The Politics of the Artificial, Chapter Twelve

What I read

In this chapter, Margolin juxtaposes two views of design: one that casts design as a science, where a focus is placed on rational systems thinking and problem solving, and that casts design as a discipline of indeterminate subject matter, different than a science, yet still rigorous.

Margolin starts by discussing Herb Simon's attempt to formalize Design as its own discipline. Simon views design as a science; he “seeks to legitimize design as a science by reducing the role of intuitive judgement in the design process as much as possible.” He indicates that legitimacy is when design is transferable and verifiable. Margolin notes that one of Simon’s goals was to replicate design activities by a computer. This is viewed by Margolin as an operational perspective, that focuses on method instead of outcome. Margolin indicates that this has not been challenged, and that “Simon’s essay, with its deceptively catholic definition of design activity (‘Everyone designs who devises courses of actions aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.’)” aimed design as a research activity instead of a theory of practice.

Margolin describes that disputing this is now practically important because academic institutions are developing doctoral programs, and need a basis upon which to ground them. He argues that “history, theory and criticism should play a central role within the diverse field of design research,” and theory should not match Simon’s engineering-focused definition of design around utility, statistical decisions, hierarchic systems, and logic.

This is compared to Herbert Marcuse, a philosopher who introduced the idea of “technological rationality,” which is a “pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior” that is defined only by rationality. Margolin quotes Richard Buchanan as defining design subject matter as a creation that occurs during the design process (and is indeterminant), which implies that it is not rationally pre-determined or discoverable and should always consider a cultural context. Marcuse proposes that “dialectical logic” should always consider the history in which it exists. Margolin references designer William Morris’s attempt to design outside of the context of industrialization, which Margolin notes “neither succeeded in changing the industrial system nor in institutionalizing an enduring alternative.”

Margolin concludes by describing that studying history is the way for designers to “acknowledge the contingency of social systems,” and that it provides a way to legitimize design as dynamically situated.

What I learned and what I think

I’m fairly certain we studied a similar essay in school in about 1998 or 1999, but I don’t remember the references to Marcuse. I feel like Margolin may have picked him as the juxtaposition simply because of his first name (the chapter is called “The two Herberts”) and I don’t know if it was the best way to contrast Simon. He starts the text with reference to Nigel Cross, and continuing that seems like it may have made the point just as well, and with more disciplinary depth. But that’s fine, the point still comes across: design isn’t a science, shouldn’t be treated like one, has non-fixed subject matter, and exists in a historical context that needs to be considered.

I’m fully in agreement with all of this, and increasingly so when thinking about Simon’s view of design as a rational activity. I love the way Margolin references the “catholic definition” that gives room for everyone to be a designer; the “everyone is a designer” phrase has always annoyed me, and it showed up hard in the design thinking garbage. But it’s showing up again with the “I’m a UX designer because I move shit around in Figma” people, the “Figma Drop and Droppers” (I got that from Lisa, and it’s great.) It sort of feels like we’ve all lost any bearing of design as a real discipline, like it’s gotten away from us in every way: teaching methods, using the IDEO “process”, equating Figma to design, the rise of AI templating, the lack of rigorous focus on history… it’s like the core disappeared, or maybe was never really there for most people to begin with.

I think maybe it’s that: all of this stuff was never made accessible to practitioners, and so they largely ignored it. I doubt I could find a single designer in a random selection of 100 that ever heard of any of the cast of characters here – Cross, Buchanan, Margolin, Simon – because their work is so abstract. Even the primary reason Margolin gives for a need to organize design into a real discipline focuses on the rise of doctoral programs, not on the rise of practicing designers, and when he wrote this, the dot-com fiasco was exploding.

I think it kills the academics to need to “water down” these theories so they are relevant or understandable or useful to practitioners, but if they don’t do it, the theories are always just going to hang around in a small group of people. UX Research as a thing is a small little toe-dip into this, because it sort-of-kind-of recognizes the embodied nature of design, but even that has gotten “science-tized” with telemetry and quant-based A/B testing, and of course it has because these ideas never got out of the ivory tower. I would also hate somehow making this into a Top Ten List that’s on LinkedIn slides, but it may be where we are as a world/discipline/whatever.

And maybe that’s actually fine if these ideas never become real, because as he notes, Morris and the rest of the industrial design craft gang hung on to a luddite view and it never went anywhere. The machine of technology isn’t slowing down.

I’m also not ready to discount Herb Simon’s work entirely (or really even in majority) because I do think both applied and theoretical design is in part problem solving, and there are parts of working through a design problem that are rational and also bounded-rational. Design isn’t a science and doing rational things doesn’t make it one, but recognizing that things designers do often do fall into the topics Simon was proposing doesn’t mean giving up on the rest of the argument. I’ve been sort of putting off the Sciences of the Artificial, because I remember it being such a grind, but I should probably read it again, or at least some Simon from the source.