Solving Critical Design Problems

Theory and Practice

Tania Allen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429677410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Diseño arquitectónico

Solving Critical Design Problems demonstrates both how design is increasingly used to solve large, complex, modern-day problems and, as a result, how the role of the designer continues to develop in response. With 13 case studies from various fields, including program and product design, Tania Allen shows how types of design thinking, such as systems thinking, metaphorical thinking, and empathy, can be used together with methods, such as brainstorming, design fiction, and prototyping. This book helps you find ways out of your design problems by giving you other ways to look at your ideas, so that your designs make sense in their setting.

Solving Critical Design Problems encourages a design approach that challenges assumptions and allows designers to take on a more critical and creative role. With over 100 images, this book will appeal to students in design studios, industrial and product design, as well as landscape and urban design.

1	Introduction Defining the drivers of design theory and practice

This book is both a celebration of design and a challenge to think about it differently. We are in a moment where design is center stage. Magazines are challenging us to “think like a designer” and championing design and innovation as the savior of our troubles. From a technological perspective, this is an exciting time to be a designer because we have the ability to speculate, knowing that our speculations will be a reality—not in 100 years, but in ten. Our wildest, craziest inventions are possible—it’s just a matter of time. But there is also immense pressure on design to solve many of the problems that have been created in the last 100 years—everything from better infrastructural strategies to handle our ever-increasing city populations to how to better manage the personal debt that affects individuals and economies. Design is championed for being able to get us out of the mess that we are in environmentally, technically, and economically by developing products and environments that are cleaner, easier to manufacture and affordable for a wider range of users. This is a lot for the field to support, especially if we want to do it conscientiously. It is especially difficult considering design as a field is relatively young. Our history of self-reflection is short and we are still in the midst of defining a comprehensive and succinct set of theories and methods that drive it.

The strength of design thinking is that it forces designers to think expansively and narrowly; broadly and deeply; generatively and selectively; and to operate as both insiders and outsiders. One of the main attributes of any good designer is the ability to understand first-hand what potential users might need, and identify problems within a current situation. Designers operate as insiders by using strategies that invoke empathy. By simultaneously operating as outsiders, designers keep their minds open to new ideas from the world around them, while also identifying patterns of behavior that design can respond to. As a teacher of design thinking myself, I see the potential and the excitement that it has for helping students make connections and prompt insights that would not have emerged without it and to make proposals for those insights that move the idea beyond a philosophy and into a realm that is action and change oriented. The literature on design thinking is vast, from Bryan Lawson’s How Designers Think (1991) and Nigel Cross’s Designerly Ways of Knowing (2007), to Tom Kelley’s The Art of Innovation (2001), Tim Brown’s Change by Design (2009), and more recently Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider’s This Is Service Design Thinking: Basics, Tools, Cases (2012). The books are but a sliver of the mountain of literature that promises design thinking will transform businesses, strategies, and products to be innovative, and highly sought after. Missing from these promises is a larger connection and critical consideration of how, when, and why to innovate. Considerations that, if entertained, might be answered with the decision not to design at all. Rather than ask, “How can we design the next best ballpoint pen?” this book hopes to get designers and students to ask, “Do we need another ballpoint pen? Where is the writing device that I design today going to be in ten years? How does the act of writing improve communication? What are future ways to capture, record, and access information?”

These questions necessitate a look at design that spans disciplinary boundaries and attempts to find commonalities. As the world becomes more integrated, so too does design. We cannot design an apartment building without considering how people will get there and the changes to traffic that might occur as a result. The design of a fitness app must wrangle with the different platforms that people will use to access it. The design of a water bottle cannot ignore what will differentiate its brand from other water bottle brands. Part of the reason this is true is that design is, and must be, of a moment. In other words, design will always be context-specific—responding to the needs and wants of a population, situation, or geography that is current and contemporary. In his 2008 article Towards Relational Design Andrew Blauvelt, curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, argued “I believe we are in the third major phase of modern design history: an era of relationally-based, contextually-specific design.” If this is true (and I believe that it is) then a more integrative and cross-disciplinary look at what is driving all aspects of design is necessary.

Design as a rhetorical activity

The phase of design focused on relationships and context that Blauvelt proposes also hints at another important context for design—that it is a rhetorical device. The way that designers operate and the ultimate goal of design is to improve a given situation. This could be as simple as improving a drinking experience or as complex as helping users be in charge of their own healthcare. But in both of these cases, the behavior of the user changes, because they are able to travel with their beverage, or become experts and agents of their own healthcare agenda. This behavior, in turn, changes the way that they think about their world and their life—in both minuscule and pivotal ways. If designers understand and acknowledge this perspective, how might that affect the way that they approach design research, theory, and practice? That is a key question this book seeks to approach. It suggests a paradigm shift that John Thackara (2005) argues is critical to designing in a complex world and which focuses on a shift away from substitution and towards reduction.

We could easily transition from an acknowledgment of the rhetorical power of design to how this power might save the world. There are a lot of people who claim that if we just design better and differently, we can get ourselves out of all of the messes we are currently facing. I do not argue that design can’t or shouldn’t address current and pressing problems in our world. I also do not argue that designers aren’t in a unique position to see a problem and come up with viable and innovative solutions to those problems. The issue is more that the literature and practice of “design for good” re-focuses energy away from root causes and towards band-aid solutions. In the same way that much of the debate in medicine centers on whether to treat the symptom or the disease, so too I would argue are the potential issues that arise when design is focused in a similar manner. For instance, the design of a straw with a built-in filter that would allow people in Sub-Saharan Africa to drink from local water sources (like a river) that might be otherwise undrinkable, fills an immediate need for people to get clean water. The danger lies when these types of solutions mask or numb us to underlying root issues, such as infrastructural, economic, and developmental inequality.

The concepts introduced in this book showcase a particular theoretical perspective. Primarily, that design should emphasize relationships, systems, and experiences over artifacts, objects, and consumption. But it also acknowledges a diversity of perspectives and counter-perspectives that ask the designer reading it to be critical, and rethink what is presented in a way that is situation-specific. Even though there are many methods within the pages of this book, methods situated within one section are not meant to only be applied to that section. It is meant to provoke critical and creative thinking, but not dictate a single way to approach a design problem. In writing this book, it became clearer to me how much crossover there are between the different theories as there are distinctions among them. In some ways, this book is suggesting a malleable taxonomy. One that sets up a system of classification in which the drivers become organizing principles, but the theories in practice might ultimately be evidence of multiple paradigms and perspectives.

I would argue these commonalities are driven (or should be) by a perspective on design action that puts people and values at the center. These are ethical considerations—for designers and users. Critical consideration for how design might affect (and encourage) an understanding of the world and each other—and by extension how we treat each—should be predominant. A consideration of how design interventions might encourage a new type of perspective or behavior must be considered earlier on in the design process. We can no longer wait and see what happens. We cannot make assumptions that design will always improve a given situation. And we must make a distinction between improvement of a current situation that is equally balanced with a critical consideration of projections for future impact. That is the ultimate aim of this book—to expand the perspective of the designer through theories, methods, and case studies and to show examples from inside and outside of design that are driving the way that designers consider their roles and the scope of design projects. I hope that this book will challenge some of the main assumptions of design and designers—namely, that design must always produce something new.

Design as an integrative activity

This consideration of design practice and focus—how designers understand and respond to the “wicked problems” that are at the core of the design process—encourages a need for more and better theories that looks across disciplinary boundaries to see what is transferable and applicable. But many would agree that theory is commonly viewed as an antagonist to the activity and practice of design—and that it can serve as an obstacle to “getting things done” (Margolin and Buchanan, 1995, x). Written over 20 years ago, Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan (1995) identified this issue as:

One of the anomalies of twentieth-century culture, particularly academic culture . . . [is the] excessive separation between theory and practice, between the words and symbols used to understand important subjects and the concrete actions of individuals and groups who employ personal or formal knowledge to accomplish practical purposes.

(1995, x)

The aim of this book is to identify theoretical perspectives that guide how designers approach practice—not separating theory from practice, but rather exploring and identifying how they are integrated. Design does not, and cannot, operate on philosophy and theory alone. Without the connection between the design concept, the artifact, and the user, design does not exist. So any book on theory must include strategies and methods for applying that theory to a real-world design experience. There are many excellent books on design theory and practice in existence. In many cases, they focus on one theory with many examples of its practice, or on theory in general. What I hope this book will add to the discourse and to the practice is the ability for designers to begin to intrinsically link the theory (what) with tools and methods (how) to their overall practice (why). I also hope this book can serve as a type of toolkit to provoke new ways of defining design problems.

One of the ways that designers can challenge themselves to think about their work differently is to look outside of design to ways that other disciplines research, evaluate, and interpret their work. But much of the evaluation of design has been dictated by those outside of design practice—and in doing so, the focus has leaned to the artifacts that are a result of design practice, rather than the practice itself. In The Idea of Design, Buchanan and Margolin (1996) call for design to be recognized as a liberal art because of its integrative nature. They suggest an important need to broaden the discussion of design evaluation to include that which is focused on the human experience, but also to connect design philosophy and practice (x). This call is in part a response to the recognition of design’s focus on “wicked” problems, and a necessary shift in motivation from what we (as designers) can do, to what we should do. As architectural practice dips into urbanism and visual communication; and as graphic design expands into strategies that involve spaces, places, and environments, the ability for designers to see across disciplines to find patterns and commonalities as well as differences is increasingly critical. By looking at design through its technology, usability, morality, sustainability, and cultural context and impacts, designers focus on how design shapes, and is shaped by, the human experience. But there is a larger motivation at play here, and that is in the building of design as a discipline. In Time for Change: Building a Design Discipline, design educator Sharon Poggenpohl (2009) argues “that design practice and education are changing, particularly in relation to . . . research and collaboration. If design is to develop as a discipline, it must necessarily develop further based on these themes” (1). At the center of this development, Poggenpohl continues, is the transformation of the tacit knowledge that designers traditionally employ, to explicit knowledge that is a core asset to cross-disciplinary communication and collaboration.

This is the shortcoming that makes design appear elusive, special, inarticulate, and even unknowable. As long as designers consider themselves to be first and foremost aesthetic finishers of ideas that are well advanced in the development process, they will be trapped by the tacit and unable to provide a clear explanation.

(5)

Since Poggenpohl’s call, design discourse has been increasingly focused on building this explicit, critical knowledge. Designers are no longer comfortable or willing to be the “aesthetic finishers” that Poggenpohl aptly names. This book argues that we are at a critical moment in time, where the cross-disciplinary nature of design necessitates a common perspective on the main themes and drivers of design thinking and practice.

Challenging design paradigms

In his book, The Sciences of the Artificial, Herbert Simon (1996) defined design as “courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (111). Through this book, I hope to challenge assumptions about those preferred conditions—what drives the paradigms that inform them, and how methodologies might shift the underlying assumptions. A common theme that will emerge is, how can we, as design students, academics, and practitioners, be rigorous in investigating, understanding, and responding to design problems. Acknowledging that the problems we face as designers are complex, “wicked,” messy, and often without any singular solution, how we frame the problem for ourselves, and communicate that framing to our clients and other designers, has a profound effect on how we address them. This book is broken up into four sections that align with what I see as foundational components to design theory and practice: usability, technology, sustainability, and morality. I argue that these drivers, and the needs and contexts associated with them, provide a crucial foundation to examine how designers engage in current and future design practices across disciplines. These drivers also frame four distinct paradigms that designers operate under—from the operational, to the scientific, to the meaningful to the actionable. The sequence of chapters is meant to grow in alignment with these paradigms. Part 1, Design and usability: if a design falls in the forest . . . starts with an understanding of how the concepts and theories of usability contribute to the judgement and “expertise” of the designer. Part 2, Design and technology: not if, but when looks at how technology impacts what it is that designers create as well as how designers push technological boundaries, with specific focus ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Defining the Drivers of Design Theory and Practice
• Part 1. Design and Usability: If a Design Falls in the Forest . . .
• Part 2. Design and Technology: Not If, But When
• Part 3. Design and Sustainability: Killing Messengers
• Part 4. Design and Morality: Do the Right Thing
• References
• Index