Herbert Simon said everyone who improves a situation designs
Design is a concept or proposal for an object, process, or system—anything intentionally shaped by a thinking agent. Professionals add labels like fashion or product designer, yet Herbert A. Simon argued in The Sciences of the Artificial that anyone devising actions to change situations into preferred ones is designing.
Historians disagree where the story starts: John Heskett ties modern design to Industrial Revolution mass production; others include pre-industrial artefacts. Western schools appear in the nineteenth century—Norway’s National Academy of Craft and Art Industry in 1818, Britain’s Government School of Design in 1837, Sweden’s Konstfack in 1844, later Rhode Island School of Design. Design and Technology later entered general education, and in the 1970s that spurred talk of distinctly designerly ways of knowing.
Researchers Dorst and Dijkhuis note many process descriptions. The dominant rational model, developed independently by Simon and by the German engineers Gerhard Pahl and Wolfgang Beitz, treats designers as optimising candidates against known constraints and goals through fixed stages: brief, research, specification, problem solving, development, implementation, evaluation and redesign. It underpins the software waterfall model and much engineering literature.
Critics reply that real designers simply do not behave that way, and that goals are usually fuzzy at the start while requirements keep shifting. The rival action-centric view, closer to agile methods, says creativity and emotion generate options and that analysis, making and implementation happen together. In Donald Schön-style reflection-in-action, a designer frames the problem, tries a tentative move, judges it and reframes.
The objects show the range. Jack Lenor Larsen’s studio screen-printed its Aurora furnishing fabric in rayon, cotton and mohair in 1961, while Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s polyethylene Cloud module of 2004 was manufactured by Cappellini. Critical design goes further, building artefacts that comment on a culture’s values. Calling only glossy products design misses Simon’s wider claim that planning a better timetable is the same kind of thinking.
Source: Design
