Definitions of Design

One of the things I’ve been pondering is that we’re probably operating off of different definitions of design (Paul mentioned this as well). Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and in fact, I think that successful product design (e.g. the learning center) requires that each of these design views achieve their respective goals simultaneously. Also, I think that while there may be certain universal approaches to a design process (e.g. IA Collaborative methodology or the IDEO methodology) that could be applied to a broad variety (any?--probably not) comprehensive design problem, some approaches are more efficient at arriving at a solution than other, depending on the nature of the problem, and whether it favors one view of design more than another.

At the risk of gross oversimplification, my thought is that the three kinds of design: market development and branding (which is I think IA’s main focus), industrial design, and engineering design work primarily on developing different kinds of artifacts, using different media, subject to different kinds of forces or rules:

Marketing (design, a la IA Collaborative):

• artifact: branding strategy, product identification
• media: mostly information technology, in a broad sense
• forces: human cognitive and emotional behavior, psychology

Industrial design:

• artifact: physical form, the shell of a later engineering design
• media: malleable physical stuff
• forces: human sensory perception and satisfaction, ergonomics

Engineering design

• artifact: physical form (that which underpins the high-level version developed by the industrial designer)
• media: physical stuff (required to compose the details of the shell developed by the ID)
• forces: laws of nature (e.g. gravity, conservation of energy, etc)

My sense is that understanding these three kinds of design, and how they relate to each other, is a key to developing an academic program in integrated design. Though we haven’t really brought this to the surface, I think this is what we have been working towards as we try to pull the class together. If we do find a way to integrate and articulate these 3 views of design, I think we’ll have something really powerful.

Does this make sense? Other thoughts?