One interesting point in design studies, brought about in this week’s articles, the view of a designer as a craftsman: a maker of things, a skilled worker that skillfully generates artifacts to be used by others. The angle which drew my attention in this week’s readings is the idea of annotation of the design process: communicating change and need, which also necessitates the conversation about transfer of knowledge from one designer to another, or to other generations of designers.
Shoen calls this a the language of designing, which he sees as a meta language to reflect on the action of design. he uses an example of a professor of architectural design studio communicating with a student about problems, problem solving, and changes in her proposed design. he describes the moment where the professor puts tracing paper over the student’s solution and gives her a set of linguistic and drawn scribbles, and lines, verybal and non verbal dimensions as he calls it, that describe proposed alternations to the proposed design she had plotted on paper.
I see this idea as a different form of design method that is based in “brainstorming” but is focused in the concept of the transfer of knowledge and expertise. This is not how to hold a conversation with stakeholders, or communicate across departments in design firms. This is related to communicating ideas within the realm of the phenomenon of design, or the design world which the designer has created.
I want to stop here and link this concept back to Sennett’s idea of generational expertise in craftsmen, in which the transfer of knowledge is required obedience, discipline, and following the rules that were established by earlier generations.
Senett also talks about connections and communication as means for design. He addresses that in the Nokia example, where developing the mobile phone was a result of oopen ended conversations between different departments (engineering, sales, etc..), and Motorola’s Engineering Shelf, which, similar to the open source software idea of better design as a result of multiple expertise involved in the same domain, created open-ended space for innovation by multiple engineers, enabling for collaborative work and discussion.
Senett also mention communication as way for improving results by allowing workers to challenge design ideas across vertical hierarchies, which is evident in the Japanese work culture.
These example, however do not refer to the language of design that Shoen talks about, less in the Japanese model than the communication engineering example. Shoen states that designing is a communicative activity in which individuals are called upon to decipher one another’s design worlds.
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