If you want to see designers trying to fuck the world go to the Osaka 2025 Expo where designers are each proposing the next Brazilia City. They want total control over everything all centrally planned. no room for anyone’s individualism except the designer’s
If you look at how humans move and interact with their environments, you'll find that it can mostly be reduced to biomechanical optimization problems. Even in extremis: A fist-fight is a sequence of biomechanical optimization problems, and there's always a "perfect move" at any given moment in time.
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.
Even if that is true (and I'm not saying it is), practical limits on handling the combinatorial complexity, or variety if you will, severely limits its use. No realistic fist-fighter has the information required or the processing capabilities to do the "biomechanical optimization problem" to anywhere near optimality.
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 fallacy comes from the fact that many humans must interact with the environment over time. The optimization for an imagined group of humans at a certain point of time dooms real humans to long periods of struggle. The transport of Le Corbusier's ideas from the South of France to urban Scotland is possibly the best example of this. To be condemned to live in the flats on the outskirts of Glasgow is a stark fate indeed.
American suburban architecture is pretty bad, but at least it's disposable. Generations to come won't have to live in these things.
Only if you have perfect knowledge of the future. And of all the humans who will be using it.
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?
> Even in extremis: A fist-fight is a sequence of biomechanical optimization problems, and there's always a "perfect move" at any given moment in time.
No, it is not. And no, there isn't.
This is exactly the sort of reductive mode of thought the article is calling out.
No, it is not. First of all the territory isn't fixed. Second of all the existence of a fitness landscape (let alone ocean) doesn't guarantee the existence of unique optima, nor that the ones you identify aren't in a second or less your loss because your opponent read you. The other person's behavior is unpredictable but can be guided, and likewise. Feints are a huge part of fighting.
To think you can identify a model in this situation is pure hubris. Absolutely no one who fights thinks this way. Fighting is NOT LIKE CHESS.
This fundamental faith in modeling is dangerous. It overestimates its own applicability, and ignores its predisposition to only focus on the most available data (under the incorrect assumption that if you collect more and more it will eventually "average 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.
I'd bet you $20 that none of the people who have ever won a fistfight have done so by modelling it as a biomechanical optimisation problem, at least on the fly while it was happening.
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.
This is the truth! Added to the purely mechanical process, is an enormous psychological aspect. But... we can do even better! The above _assumes_ that fist fighting is indeed what we want to do, but perhaps the best (TM) solution is to avoid the fist fight alltogether?
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.
Technologists in particular, taken as a group, have a very specific philosophical outlook that they don't tend to interrogate in themselves because it's so pervasive and intrinsic to what they work on and how they do so. Fish unaware of water, so to speak. It's a set of assumptions that make sense when you're programming software, but break down when applied to other things in the real world.
The tend to assume the universe is deterministic.
They tend to assume (incorrectly) that because it's deterministic a good enough model will be able to predict or explain.
They tend to ignore or not even be aware of the inherent bias towards available and measurable data, or that what we can measure must capture the essential dimensions of it.
The most naive tend to assume that given enough data, a model will get better, that the noise will "average out" (it doesn't).
I don't have a good name for this, but it has all the trappings of a good -ism otherwise.
Beyond philosophy, they should study art, music, literature, and whatever else interests. They should spend time with others who do and not only with people who work in technology. Unfortunately, increasingly college CS programs have cut out general education requirements in favor of questionably useful skills training, leaving graduates in a state where this seems daunting.
Computer scientists are building the world we all have to live in. Is it so much to ask that they be educated in the humanities before they're turned loose to do so?
This is the sort of statement that is both true and also completely useless in a fist-fight. A fist fight is both biomechanical movement and also a mind-game comprising physical, mental, and emotional stamina.
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.
It can assuredly be done in practice, with currently available technology. It would, however, be very expensive and time-consuming.
I'm thinking of putting together a set of general biomechanical models for foil or kendo fencing. Both forms feature a highly constrained ruleset, which simplifies things. Hobby project, though, so maybe one of these days...
Current Paris looks the way it does because of central planners who had a vision for the city. In my opinion, it’s beautiful. I don’t know what it’s like to live there, but as a visitor walking though all those brownstone buildings? I love it.
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.
The mansard roofs, etc are a consequence of tax policy.
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.
>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.
Commercial real estate is all about financial shenanigans. For housing, the Feds both directly subsidized construction and indirectly by changing capital gains rules and having a plethora of goodies for developers.
My parents bought their first home in NYC for $19,000 in 1977. They sold it in 1993 for $500,000, and that owner sold it in 2024 for $2.8M. Nobody paid capital gains.
Paris is basically Haussmann's. Let people do whatever and you get suburbia-USA: one Normandy style house next to a cheap pre built one next to a tatooine-like dwelling. The city becomes ugly and has no soul.
To an extent there's a lot of smaller scale projects with nature and human life quality as main goal. The 60s-70s era of architectural grandiosity is most probably over (except nation-wide desire to boost GDP through real estate)
I’m not sure you understand the purpose of those designs, it’s much like the clothing on a fashion runway. It’s meant to inspire creative thinking, not be a literal plan to follow. Not being able to recognise that is like, the absolute baseline understanding you should have to even be able to hold any valid criticism, IMO.
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.
I've spent far too long in the "Design" world (I'm talkikg Design with a capital D).
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.
I just assume the job of the designer is make everything look the same.
Creativity is the domain of the artist, doesn't seem to have anything to do with design.
I wouldn't knock the corporate designer costume anymore than knocking an investment banker for wearing a suite.
> These people are born rich and die rich and affect very little positive change in the time between.
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 had a colleague, an architect deeply soaked in the Design Thinking cool aid, telling me that architecting a single-family house is humankind's most intellectually challenging endeavor because he has to worry about the end users and construction materials that go in ("holistic[TM]"). I asked him if building a space shuttle is easier than building a house, and he genuinely believed that engineers have a far easier (and dumber) time than designers like himself.
This take of designers being superior being to engineers is something I consistently observed among designers over the decade.
Your colleague is wrong and this is a tired debate, but neither are easy.
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.
In the context of the article design is separate from engineering and/or invention. those later two invented the Cotten gin and ford’s use of interchangeable parts.
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.
I did not really understand why they use the term 'Design Thinking.' The article did not make it clear to me why they use the product development framework for social problem-solving.
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.
Thx for the hint. I found a introduction to Design Thinking Process Guide by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford [1].
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.
It had a big moment in about 2015 where it (Design Thinking) was touted as a way of focusing software/product development on "real needs". This created an industry of designers and workshops and a lot of C-1 executive enthusiasm. I think it failed for two reasons, first off is the fact that technical and financial fundamentals are like gravity - there's no arguing with them. Secondly, COVID came and all the workshops went away. I haven't seen any big push to resurrect it, and I suspect it's been quietly parked by all those who had bet their careers on it and then identified an off ramp during the pandemic.
it assumes the system is already asking the right question. you walk in with sticky notes ,empathy maps ,whatever. but the brief's scoped wrong from the start. you're figuring out how to make the form smoother ,not whether the form even needs to exist. so you end up optimizing bad premises. no amount of ideation fixes that
This looks to me like a profession which is overstepping its bounds. The trap seems to be in the "form follows function" motto. It shouldn't mean that designers have a word to say about how things function.
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.
Such a dumb position. Every discipline has projects that don't succeed. What about when engineers use both metric and imperial measurements while engineering a space probe.
It's as if people that wanted to accomplish something called their method design, but the people that came after them wanted the design itself to be the achievement. We see this in the developer world, where the goal is not to have working software, but a work of art of engineering that is to be admired by fellow colleagues.
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.
https://archive.ph/vRkDq
If you want to see designers trying to fuck the world go to the Osaka 2025 Expo where designers are each proposing the next Brazilia City. They want total control over everything all centrally planned. no room for anyone’s individualism except the designer’s
If you look at how humans move and interact with their environments, you'll find that it can mostly be reduced to biomechanical optimization problems. Even in extremis: A fist-fight is a sequence of biomechanical optimization problems, and there's always a "perfect move" at any given moment in time.
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.
Even if that is true (and I'm not saying it is), practical limits on handling the combinatorial complexity, or variety if you will, severely limits its use. No realistic fist-fighter has the information required or the processing capabilities to do the "biomechanical optimization problem" to anywhere near optimality.
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 fallacy comes from the fact that many humans must interact with the environment over time. The optimization for an imagined group of humans at a certain point of time dooms real humans to long periods of struggle. The transport of Le Corbusier's ideas from the South of France to urban Scotland is possibly the best example of this. To be condemned to live in the flats on the outskirts of Glasgow is a stark fate indeed.
American suburban architecture is pretty bad, but at least it's disposable. Generations to come won't have to live in these things.
Only if you have perfect knowledge of the future. And of all the humans who will be using it.
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?
> Even in extremis: A fist-fight is a sequence of biomechanical optimization problems, and there's always a "perfect move" at any given moment in time.
No, it is not. And no, there isn't.
This is exactly the sort of reductive mode of thought the article is calling out.
Just because you don't know what the best move is doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
there is only a perfect move in certain kinds of constrained "games", like a fight.
Enumerate your possible moves.
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.
At that point the map is the territory.
Yes. The territory has an optimal move. If your map is not good enough to identify it, that's a property of your map not of the territory.
No, it is not. First of all the territory isn't fixed. Second of all the existence of a fitness landscape (let alone ocean) doesn't guarantee the existence of unique optima, nor that the ones you identify aren't in a second or less your loss because your opponent read you. The other person's behavior is unpredictable but can be guided, and likewise. Feints are a huge part of fighting.
To think you can identify a model in this situation is pure hubris. Absolutely no one who fights thinks this way. Fighting is NOT LIKE CHESS.
This fundamental faith in modeling is dangerous. It overestimates its own applicability, and ignores its predisposition to only focus on the most available data (under the incorrect assumption that if you collect more and more it will eventually "average out").
The entire universe is like chess.
Yes your opponent can make a move and you don't know what move they'll make. Chess is like that too.
I'm not saying this is in fact a good way to win a physical fight.
I'm also not saying the optimal move is unique. If 2 moves have the same utility then they can both be optimal.
What I'm saying is that just because you don't know what is the best move doesn't mean a best move exists.
You can literally model this.
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.
I'd bet you $20 that none of the people who have ever won a fistfight have done so by modelling it as a biomechanical optimisation problem, at least on the fly while it was happening.
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.
This is the truth! Added to the purely mechanical process, is an enormous psychological aspect. But... we can do even better! The above _assumes_ that fist fighting is indeed what we want to do, but perhaps the best (TM) solution is to avoid the fist fight alltogether?
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.
Technologists in particular, taken as a group, have a very specific philosophical outlook that they don't tend to interrogate in themselves because it's so pervasive and intrinsic to what they work on and how they do so. Fish unaware of water, so to speak. It's a set of assumptions that make sense when you're programming software, but break down when applied to other things in the real world.
The tend to assume the universe is deterministic.
They tend to assume (incorrectly) that because it's deterministic a good enough model will be able to predict or explain.
They tend to ignore or not even be aware of the inherent bias towards available and measurable data, or that what we can measure must capture the essential dimensions of it.
The most naive tend to assume that given enough data, a model will get better, that the noise will "average out" (it doesn't).
I don't have a good name for this, but it has all the trappings of a good -ism otherwise.
Beyond philosophy, they should study art, music, literature, and whatever else interests. They should spend time with others who do and not only with people who work in technology. Unfortunately, increasingly college CS programs have cut out general education requirements in favor of questionably useful skills training, leaving graduates in a state where this seems daunting.
Computer scientists are building the world we all have to live in. Is it so much to ask that they be educated in the humanities before they're turned loose to do so?
This is the sort of statement that is both true and also completely useless in a fist-fight. A fist fight is both biomechanical movement and also a mind-game comprising physical, mental, and emotional stamina.
> You can literally model this.
Show me.
What would you like to see?
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.
> What would you like to see?
A model that shows the optimal move for a fighter at any point in time.
You don’t actually have this. It can maybe be theoretically done, but not in practice.
It can assuredly be done in practice, with currently available technology. It would, however, be very expensive and time-consuming.
I'm thinking of putting together a set of general biomechanical models for foil or kendo fencing. Both forms feature a highly constrained ruleset, which simplifies things. Hobby project, though, so maybe one of these days...
I don't know if this was your intention, but I read this in the voice of Morpheus.
Not a new thing, sadly. See Le Corbusier's "plan for Paris".
Current Paris looks the way it does because of central planners who had a vision for the city. In my opinion, it’s beautiful. I don’t know what it’s like to live there, but as a visitor walking though all those brownstone buildings? I love it.
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.
The mansard roofs, etc are a consequence of tax policy.
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.
>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.
There's more to it than taxes. Fear of the other (racism), tradition (farming cosplay), and abundant land are also big factors.
Without the tax incentives people would still have left the biggest cities.
Commercial real estate is all about financial shenanigans. For housing, the Feds both directly subsidized construction and indirectly by changing capital gains rules and having a plethora of goodies for developers.
My parents bought their first home in NYC for $19,000 in 1977. They sold it in 1993 for $500,000, and that owner sold it in 2024 for $2.8M. Nobody paid capital gains.
I don't dispute taxes are a big factor, just not the only or even most significant one in residential real-estate.
Thanks for calling out commercial. That's something I'll have to study more.
"brownstone" buildings in Paris?
Paris is basically Haussmann's. Let people do whatever and you get suburbia-USA: one Normandy style house next to a cheap pre built one next to a tatooine-like dwelling. The city becomes ugly and has no soul.
> Let people do whatever and you get suburbia-USA.
Absolutely not the case. American suburbs are the result of massive planning restriction and financial subsidy.
To an extent there's a lot of smaller scale projects with nature and human life quality as main goal. The 60s-70s era of architectural grandiosity is most probably over (except nation-wide desire to boost GDP through real estate)
I’m not sure you understand the purpose of those designs, it’s much like the clothing on a fashion runway. It’s meant to inspire creative thinking, not be a literal plan to follow. Not being able to recognise that is like, the absolute baseline understanding you should have to even be able to hold any valid criticism, IMO.
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.
Any particular pavillion you were thinking of? I just got back from the expo and thought of them more like tourist board exhibits...
Mind you, the queues were atrocious and I saw much less than I'd like.
I've spent far too long in the "Design" world (I'm talkikg Design with a capital D).
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.
I just assume the job of the designer is make everything look the same. Creativity is the domain of the artist, doesn't seem to have anything to do with design.
I wouldn't knock the corporate designer costume anymore than knocking an investment banker for wearing a suite.
> These people are born rich and die rich and affect very little positive change in the time between.
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’m not sure anything they wear could be more pretentious than your judgement of what they wear, to be honest.
Stereotypes exist because they have an element of truth. His description of designers aligns with mine.
There are certainly more pretentious things to wear, but very few.
Sorry what?
I had a colleague, an architect deeply soaked in the Design Thinking cool aid, telling me that architecting a single-family house is humankind's most intellectually challenging endeavor because he has to worry about the end users and construction materials that go in ("holistic[TM]"). I asked him if building a space shuttle is easier than building a house, and he genuinely believed that engineers have a far easier (and dumber) time than designers like himself.
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
Your colleague is wrong and this is a tired debate, but neither are easy.
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.
Is such discussion of such a broad area helpful in anyway other than filling magazine pages?
It's a bit like saying 'language is so damaging, every argument I ever had was a result of language'.
> Design won’t save the world. Go volunteer at a soup kitchen, you pretentious fuck
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?
In the context of the article design is separate from engineering and/or invention. those later two invented the Cotten gin and ford’s use of interchangeable parts.
But it's not actually separate. A lot of engineering innovation starts by identifying a design problem.
There is a general academic rejection of “solutionism” that prefers criticism to design. I find it unnerving, personally.
this is a useless semantic position.
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.
In the context of the article it is separate. maybe engage with the article itself instead of arguing with something the article is not about?
You had n chances to note that "save" =/= change.
I did not really understand why they use the term 'Design Thinking.' The article did not make it clear to me why they use the product development framework for social problem-solving.
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.
>Stanford University's d.school begins to teach design thinking as a generalisable approach to technical and social innovation.
From wikipedia. It's like "Foundation Models", they successfully branded the concept but nobody cites them anymore
Thx for the hint. I found a introduction to Design Thinking Process Guide by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford [1].
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...
[2] https://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring18/cs130/hw/IBM-Design...
It had a big moment in about 2015 where it (Design Thinking) was touted as a way of focusing software/product development on "real needs". This created an industry of designers and workshops and a lot of C-1 executive enthusiasm. I think it failed for two reasons, first off is the fact that technical and financial fundamentals are like gravity - there's no arguing with them. Secondly, COVID came and all the workshops went away. I haven't seen any big push to resurrect it, and I suspect it's been quietly parked by all those who had bet their careers on it and then identified an off ramp during the pandemic.
it assumes the system is already asking the right question. you walk in with sticky notes ,empathy maps ,whatever. but the brief's scoped wrong from the start. you're figuring out how to make the form smoother ,not whether the form even needs to exist. so you end up optimizing bad premises. no amount of ideation fixes that
This looks to me like a profession which is overstepping its bounds. The trap seems to be in the "form follows function" motto. It shouldn't mean that designers have a word to say about how things function.
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.
Such a dumb position. Every discipline has projects that don't succeed. What about when engineers use both metric and imperial measurements while engineering a space probe.
It's as if people that wanted to accomplish something called their method design, but the people that came after them wanted the design itself to be the achievement. We see this in the developer world, where the goal is not to have working software, but a work of art of engineering that is to be admired by fellow colleagues.
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.
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