Review

Review

As this EM elective is striving towards its fifth week, approaching quickly the midpoint on the time axis, I thought to share with you some my personal reflections so far, from the perspective of a design educator, and with focus on design as a unique process, and somehow touching the peripheral of design pedagogy.

I will do this by first making some loose references to a book written by a Dutch design scholar and senior researcher in philosophy of technology in Eindhoven University, Kees Dorst, Understanding Design, Bis Publishers, 2003.

In this book Kees describes design as

- Applied Creativity
- Problem Solving
- Learning
- Evolution
- Social Process
- A Game

Let me use these points as platforms to do my review.

Design as applied creativity. A particularly interesting point, since all of you but Yang (who is a professional designer and design educator) are artists. As an artist, you depart from yourself. The goal of your creativity is to express your meaning or yourself. Your creativity honors no confine, nor has it to be applicable to anything.

Design, on the other hand, would only be significant if it is applicable to a clearly identified context, within which there is a defined or at least definable problem. The point of departure for a designer is then the problem, rather than him or herself. Designers’ creativity is therefore applied, augmented, or sometimes compromised (however self-respected we are as a designer).

To determine our context, we did our surveys, one being to critically look into the media phenomenon in public space, from our individual perspectives; and the other Arlanda Airport as a unique public space.

Kees says that design is achieved by a mixture of creativity and analytical reasoning, and generally designers tend to focus more on possible solutions rather than the problem itself.

We did emphasize deepened discussions of the perceived problems, and we reasoned and argued to establish a more common understanding of the framework and the problems within the class, before we started to divert our attention to the generation of possible solutions.

Design as problem solving. Kees says that a tremendously well functioning design process is like playing chess: you pose a problem, search for the best solution by generating all the possible “next moves” and then test them to find out consequences. As long as, Kees adds, that the design goals are explicit, clear and stable, and a set of comparable solutions can be generated.

Now our goals, as I can gather from the past days’ discussions, are*:

• The Traces project: To make passengers aware of their own individual identities, other than their passports, nationalities, or those people are otherwise identified with in an international airport as Arlanda.



• The Media-less Is More project: To give passengers a well-deserved break midst the overdosed media noises.



• The Interaction/gaming project: To enrich passengers’ on-site experience with physically-active games.



• The Hall-way revealing project: To reveal the beauty of architecture by making the architecture itself as part of the media.
  
  *Those goals noted down here may not be accurate but are meant to serve as place-holders. Your task is therefore to comment and reformulate them if considered necessary.

Once set, the goals will then be used to exam the relevance or effectiveness of the design solutions.

Design as learning. Kees’ learning model works something like this, you try out different ways of looking at the problem, experiment various solution directions, and learn from the results. You will keep doing this in cycles, until you reach a satisfactory design solution.

So don’t be afraid of making a bad design solution, because you will learn from it. More so as all our projects are school projects (as opposed to commission projects), although they can be as real as any real project gets. It is meant as an important part of the expected learning outcomes, to develop your skills and methodologies to work with public spaces using embedded media.

Design as evolution. Kees explains what the mythical “creative leap” in a design process is, and how does it happen. Kees points out that a typical design process is not a matter of first fixing the problem and then performing a “creative leap” to a solution. It is more of a matter of evolution. Kees introduces a term of a matching problem-solution pair: design is of developing and evolving both the formulation of a problem and ideas for a solution, while constantly shuttling between the two, in order to find that presumed perfect match of the pair. In other words, design is match-making.

If design is match-making, we can then assume that even if we have a perfect formulation of the problem (so we have a good guy here), and very smart ideas for a solution (and we have a great girl, too), we may not have a guaranteed successful match (they may still not like each other, not at the beginning, or not at all), meaning keep seeking, matching, rejecting, and re-matching.

That is what we are going to do the coming weeks.

Design as a social process. As an experienced designer himself, Kees says that a successful designer needs to be able to understand and communicate with his/her collaborators, as they tend to come from a completely different social background and knowledge field, so while they bring their special expertise into the project, they would come with their own viewpoints, expectations, and ambitions. And my contribution here: they may have so different approaches and ways of working that would render the first meetings into one word: frustrations.

Kees concludes: now that design has become a social process, designers will need to become skilled negotiators.

Haven’t we already been in the process of becoming one, after the discussions and debates we have had during the last weeks? Anyway, now we know that was a part of the game.

Speaking of a game, Kees calls design as a game.

As we now know that design is sort of match-making, trial-and-error, it is like gambling: we challenge the problem, it may pay-off, may not. And more often than not, we would even raise the stakes by adding all kinds of our personal goals to the design brief. Remember we had an assignment of exactly that: to reword the design brief with your own interpretations of what Arlanda, our customer has said?

Kees puts it: design is pure fun, exciting and exhilarating… Designing is highly addictive.

So, to my dear art students: Designing is highly addictive!

To all of you: the game is on! Have fun!

Bob Lee
Monday, February 11, 2008