Designing Methods

This afternoon I got a book from the library called 'Designing Methods' by J. Christopher Jones.

Chapter one talks about the role of a designer, some aspects of which are listed below.

Designers must:

• Predict effect
• Specify actions that need to take place
• Formulate proposals in response to brief
  
• Predict behaviour and response at each stage of the 'product' life
• Use examples of existing 'model' behaviour
• Make their process public so as to stimulate political debate and gain public opinion

This is something which is valuable for me at the moment, it creates a framework on which to explore and gauge the quality of ideas. Of course the angle which Jones is coming from is not the same as my own, he is referring to production on a large scale and also talking about utilising public and political opinion, but this information is infinitely transferable, in my case working on a much smaller scale.

Then the second part comes in, this stage was completely lost on me for quite a long time - arrogantly or naively thinking it was was by-passable, only later recognising the value of these systems - diagrams, flow charts, pie charts, graphs for my work.

The diagram below is about considerations which are typically important to the designer.



The blanks are for the designer to decide, they should broadly correlate to the boxes above with user/designer information inside, using markers that are modified and improved throughout the process to quality control the designs. Ideally following this process creates a correct and appropriate result each time.

The next chart enables the designer to narrow the focus. Asking questions, and finding the answers gives the designer the creative edge, knowing the conclusion means you can deviate form the standard route as long as you arrive at the same point.

"This instability of the problem is what makes designing so much more
fascinating than it may appear to someone who has not tried it." pg 10.

"Strong dependencies between distant points in product life history make it difficult to design without much back-tracking and circularity. The role of imagination, the designers trump card, is to enable him to avoid incompatibility between the one stage and another by changing his original aims to others that are more compatible but equally satisfactory in the long or short run." pg 10

"A scientists aim is to describe precisely, and to explain phenomena that exist. His attitude is one of trained scepticism and doubt: his main tools are the experiments that he carefully sets up to disprove hypothesis by searching for truth in statement of the opposite. An Artist, e.g. a painter or a sculptor, is equally uninvolved with the future and is much concerned with the present. His aim is to manipulate, for the satisfaction of so doing, a medium that exists (aaahhh) at the same time as his actions. (There are, of course, artists who use rough drafts, models and musical scores and the like, in which to plan their works, but in such cases as this they are acting with the forethought of designers rather than the impulsiveness of artists.) The attitude of mind that an artist cultivates is that of certainty, and of willingness to act on no or little or no external evidence to support his imagination. He acts in 'real time' using to the full capacity of a skilled nervous system to respond quickly to an intuitively held picture of the real world" pg 10.

And then Jones starts on Mathematicians, saying that their problem is a stable one, unlike the scenarios found in design. Then accordingly the designer does take from the Artist, Scientist and Mathematician to floorlessly engage stimulate and appropriate beautiful ideas into lemon squeezers and chez lounge's.

Below is diagram of my own.