Legs worn out from a Sunday afternoon spent pacing the gallery halls, we found reprieve in the cool darkness of the Walker Art Center’s Mediatheque. An aimless scroll through the touchscreen remote controlling the cinema collection landed on a charmingly blunt Q&A with legendary design duo Charles and Ray Eames. In a rather to-the-point manner, the Eames’ offered their take on design foundations and fundamentals, an interview that served as source material for a 1972 Louvre exhibition titled Qu’est-ce que le design? (What is Design?)
As the film played, the Eames’ responses echoed aspects of my still-nascent understanding of design as shaped by The Design Way. In many other ways, though, they exemplified the very positions counter to which Nelson and Stolterman frame their arguments. Though we moved on to other cinema selections after the credits rolled, the Eames video in its short five minutes created an itch of cognitive dissonance that lingered as I sat in the darkened theater. This dissonance helps to clarify and highlight the ways in which The Design Way offers a novel approach.
Point: Problem-Solving
Amic: Ought form to derive from the analysis of function?
Eames: The great risk here is that the analysis may be incomplete.Amic: What are the boundaries of design?
Eames: What are the boundaries of problems?
Counterpoint: Intention
While The Design Way in its chapter on Foundations offers a palette of perspectives from which a designer can choose to approach a systematic analysis, the authors caution against attempts so thorough in their pursuit of being comprehensive that they lead to the dead-end called paralysis.
Further, while the Eames’ found design and problem to be a tightly linked pair, The Design Way frames problem-solving as a root cause of design inertia. Whether analysis paralysis, wicked problem paralysis, value paralysis, or holistic paralysis, each derives from a strategy of problem-solving focused on the gaps between “that-which-is” and “that-which-ought-to-be” (Nelson & Stolterman, 2012, p. 105).
Point: Need
An emphasis on need as a central driving force of design emerged throughout the session:
Amic: What do you feel is the primary condition for the practice of Design and for its propagation?
Eames: A recognition of need.Amic: To whom does Design address itself? To the greatest number? To the specialists or the enlightened amateur? To a privileged social class?
Eames: Design addresses itself to the need.
Counterpoint: Desire
While the perception of need offers an initial imperative for design action, it proves an insufficient, reactive, and often fear-driven catalyst. (Changes made in response to waves of nationalist sentiment sweeping the Western political landscape in recent months offer a useful example here, though one that’s perhaps too on-the-nose.) The Design Way suggests an alternate approach in which design is driven by desiderata, an inclusive combination of aesthetics (what we want), ethics (what should be), and reason (what needs to be) (Nelson & Stolterman, 2012, p. 106). Further, a desire-based change process makes no assumptions that the need or outcome is clearly understood from the outset. Instead, with careful calibration of the designer’s aim, a vision of outcome emerges at the intersection of belief and desire (Nelson & Stolterman, 2012, p. 112).
In the field of learning design, common frameworks like ADDIE and the Dick & Carey ISD model position needs assessment as a key part of the initial analysis phase of the design process. The holistic nuance of the desire-driven Design Way approach, however, renders it perhaps too unwieldy to wrangle into a plug-and-chug model fit for an introductory-level ID textbook. Industry-standard frameworks are indeed useful in scaffolding a certain rigor of approach, but if the fundamentals of design truly require continuous “learning by doing”, isn’t the novice learning designer better served by diving into the ambiguity head-first?
In the apprenticeship experience offered by the Avenue PM intern program, I have been granted a key opportunity to navigate the waters of uncertainty as I practice the fundamentals of design. My goals for this experience are to put in dedicated daily practice in setting my aim, developing my skill for appreciative judgement, sharpening my formative faculty, and “breathing together” with my teammates. The connoisseurship shared by the differently-skilled peers and expert designers working on this project has helped me to see qualities of the design space that would otherwise remain tacit. My responsibility from here is to push steadily onward towards the measures of excellence and quality that Nelson and Stolterman say define accomplishment, which as of now rest in the far horizon.
Sources
Design Q&A Text. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.eamesoffice.com/the-work/design-q-a-text/
Nelson, H. G., & Stolterman, E. (2012). The design way: Intentional change in an unpredictable world. Cambridge, Massachusestts: The MIT Press.