The Coming of Post-industrial Design

What I read

In this article, the author describes two futures of design, one that is focused on a continuation or change of the methods movement, and the other is focused on a post-industrial shift towards an ecologically friendly, humanistic perspective.

First, the author describes the methods movement. He explains that design methods emerged as a way of creating a science of design—of formalizing how decision making worked in the context of generating new things; he focuses primarily on architecture, using Disneyworld as an example of rational design. With a clearly negative perspective to the park and to design methods (“It captures a Brave New World atmosphere endemic in the design methods movement”), the author discuses how the movement emerged first with de Stijl, next through World War II, and then through present day, in various forms. He indicates that early proponents of the movement, such as Chris Alexander and John Chris Jones, both distanced themselves from the idea that design could be machine-like and logical.

Horst Rittel’s focus on wicked problems as compared to problems approach from a perspective of science appears distinct from methods, but the author argues that it is actually a “second generation” of the same approach. While related to participatory design, the author gestures that the approach is only focused on architecture, and the approach was Rittel’s “escape clause.” He anticipates a third movement of design methods focused on Karl Popper’s ideas of conjectures and refutations, which is similar to what designers do, but the author asks “what happened to the desire to reform designers’ practices?” He then predicts a fourth generation focused on automation “without the meddling interferences of a human designer.”

Next, the author spends the majority of the text proposing a new focus of a post-industrial society and a post-industrial approach to design. This is based on the underlying rationalism of methods grounded in “what we now know to be a rather naïve view of science.” He views the push away from this as driven by technology, and characterized as post-industrialism, and one that questions if technological advancement is really progress. This characterization emphasizes resource conservation, the use of tools instead of machines, quality, and a reorganization of social life into small-scale units. One result of this large shift is the change it will force on designers. It is a “democratic, non-hierarchical, participatory process, open to everyone, and taking into consideration the long-term needs of the environment and society.” The author provides very optimistic examples of how this plays out in reality, and some examples of how it is currently showing up in small amounts: participatory design, argumentative planning (where the people impacted by top-down planning are refusing to accept what is being planned for them), socially-responsible design (where companies choose to build socially responsible products), and eco-design.

The author concludes by explaining that, while it may take upwards of 50 years, this post-industrial society will emerge, and as a result, design methods and approaches will change, too.

What I learned and what I think

It’s always interesting, in any context, to walk through a history to both evaluate how prescient the author was, but also (and more interestingly) to think about the context in which an argument was made, and how that context has shifted. The author wrote this in 1981, in the second issue of Design Studies. He was forty, and about twenty years into his career. It’s just a year before he wrote Designerly Ways of Knowing, which always showed up during my undergraduate experience as antithetical to Dick’s work.

I worked my way through Chris Alexander and John Chris Jones when I was at SCAD, and remember the way I was drawn to methods, not as a science of design, but as a way of formalizing how to learn it. It was sort of weird to see it play out with the IDEO method-card-garbage 15 years ago. People are just enamored with finding techniques to use that they can follow. I still think it’s a really valuable way to learn, but a completely unrealistic way to do design.

Anyway; what I took away from this is really about the way the design science/design discipline conversation was framed in what was probably an important moment in time. Herb Simon would have been 66, and the push around computation in problem solving had been entrenched in AI research at that point, but I don’t think real formal connections between problem solving and design were being made. Much of this seems actually a response to subdivision-like suburbs (architecture, which makes sense, particularly with the references to Alexander). The somewhat utopic vision that the author lays out really is a rejection of industrialism of the time; when I think even about just industrial design styling, there’s nothing that stands out in the late 70s, as if the time was a blanded, homogenous time of selling, pre-memphis but post-disco, and that’s just on aesthetics.

I really do love this stuff, although I wonder if it’s really useful in my creativity/teaching/whatever pursuit here. I did lol at this one:

According to Archer, 'design methodology is alive and well'. This may have come as a surprise to many who had assumed that the subject was now (like so many of the delicate offspring of the 1960s) well and truly dead. Such an assumption was clearly premature, if he is right. However, Archer might be presumed to have a vested interest in trying to keep the subject alive on his hospital bed, since he was one of the originators of the subject and the design methods movement.