there is a lot to say, of this we are sure

Changing the Definition of Design

2010-02-05T23:15:19Z

Readers of this site will know that I am perplexed by the term "design thinking." This consternation stems from the lack of a good definition, particularly with regard to what separates a "design thinker" from a plain old good designer. Design culture in North America and Europe has seen a profusion of nomenclature in recent years from interaction, to experience, to service design, all in addition to design thinking (I've observed the same thing happening in Australia and Asia as well, but I can only speak with direct experience of the North American and European contexts).

Is there a new practice of design brewing? If so, what makes it unique and how do we define it? How do we understand who is a design thinker and who is not? And perhaps most importantly for the readership of this blog, if design thinking can be "practiced by anyone" as Tim Brown suggests in Change by Design, what is it that professionals contribute? What unique things do design thinkers do?

My hunch is that the recent usage of the name stems from a professional concern for differentiation and is therefore an attempt to establish a competitive advantage by creating-and being a first mover within-a new market of design services. This has obvious benefit for a group such as Brown's IDEO as they seek to distinguish themselves from the clamor of the world's many design firms. Professional practices use names to create territories and things that they own, but what happens when the conversation expands beyond a single corporate entity and begins to encompass a larger community? As groups around the world try to redefine the practice of design, we risk a profusion of names for what are essentially just slightly different variations of "good design."

To ask it another way, is there any reason that some designers should not be design thinkers?

I'm trying to ferret out whether "design thinking" is a useful term amongst the community of designer-peers or if it's more appropriate, in a non-pejorative way, simply as a PR tool.

The design community has generally not communicated the value of our various practices very well to the public, so it's exciting to have a new way of posing a value proposition that people actually buy into! If the term "design thinking" is a tool for differentiation within the market then it's easier to accept, but now that it's spilling into schools-and particularly business schools-the term is in danger of creating more confusion than value.

The design community seems to be experiencing an identity crisis compounded by its myriad PR failures. The more I dig into this question, I see the energy put into supporting "design thinking" as two matters that are confusingly grouped under one name:

1. A renovation of the definition of what it means to be a "good designer" to include systems and strategies as well as enhanced skills in observation, analysis, and communication.

2. Recognition that the best way to increase the standing of "design" in the eyes of non-designers (read: potential clients) is to educate them through exposure to our process

It seems that the hoped-for outcome is:

A. Designers who understand their work as integral with a variety of contexts: physical, organizational, market, environmental (#1)

B. Non-designers ("design thinkers") value the design process as a contribution to their core business/mission whether this is product based or not. (#2)

C. An increasing number of designers involved in strategic decision making (result of A+B)

As I continue to try to make sense of "design thinking," I took the opportunity of a recent flight to read Tim Brown's new book and conducted a little experiment. I've transcribed ~~every~~ most mentions of "design thinking" and "design thinker" as a way of attempting to find Brown's definition. It's one of the most coherent available at the moment, but it's still fuzzy and I'm still having problems rectifying the implications of the following statements with their relationship to the deprecated terms of "design" and "designing."

Taking lines out of context is a cruel and unusual thing to do to another author's text, but it's done in good sport as a quick and dirty attempt to conjure a definition where one does not otherwise exist. Sorry, Tim!

Design thinking Is...

Design thinking is founded upon "The willing and even enthusiastic acceptance of competing constraints." p.18

"Design thinking is expressed within the context of a project that forces us to articulate a clear goal at the outset." p.21

"Design thinking is the opposite of group thinking, but paradoxically, it takes place in groups." p.28

"Design thinking is embodied thinking-embodied in teams and projects... but embodied in the physical spaces of innovation as well." p.35

"Design thinking is rarely a graceful leap from height to height-it tests our emotional constitution and challenges our collaborative skills." p.65

"Design thinking [is] a continuous movement between divergent and convergent processes, one the one hand, and between analytical and synthetic, on the other." p.70

"Design thinking is neither art nor science nor religion. It is the capacity... for integrative thinking." p.85

"Design thinking... [is] allowing customers to write the last chapter of the story themselves." p.148

"Design thinking is ideally suited to enhance... [a] human-centered, desirability-based approach." p.159

"Design thinking is unlikely to become an exact science but... there is an opportunity to transform it from a black art into a systematically applied management approach." p.176

"Design thinking is being applied at new scales in the move from discrete products and services to complex systems." p.178

"Design thinking is about creating a multipolar experience in which everyone has the opportunity to participate in the conversation." p.192

Design thinking principals are "user-centered research, brainstorming, analogous observation, prototyping." p.224

"Design thinking requires bridging the 'knowing-doing gap.'" p.227

"Design thinking starts with divergence, the deliberate attempt to expand the range of options rather than narrow them." p.229

"Design thinking balances the perspective of users, technology, and business." p.229

"Design thinking is fast-paced, unruly, and disruptive." p.234

"Design thinking has its origins in the training and the professional practice of designers." p.241

Design thinking needs...

"Design thinking needs to move upstream, closer to the executive suites where strategic decisions are made." p.37

"Design thinking... demands divergent, synthesis-based methods." p.160

"Design thinking needs to be turned towards the formulation of a new participatory social contract." p.178

"Design thinking... must find ways to encourage individuals to move towards more sustainable behavior." p.195

Design thinking does...

"Design thinking... [translates] observations into insights and insights into products and services that will improve lives." p.49

"Design thinking extends the perimeter around a problem." p.205

Design thinking "[builds] on one another's good ideas." p.225

"Design thinking can not only contribute to the success of companies but also promote the general welfare of humanity." p.227

Design thinking can...

"Design thinking can be practiced by everyone." p.149

"Design thinking can help us chart a path into the future." p.149

"Design thinking can provide guidance... on a large scale and even at the level of the most challenging problems we face in our society today." p.201

Design thinkers are...

"Design thinkers... cross the 'T.'" p.27

"Design thinkers [have] the ability to spot patterns in the mess of complex inputs, synthesize new ideas from fragmented parts, [and] empathize with people from different contexts." p.86

"Design thinkers can 'build' prototypes in the cafeteria, a boardroom, or a hotel suite." p.106

"Design thinkers... can use... empathy and understanding of people to design experiences that create opportunities for active engagement and participation." p.115

[Design thinkers have] to be comfortable moving along both... axes [of space and time]." p.133

"Design thinkers have been drawn to the greatest challenges" p.203

"Design thinkers have become adept at approaching important social issues from the angle of individual motivations and the behaviors that follow" p.220

"Design thinkers have become activists and are applying their skills to sources of social dysfunction." p.220

"Design thinkers observe how people behave [and] how the context of their experience affects their reaction to products and services." p.229

Design thinkers use a "human centered approach" to "inform new offerings and increase likelihood of their acceptance by connecting them to existing behaviors." p.229

"Design thinkers may be in short supply, but they exist inside every organization." p.234

Design thinkers ask "'Why?' [as] an opportunity to reframe a problem, redefine the constraints, and open the field to a more innovative answer." p.236

"Design thinkers observe the ordinary." p.237

Design thinkers do...

"A design thinker will bring into harmonious balance" desirability, feasibility, and viability. p.18

"Design thinkers... have shifted their thinking from problem to project." p.21

Design thinkers "[help] people to articulate the latent needs they may not even know they have." p.40

"Design thinkers have upped the ante, beginning with the premise that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." p.56

"Design thinkers... continue to 'think with their hands' throughout the life of a project." p.106

"Design thinkers... anticipate the needs of their customers and build on the ideas of their colleagues." p.121

Design thinkers will do...

"Design thinkers must also consider the demand side of the equation." p.199

Design thinkers should be "sitting on... corporate boards, participating in their strategic marketing decisions, and taking part in the early stages of R&D efforts." p.229

"Design thinkers will connect the upstream with the downstream." p.229

New Universe

2010-01-25T20:29:20Z

This evening Y Combinator opened up applications for its Summer 2010 round, marking what will be the fifth anniversary of the program, which has funded 171 startups to date. This round is bringing an important change: the program calendar has been moved up by a month, which means that startups will find out if they've been accepted at nearly the same time that they'll hear back from competing programs like TechStars and DreamIt Ventures.

Interesting. YC is essentially a parallel university with its own faculty, (borrowed) dormitories, and in-house curriculum. It was explicitly set up to target college-aged kids who were more ambitious than their CS courses. The model proved so successful that it attracted copycats and, not only that, but the copycats are also successful. So much so that they are clearly starting to pull talent from the first-mover, and YC doesn't like that.

Now YC is pushing up the announcement date of their incoming class so that this whole segment of youth-oriented VC is now basically right back where it started: YC may have started as a new school, but now it has inadvertently given birth to a whole new university system.

Losing (Our) Edge?

2010-01-23T14:08:52Z

[These groups interested in architectural territory] are creating their own discourse from scratch, outside of academia. Architectural discourse has been supported by schools for so long that it is difficult to remember any other way. The fields of Service and Interaction Design seem to be supported by something more like the feudal corporate patronage structure that architects relied on in the Renaissance. That's very interesting, no? Not the least because despite any purse or apron strings linking them to the corporate world, they still seem to want to talk about ideas, even some of the more out-there quasi-marxist corners of critical theory that academic architects like to frequent. That's kind of fun, right?

Right.

Fred has a thought provoking post over at 765. The comments are also worth your time, I was certainly inspired to respond.

From 2000 To 350: Two Numbers

2010-01-13T07:45:05Z

One thing we did not intend to do in 2009, but did: visit South America.

One thing we intended to do in 2009 but did not: write this post about the bookend numbers of the decade. A small observation.

The first decade of the 21st century started with Y2K and ended with 350 - two expressions of our fear that the collective technological creations of humanity will also be our destruction.

As a lingering concern from the tail end of the 20th century, we entered 02000 affraid that the computer systems running everything from our stoplights to medical devices would call it quits as their internal clocks reset from 99 to 00. People stockpiled food, escaped to remote areas, and there was a collective holding of breath as we stepped into that unknown territory together. By the end of January 1, 2000 fears of massive computer meltdown had already dissapated and "Y2K" was thrown out with the party favors from the night before.

December 12 2009: World leaders gather in Copenhagen to discuss an international treaty that would limit the presence of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere by establishing a cap of 350 parts per million. At the end of the decade we were again confronted with the unexpected consequences of human progress.

Although the possible disaster that was Y2K fizzled quickly, all informed parties agree that 350 is a much more menacing number that we are not likely to escape. I'll remember the decade as a transition from 2000 to 350, a persistent fear of technocollapse concretized into two essential numbers. Hopefully 350 won't become this decade's Y2K, forgotten as soon as it's widely recognized as a problem.

On Things Elastic, Idle, and Vast

2009-12-01T08:26:20Z

I am lucky enough to have an incredible job which puts me up to unusual things. Like visiting five continents for research. In one month. November was pretty unique. I visited London, New York, Santiago, Sydney, Torquay, Melbourne, Singapore, and Beijing in the span of 25 days. Seeing such a wide variety of climates (meteorologically, economically), geographies, and cultures has stretched my brain in new ways. This trip will leave a mark on me.

Idleness

On my first visit to mainland China the most striking thing was the sheer number of people who are employed by idleness. My experience was probably a bit skewed by staying in the middle of the embassy district where literally every building is attended to 24 hours a day by a plank-straight guard, but buildings all over the city are similarly kept company.

The way that idleness is handled seems to me a useful way to understand a culture. In India something like a simple transaction in a store involves two or three more people than it would in the west. Cultures in warm climates generally tolerate a greater degree of loitering - doing nothing but watching the sun pass through the sky. In Europe and North America we stuff our idle people into offices. On paper these people look employed but there's a reason that Windows comes with Solitaire installed. In China everything is guarded.

Vanishing of the Vanishing Point

Arriving around Midnight, I slip into Beijing under the cover of darkness. The cold is a shock after being in the southern hemisphere for two weeks but everywhere it smells lightly, pleasantly of burning things. From the width of the roads alone it's clear that Beijing is a big place, but it's not until the next morning that I wake up early and hop in a cab to visit some sites that the size becomes palpable. That smell of burning reveals itself as a mix of coal and dust and who knows what. Avenues fade to blue; everything beyond 100 meters is a silhouette in the smog.

As a visitor it's pathetically easy for me to put aside the sad reality of the pollution and its long-term effects on the people who live there. For the moment I'm in thrall with the incredible optics of a city that is so vast it yields the potential for, but ultimately denies, infinite vistas with vanishing points in every cardinal direction. These forever-boulevards literally choked by smog are tragically beautiful with something akin to the sad sadism of foie gras. In so many ways, Beijing is the foie gras of cities: ethically complicated but undeniably exquisite.

It's a city that any kid who grew up with video games already knows: the Z-buffer culling of distant objects to reduce render time is exactly what dense smog produces. Successive layers of massive buildings and leafless trees rendered as increasingly pale outlines encapsulate you in a little sphere of existence, your own little microcosm of the endless city, as if seeing the whole thing at once would simply require too much processing power from your human brain. Please upgrade your buffers before you visit the city of the future.

Beijing has vanquished the vanishing point. What's next?

Elasticity

Between the events of my personal life and the myriad places I've visited and people I've met for work during the course of this year, I keep returning to an earnest appreciation for the ultimate elasticity of the human condition.

On every continent, in every income bracket, under diverse conditions, what I'm in awe of these past few months is the ability of humanity to cope, to make due, and to recover. I've watched people close to me suffer life threatening injury, give birth to children, get married, get divorced, freak out, cash out, break things, die. But we keep going.

Three Cultures

2009-11-30T12:34:14Z

Note: What follows is a ramble reflecting the eroding memory and personal views of its author more than an historically accurate recounting of the people and events mentioned.

Last weekend I spent two days in Torquay, Australia amongst designers, educators, and a general cohort of smart people on the invitation of Ken Friedman, Dean of the Design Faculty at Swinburne University of Technology. The theme for the weekend was "design thinking," a term which I have a lot of misgivings about. Nevertheless, the tone and content of the conversation was refreshing. Upon returning from Torquay I twittered:

having spent the wknd at a "design thinking" cnfrnce I have to say that architects have their shit figured out compared to "designers". hrmm

Rightfully, Matt Jones and Chad Carpenter called me out on this comment that is ill-suited to a tweet-length post. Perhaps I can put a little meat on those bones. We were asked to consider three man questions through a series of roundtable discussions (remembered as best I can):

What is the specificity of design in design thinking?

What are current and future successful applications of design thinking?

What are the skills that we need to educate design thinkers?

As soon as the conversation began there was already disagreement about the relevance of "design thinking" as a term and further confusion about whether the focus should be on designers or "design" more broadly.

The group fell into two loose camps: slightly more than half seemed intent on "design thinking" being something that is equally relevant to all people whether they're design practitioners or not. The other camp was more concerned with the ways in which design education, and to a lesser extent practice, needs to change to take advantage of the opportunities now existing as, in the words of MP Ranjan, the scientific era reaches a stage of diminishing returns.

Listening to what was generally an older crowd talk about the need to change design education made me feel very fortunate for two reasons. From the sound of their conversation, they had a much more rigid design education than I did. I heard tales of ruthlessly focused Bauhaus masters who only cared about form and composition with little concern for anything beyond the craft-based skills of a guild master. Fair enough: that's not the sort of education I would wish upon anyone in any discipline.

Personally, I was lucky enough to go to a pretty good design school that excels at being cross-disciplinary in both formal and informal ways. The RISD community is extremely integrated by social fact. Situated in the middle of Providence, RI with relatively cramped facilities, the school yields a remarkably interdisciplinary atmosphere. Soft factors are important too. As one of my first professors put it, "find yourself a girlfriend in the jewelry department and you will always have the best models." While I never did date a goldsmith, I certainly did benefit from sharing courses with people from just about every department in the school - later making occasional use of their shop facilities or sharing beers.

Neither my undergrad or graduate education involved what I would call "a lot" of teamwork, but there were definitely times when it was encouraged or necessary. It came up at Torquay that teamwork, and especially the ability to effectively collaborate across disciplines, is a necessary addition to design curriculums. While I can agree that more teamwork would be useful, it seemed to me that the tone of the conversation was a little behind the on-the-ground reality. Or perhaps my view is disproportionately framed by recent visits to leading design schools such as the RSA. This is also an area where the nature of the design work plays a determining role: the scale of architectural projects tends to include enough work that teams are a necessity more than an option. From what I see coming out of departments like Design Interactions this is also the case in more advanced conversations around product design.

There was a lot of discussion around the place of the designer in larger teams. Does the designer need to continue importing skills from social sciences and other disciplines or should they be more prepared to "know when they don't know and be ready to look for help?" The latter happens to be where my personal opinion lays, and it's something that I again feel privileged to have had some exposure to already through my education as an architect.

In the worst Randian cliché the architect is an ego monger hell bent on manifesting their vision in the world. If we look around with fresh eyes, particularly at younger practitioners, this perspective is increasingly an endangered species. In small and necessary ways, architects cooperate with more trades than ever in the form of an increasingly wide array of consultancies ranging from structural engineering to audio/visual systems. But so too are interests spreading as architects seek collaborations with computer scientists, behavioral experts, philosophers, economists, and others. And in some cases vice versa.

For Matt and Chad, this is what spurred my wine-fueled twitter above. After listening to educators lament how their industrial design students only work at one scale it seems like architecture has a built-in advantage. But again, it depends on the specifics of your education. Even at the best schools it seems that there's still room to improve the collaboration models. Persnickety things like individual evaluation requirements got in the way of many official, graded collaborations at the GSD. That's seems like a poor reason to restrict collaborative projects, or at the very least an unnecessary complication.

In Torquay there were many calls for designers to deal with problems that are more complex as practice for the nature of today's real world challenges. This, too, seems like an area where architectural education has a natural advantage. As a matter of basic fact, architectural problems operate at a scale large enough that they require the coordination and resolution of multiple systems. That the full complement of potential issues contained within a building is so vast provides an essential motivation for architects to develop their work systemically - as a logical system of relationships between components in various levels of definition.

I'm speculating here that what makes design tasks at the urban and architectural scale unique is that they begin to incorporate systems with widely divergent, even opposed, systems of order. To use a mundane example, if followed to their own logical conclusion the structural, the HVAC, cultural, and the formal systems of a building would all yield uncooperative exquisite beauties. Architecture is in the business of making careful monsters through the preferencing of one system over another at critical junctures such that these independent but necessary components may be integrated into a single material whole. (Dear interaction designers: we're still a long way from changing the stylesheet on a building, let alone outputting it as a multiple different flavors of XML that you can live in.)

Because it's virtually impossible to scrutinize every minute aspect of a building proposal, the architectural critique is an analytical act set up to illuminate the high level structures that orchestrate local decision making. Discussions about how a stair is disposed or why an elevation has taken on a certain characteristic are ways to test the rigor of the system that a student has established for themselves. Material evidence is always linked to the analytical frame that motivated it - that made it be just so - and thus the project is nothing without an analytical feedback loop.

It also seems important to note that at its best the overarching tone of (most) architectural conversations is one of plausibility rather than possibility. Perhaps I'm being a tad conservative here, but the fact that architectural projects have a lurking liability to the inescapable real world of structures, construction, and inhabitation is a useful starting point for holding the work to a high level of rigor. Admittedly, this is a requirement that many architectural educators choose to leave out of the equation.

But this gets at an important question about the nature of education. How can we effectively approach levels of "real world" rigor? In Torquay I heard a number of people express a desire to "educate students through real world projects" and while this is a noble goal it's a difficult one to scale up. There aren't that many "real world projects" out there for students to take on. So the question is how we hold ourselves to high levels of rigor despite still operating in a realm of exploration?

Asked another way, what makes an architectural proposal more meaningful/valuable/useful than a sketch from a Hollywood set designer? As someone who is highly invested in designing projects proceeding from a strong base of research, it to me seems like there's a difference between speculation and proposition. If you're going to propose, you have to be ready for someone to say yes. A rigorous process is about preparing for that eventual yes. By no means is this something that architectural education has all figured out, but from the conversation in Torquay it seems like a disproportionate number of industrial and graphic designers are still struggling to move beyond questions of style and form. I was surprised by this.

Everything I've written above is probably naive to the point of being chauvinistic (way to play to the Randian stereotype, eh?) but I'm genuinely interested in hearing from people who have a differing opinion. What other sorts of design problems have the essential complexity of design at an architectural or urban scale? It strikes me that the recent and developing interest in service design is not only a recognition of the importance of the intangible (which I'll get to below) but also a desire to operate on a larger scale out of recognition that engagement with more than one system at a time is fundamentally more challenging and more natural. It seems like we could talk about the disciplines of design as having scales which they center on, but that no practice should ever be locked away in a single scale. Cue Saarinen. The same should be said for the socio-econ-cultural-environmental context. Designers (should) trade in things in the Latouring sense, rather than objects. Our projects fundamentally exist within a spectrum of scales and contexts. If there was one crystalized message from Torquay it's that all design professions need to be more agile in working between these myriad scale & context dispositions.

Thinking, Doing, and Professional Practice

The reason I went to Torquay uneasy about "design thinking" is because it shortsightedly favors half of design. Design is not the most sophisticated way of thinking. Nor, for that matter, is design a more sophisticated way of making than, say, fine art. Only at the intersection of thinking and making does design become a meaningful act. What I've been puzzling through over the past few months is why the thinking part has been getting all the attention these days. Is it simply a buzzword that has a lot of traction? If so, why?

When I listen to the loudest voices in the "design thinking" space, they're mostly commercial. Frankly, this scares me. Design firms have traditionally been involved in projects towards the end of the development cycle. Product designers come in after the product is defined; architects after the assumptions about spatial needs mostly made. When "transformation" and "innovation" consulting became popularized practice among design offices the hourly rates went up. To be overly simplistic and just a little brutal, design practice has been incentivized by the market to favor the "thinking" end of its service spectrum. When you run a for-profit company, particularly one with the typically low margins of a design firm, you have little choice but to gravitate towards the those services which yield more profit. High-level consulting is a win-win since it's generally at a higher hourly rate and has lower overhead costs. In other words, "design thinking" makes more money than "design doing" and thus it's no surprise that the conversation has been leaning heavily in that direction when the loudest voices are speaking from within corporations, however altruistic and collegiate they may be.

On the contrary, the quick wins of some big ticket consulting sessions sell our discipline short by pretending that design is some magical elixir that can be poured into a situation and zammo everything is fixed up. Like accounting, medicine, and just about every other profession, design is a practice which is persistently useful at regular intervals. If anything, during this transitional period where business and government are slowly coming to terms with the potential yield of having design as an integral part of the conversation it behooves us to collectively seek longer engagements, not shorter. That means transformative conversations in the board room as well as being embedded within client organizations to act as stewards during the implementation. If "design thinking" becomes the mainstream discourse of the broader community, design is in danger of becoming the new moniker for management consulting thanks to the domination of business schools in this conversation. Yes, design processes can be very useful for a variety of communities, but we need to do a better job of collectively valuing our own expertise.

Over dinner a few nights ago I asked the VP of a major multinational how he made the decision to hire the Idea Factory, a design firm based in Singapore, to help him sort out some of his business challenges. He was frank: to his eyes as a client, the Idea Factory looked like a management consultant. If the empty slot left in the wake of management consultancy is a first foothold for design firms to enter new, more profitable engagements that's great news. However, we should collectively be careful that these board room opportunities do not becoming defining. In other words, I would hope that the trend is towards design firms being opportunistic rather than capitulating. Design practices should be flexible (and always truthful) in pitching their services so that they can capture these opportunities, but not abandon their core methods, competencies, and attitudes in the process. Personally I don't know any designers who are satisfied with just thinking and talking - it's a culture of doing, of making, of sticking around till the job is done.

I should be very clear that I'm an entrepreneur at heart and have absolutely no problem with people profiting from their work. And while I generally like lopsided things, I really don't like lopsided conversations. This is why the weekend at Torquay seems important to me: the academy and other neutral actors need to speak with a louder voice in the conversation about the future of design so that it maintains a useful balance of consultation and implementation.

As we saw at Torquay, there is a lot that propositional (as opposed to analytical) thinking can contribute to the endeavors of business and government. To paraphrase Stuart Candy, society needs to be better at imagining possible futures - and a dash of design is instrumental in developing this capacity. This is largely the promise of "design thinking." Designers also tend to be pretty skilled at holding complex and contradictory inputs in play while searching for ways to make sense of the jumble without resorting to oversimplification. Developing a synthetic understanding of the problem is one of design's value propositions, but the other half of the contribution is a persistent care for realization.

Design has an in-built concern for making. This manifests itself as a cycle of reality checks that reign in "thinking" within achievable brackets as well as sustained attention throughout the process of implementation (or fabrication or construction) which always requires tweaks and adjustments of course as the contingencies of the material world come to bear upon the exuberance of ideation.

Through the practice of producing Things, designers acquire an expertise in the framing of problems, an agility required for executing on ideas, and a particular understanding of material and spatial consequences within manifold contexts. This is the fundamental differentiator of design as a discipline and it's the foundation of the expert that we call a designer.

Ken Friedman closed the conference with a proposition that CP Snow's Two Cultures of knowing, science and the humanities, needs to be rewritten to be expanded to include design as a third. In my own monkey brain this works out to something along the lines of science = search for fact, humanities = search for truth, and design = search for opportunity. While my noggin is still churning on that one, it does seem like a valuable framework insofar as it establishes the so-called "design thinking" not as a proprietary skill of the designer but a general cognitive mode which all humans exhibit to some degree or another. As my colleague Marco Steinberg eloquently put it the other day, anyone can be musical but that doesn't make them a musician.

I Saved Latin

2009-10-30T21:47:19Z

I've been dealing with email these past few days, tidying up shop and whatnot. Found this, which was in response to a post on my old website.

From:    adonis
Subject:    Architects
Date:    July 12, 2004 8:33:22 PM GMT+03:00
To:    Bryan Boyer

How many buildings did Le Corbusier build? Almost nothing. Have your ever hear of Frank Lloyd Wright?

On Ignorance

2009-10-29T22:54:41Z

Sloterdijk on horse lovers and inter-ignorant systems:

The concept of "society," [suggests] a coherence that could only be achieved by violent-asserting conformism. The conglomerate of humans that has, since the 18th century, called itself "society" is precisely not based on the atomic dots that we tend to call individuals. Instead, it is a patchwork of milieus that are structured as subcultures. Just think of the world of horse lovers--a huge subculture in which you could lose yourself for the duration of your life but which is as good as invisible if you are not a member of it. There are hundreds if not thousands of milieus in the current social terrain that all have the tendency from their own viewpoint to form the center of the world and yet are as good as nonexistent for the others. I term them "inter-ignorant systems." And, among other things, they exist by virtue of a blindness rule. They may not know of one another, since otherwise their members would be robbed of the enjoyment of being specialized members of a select few. In terms of their profession, there are only two or three types of humans who can afford poly-valence in dealing with milieus. The first are the architects, who (at least virtually) build containers for all; the second are the novelists, who insert persons from all walks of life into their novels; finally come the priests, who speak at the burials of all possible classes of the dead. But that is probably the entire list. Oops, I forgot the new sociologists à la Latour.

Scharmen on the architect as anti-ignorant:

You can call yourself an 'X Architect' (where 'X' is information, product, solutions, flavor, etc.) if you can answer yes to the following questions:

Are you self critical?

Do you have a coherent set of ideas that parallels production and allows you to talk about why you make the choices you make?

Are you able to position those ideas relative to the ideas of other peers and define a space for conversation or debate?

Is the task large enough that it requires a division of labor, a split between concept and execution, and the continuous maintenance of evolving consensus between multiple stakeholders?

[...]

Shallow Begets Deep

2009-08-26T15:01:54Z

We at archinect received this email in response to the Michael Jackson Monument Design Competition that we're hosting at the moment. As a competition that was intended to challenge the ability of architecture to respond to the overwhelming intricacy of contemporary identity, I think this email may be the best (if unintended) entry yet. Architects: what are you if not religious?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: XXXX XXXXXXXX
Date: Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 4:54 PM
Subject: Is the Michael Jackson Competition legal?
To: archinect

Dear Archinect:

It is my opinion that your "Design Competition" is illegal. The fact that this type of contest is commonplace does not alter the laws that are in place.

I do not intend to enter this contest, nor do I expect you to agree with me or to change anything. Nor is this email a threat of legal action by me.

But the simple fact is that ARCHITECTS ARE NOT ARTISTS under California law. Fine artists engaged in expressive activities - such as painters, dancers, musicians and sculptors - are not regulated by statute. Architects ARE regulated under the Business & Professions Code, the California Civil Code, and others. Basically, we are building engineers.

A filmmaker may decide that she needs a disabled, 65-year old, African-American, lesbian Hindu and offer $500 to anyone who fits the bill, but an architect may not make similar distinctions in the course of professional activities.

Architectural style, however, is religious expression. It appears that your contest involves the making of a distinction based on an expression of religious belief. You are offering money in exchange, and this is being done by people who claim to be architects or are otherwise offering professional opinions.

Just something you might want to think about?

Thinking!

In Search of Magnificent Things

2009-08-13T05:32:42Z

Light bouncing off those trillion tiny molecules of water in the body of a fog: this is reading San Francisco in the original. Every place has its own way of expressing volume to its visitors, of showing us how to think about the act of containing and being contained. London has its parks, New York has its grid, and San Francisco has its weather. On my last of four nights in the city I'm glad to have had one that was not clear. Empty skies are the enemy of anyone who hopes to visit San Francisco; without fog it's just scenography.

Tall buildings caught in the volumetric light of a San Francisco night have me pondering whether it is the land that gives foundation to the towers, or the towers themselves that began with penthouses and shaped the topography by growing downward. Pushing and cracking the earth of the bay into hills and valleys in an act of hyper literal settling.

Twelve hours later, along the hollow center of an anonymous corporate campus: steady winds render the surface of an artificial lake into a conveyor belt moving fast and consistent against the shore. Water ends cleanly in land and perpetually keeps doing so with no margin or edge. The illusion is pulled off through a careful balance of sight lines, retaining walls, and a natural-looking distribution of "shore material" that erase any break of the waves.

Although efforts to lump San Francisco into some larger Bay Area are overzealous, these vignettes bracket my time in Northern California well: a pure beauty, a beautiful artifice, a careful contest.

Unexpected, but we seem to be getting back to the old sort of writing that used to be on this site.

Breakfast of Champions

2009-07-08T16:10:04Z

Breakfast of Champions, originally uploaded by bryanboyer.

Since I haven't had the presence of mind to post anything that would fall into the typical pail, perhaps the world may find this recipe useful. It may be one of the biggest accomplishments of my adulthood thus far (and all I did was rip it off from the Roebling Tea Toom in Brooklyn).

Be warned, this is so good your face may explode:

1. Preheat oven to 350ish
2. Make yourself some french toast batter
3. Soak some bread in the batter till it's nice and soggy
4. Stuff one the bread, slice by slice, into the spots on a muffin pan
5. Top with a little pat of butter
6. Bake will delicious
7. Make some sauce with pears and bourbon
8. Tell yourself how awesome you are

We're Moving!

2009-06-28T20:03:34Z

we're moving!, originally uploaded by yusunkwon.

Much preferred this year's art biennale over last year's architecture showing. Not to be a broken record or anything, but seeing these two shows back-to-back demonstrated to me the lack of understanding that most architects seem to have of format.

The architects tended towards pavilions stuffed with hundreds of tiny things each invested with thousands of hours of work combined into a display of overwhelming masochism. All that effort for a throng that will never stop to investigate each piece with the level of attention it was made to capture. It's just sad, really. Why treat the Biennale like a book or a symposium? Perhaps the crowning example of this were the video interviews interspersed throughout the Betsky-curated Arsenale. Does anyone really want to wade through a hall of spectacle to stop and listen to Thom Mayne talk about his theory of architecture? I am genuinely interested in what Mayne has to say, but not there.

For me, the best parts of last year's architecture showing were those that treated the space as an installation like the Dutch and Japanese pavilions and the spaces in the Italian pavilion designed by Herzog & de Meuron, Jurgen Mayer, and Ball Nouges to name a few. These were simple, on the verge of one-liners, and designed -- formatted -- explicitly for the experience of the Biennale both in terms of site and time line. More like this next year, please.

Island Bathroom

2009-04-05T15:01:16Z

Just a quick note that I've updated my portfolio with a new project: a 200 square foot master bathroom renovation for a house that sits smack in the middle of 120 acres of Walnut trees.

It was particularly fun to work with the unusual variety of local trades one finds in a rural area to complete this project. A shop that usually makes parts for tractors and bass fishing boats bent the sheet metal base for the island, all the pulls on drawers and doors were fabricated by a saddle maker, and somehow I managed to find a cabinetmaker who was willing to try his hand at milling a solid wood sink.

See the whole project at bryanboyer.com.

Moving Two Ways

2009-03-21T16:49:40Z

When I left California two weeks ago life seemed like an abstraction, a collection of letters and numbers splayed across the page with little hint of their kinetic potential. Having arrived to Helsinki, acquired a Finnish social security number, found an apartment and stuffed some furniture in it, and then took off on the Helsinki Design Lab 2010 (sort of) Grand Tour, I am here to report that my brain is currently oscillating through perpendicular planes of excitement and exhaustion.

Last week I departed Helsinki to meet up with my colleague Marco Steinberg in balmy Singapore. Marco runs the Strategic Design Unit at Sitra, which I am part of, and has been traveling westward around this little planet since the 10th of March. As I write this Marco and our colleague Pia are making their way back to the shores of Finland, but I am continuing the tour to Seoul, Honolulu, and Los Angeles over the next two weeks.

If you plan to attend Postopolis LA you'll be able to see me present a more complete picture of what we're up to on April 3rd, but for those that will not make it to California you may enjoy the blog we've been keeping on this Tour. If you're in Honolulu, I'll be hosting a lunchtime salon at the University of Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies on April 1st, thanks to a kind invite from Stuart Candy.

You're Going To Get Sick Of Me Talking About This...

...But let me try to lay out a brief vision for Helsinki Design Lab 2010, the 3rd in a series of events that started in 1968 on the island of Suomenlinna. Our goal for 2010 is to put the emphasis on doing. There are plenty of great design conferences that offer their participants an opportunity to meet great people, see good work, and talk about powerpoint slides. We're interested in something different: we want to give our guests the opportunity to work together on real problems.

This will be a small event where designers sit at the same table as experts from the business, academic, and policy communities in a collaborative team. Our guests will meet with stakeholders within Finland who face significant challenges in their own domain (health care, education, industry, etc). The idea of HDL is then to charrette on specific, bracketed problems in search of two outcomes: a road map for their strategic rethinking and the identification of discrete opportunities that may be turned in to pilot projects. We believe strongly in using specific, tangible problems as a way to unlock the complexity that besots the massive, tangled issues which society faces today. For instance, everyone knows that health care needs help (even in a place like Finland!), but what exactly is the problem? What is the terrain of the health care? HDL 2010 will use Sitra's unique position as a government agency to offer a framework and resources to help clarify these questions by applying the skills and mindset of the designer to strategic issues.

We're interested in changing the world but realize that it's going to take a while. If HDL 2010 succeeds it will be because the event proves the value of having designers involved with decisions at the highest levels of business and national policy. The problems we choose to tackle will be used as case studies that affirm a process which may be replicated in other contexts, thus making the proceedings of HDL 2010 relevant beyond the confines of Finland. After all, no single country owns climate change just as no single corporation can fix health care: these issues require a framework that is agnostic to borders of all kinds.

What's up, Bangalore? (And ARN, LHR, BOS, SFO, NRT, SIN, HKG, ICN, HNL, LAX...)

This is the basic question we've been asking of each stop on the tour. We set out from Helsinki to check in with people around the planet who have a similar mindset about the potential of design to create meaningful impact beyond the shaping of objects. HDL 2010 will be a prototyping lab but we're humble enough to realize that our efforts will be small compared to the number and diversity of problems out there in the world. This is why it's important for us to escape the confines of Finland, see what's happening everywhere else, and learn what keeps the rest of the world moving.

Are you redesigning your world? If so, we gotta talk.

Let's Not Abandon Hardware

2009-03-03T06:09:52Z

I couldn't agree more with Kazys argument that the last thing we need is fiction about architects and architecture. Not to mention the fact that this is already going well enough without us. For example, The International, a movie which takes full advantage of famous architectural settings and even transposes Hadid's building in Phaeno to the shores of Italy. And while I admire Geoff's writing at BLDGBLOG, and enjoy reading it on a regular basis, let's not confuse this with the act of designing a building.

I know that this will probably be read as a fairly reactionary position at this time (not to mention hypocritical from someone who is not practicing as an architect at the moment), but it's lazy to let ourselves off the hook for producing buildings. Yes, let's expand the architect, but at the end of the day we still build buildings and it's depressing to entertain the notion that we would simply give up on this endeavor because we've become collectively bored by recent architectural output.

Sure, let's have great writing inspired by and inspiring these buildings, but words on a screen (or paper!) do not a building make. If there's an architectural fiction, it must be a way of thinking about and designing architecture and that definition of architecture better include at least a few things that could nominally be construed as buildings.¹

"Performance," that ugly word, has dominated architectural discussions for too long -- and to what end? If architects are serious about performance we need to do much better about actually measuing the results of such works. Where are the post occupancy studies? Where are the charts and graphs of energy savings that wooed the client into signing the check, now refactored to compare expected and actual savings? As a profession we have largely failed to follow through on claims of performance, so in effect we've already arrived at an architecture of lies. That's a bitter pill to swallow. At least fiction is self conscious of its fabrications, flaunting them as an advantage rather than hiding behind speculative chart junk.

For posterity, I'm re-posting my comment from Kazys' site here:

might it be possible for architecture to shape our experiences in such ways as to approximate the effects of films or fiction? Or better yet, video games?

this sounds a bit like a theme restaurant to me. what is TGIFriday's but a space carefully crafted to give its visitors an excuse to engage an alternate subjectivity: the post work flair-wearing drunkard?

it comes off sounding sarcastic, but I'm serious. (it's also interesting to note that those sports bar type restaurants were amongst the first to start issuing guests pager/coasters while they wait for a table, a brutal and peculiar form of locative media.)

at any rate, the point is that novels, films, video games, and theme restaurants invoke immersive environments by issuing rich descriptions *and* story line. "saving energy" is a boring story (green arch). so are "this is a really crazy space" (Liebeskind) and "Oh, shiny curvy" (DS+R) etc, etc. The story line of contemporary architecture is like jumble spam: poetry without reason. unfortunately, spam filters are not so easy to develop for a world without absolutes. If there's something that excites me about "fiction" (I think of them as fables), it's that we may feel comfortable making judgments again. we might actually be able to discuss whether a project was a good idea or if it actually does anything rather than going on and on about the techniques used to produce it. if I had a nickel for every time I heard the word voronoi...

I appreciate the interest in architects making things besides buildings, but it's also the easy way out. perhaps at the moment these other projects are more appealing, but that does not alleviate the burden to create buildings that contribute meaningfully to our world (in whatever definition you want to use for meaningful). although you may have a point about newspapers being in the deadpool, it will be a while before we evolve beyond the idea of constructed shelters that humans dwell in.

(...and this is coming from someone who still writes software on a regular basis)

Read Kazys' full post and the rest of the comments here.

1. My insistence that an architecture of fiction must result in more than just words is one of the reasons that I was thrilled to get a glimpse of the BLDGBLOG manuscript and see Geoff's fictions telegraphing through the medium of drawing. Good stuff.