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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.)
No, it is not. And no, there isn't.
This is exactly the sort of reductive mode of thought the article is calling out.
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?
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.
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 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 wouldn't knock the corporate designer costume anymore than knocking an investment banker for wearing a suite.
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.
It's a bit like saying 'language is so damaging, every argument I ever had was a result of language'.
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.
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?
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...
[2] https://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring18/cs130/hw/IBM-Design...