There’s a fascinating shift from the craftsman’s approach to object making into the recent methodological design process of our modern era. A craftsman’s design process is mainly based in trial and errors, and in acquired experience over time, but is also mainly centered around the process of making. John Chris Jone breaks down the account of Strut’s description of the wagon making, and how different components were gradually added to the design as a form of necessity, observation of a need that arises, and reaction to that need. The addition of a “dish” to a wagon wheel was a response to an observation of the wheels folding under weight and when making turns. Strut describes the various iterations of developing the dish and how each iteration would fix an issue to reveal other issues afterwards.
This process, observing a discrepancy between the desired condition (wheels that do not fold with weight at road turns), and the current condition (wheels that do fold under weight and turns), and the process of altering properties of this condition, is a very basic description for the process of design that Bruce Archer describes in his book.
But Jones differentiates between the craftsman’s approach to making things and the professional designer’s methods and processes. He centers his breakdown around drawing, scale and collaboration, and argues that we cannot isolate the design process from the production and distribution process, and form the social and cultural implication of such design, which poses limitations and rules that are not necessarily directly related to the original problem. Jones argues that drawing, as a form of denotation and a medium that allows for collaboration, discussion, and knowledge transfer, is what really differentiates modern design practices from earlier craftsmanship.
Jones describes the design process as something that is based in the future, and is very interested in analyzing it as a collaborative process by multiple professionals with different levels of expertise, working sometimes simultaneously and sometimes in sequence, returning to scale drawing as a main element in sharing knowledge and working collaboratively.
However, all articles agree that the design process start from a certain need or needs: a condition which needs to be changed into what one wishes for it to be (as Archer calls it). The the identification of the properties that are present and satisfactory, present but need to be corrected, and the potential properties of the new system, is crucial to embarking on a design process. This is what Christopher Alexander does in his annotation for the determination of the components of an Indian village. Alexander lists those variables that are pertinent to the functioning of a village, but are also potential for the creation of an undesirable condition (what Alexander calls a misfit), which can be regarded as synonymous to what Archer calls a network of subproblems of which the overall design problem is composed.
Then, the articles discuss the creative process. Jones presents the models of a blackbox and a glassbox, all trying to describe the design process. The designer as a blackbox has a process that is dominated by a creative leap which is based in memory, experience, exposure to external factors, and contemplation; The designer as a glassbox has a process that is a highly logical and rational, where the flow is descriptive and the outcome is predictable. Alexander seems more in favor of the blackbox design process. As an example, his conversation with Jacobson discusses “what constitutes a good lobby vs. a bad lobby”. While he says that some metrics are easy to use to evaluate the final object (like size for example), he says that there are qualifiers for a design object that is cannot be judged (or be influenced) by a process or a method, nor can they be codified. He then dismisses the concept of a methodology entirely, and says that something (the design process) that is extremely sensible becomes absurd when it’s called a methodology.
However, while Alexander’s take is anchored in architecture as an experience, an ambience, an amalgamation of spaces, and volumes, Jones and Archer think, about design beyond architecture, and look at it as a whole thought process, from designing wagons and violins (objects) to planes (complex objects), to a complete check-in and boarding experience in airports (systems), and highlight that these cannot be thought of without considering the full process from inception to production to the social and cultural effects of the resulting design.
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