals (if in doubt, seek out a pavilion).
Their ideas are largely stale and reused. These people are born rich and die rich and affect very little positive change in the time between.
But - remove the glamour and apply design thinking to hard, thankless but important problems and it can be a pretty meaningful and worthwhile profession IMO.
Sadly, with increasing wealth inequality, the rich are better able to keep out the talented but poor, with things like unpaid internships, access to professional networks gated by exorbitant college fees, insane rents in key cities, etc. There was a period in the mid 20 century when just talent and drive could get you very far. Should be no surprise that that led to a blossoming in the creative fields, and the converse more lately has led to their impoverishment.
I wouldn't knock the corporate designer costume anymore than knocking an investment banker for wearing a suite.
This take of designers being superior being to engineers is something I consistently observed among designers over the decade.
Here is a light-hearted video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvU5dmu4sl8
Engineering deals mostly with objective outcomes. Space shuttle designers have a clear goal and measurable performance metrics. The problems are extremely hard but the design constraints permit a more focused development process.
Architecture is technical but mostly subjective, and deals with a host of multi-disciplinary and social concerns. It's quite open-ended and difficult to settle on an optimal approach. Extreme budget limitations, building code, zoning restrictions, public consultation, and the idiosyncrasies of personal taste complicate this process further. Full-size prototyping is also less common and it's almost impossible to truly test the outcome of a design before actually constructing something.
Building a house and building a perfect house are drastically different accomplishments. A lot of people will even hate the perfect house – there's no winning!
I have a great deal of respect for engineers and (competent) architects. The latter are rare.