Month: January 2023

Three Ways of Justifying Design Features

Yesterday, in a discussion with a student on how to structure their design report, I found myself constructing a little typology of three types of justification for design decisions, each with their own rhetorical structure and form of presentation.

First, a particular feature of a design can be selected from alternatives developed in parallel. We do this at the overall level with concepts, usually three of them. These alternatives do not follow from the other, but are developed independent of each other, they are explorations of different approaches, and each represent a different set of trade-offs. Sometimes, these are developed in a sequence, one after the other but they are sufficiently independent of each other that they could have been developed in parallel, as three alternative answers to the same design problem, and so that each option can be evaluated using the same set of criteria. You can also do this at the level of details. Alternative ways to construct the frame, for instance, or different options for a hub assembly. In a report, you’d present these options side-by-side, with an argument for why one of them is the better choice.

Second, design features or geometries can be the endpoint of a single-track, iterative exploration or evolution. In this case you also have a number of alternatives that were considered, but they are not equivalent, and could not have been developed independently, in parallel. Instead, they form a sequence, where an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of each iteration forms the argument for the next one. The criteria used to get from one step to the next might differ from the considerations that led to the step after that. In a report, you can present the main stages of such an evolution, arranged chronologically, together with an explanation of the dimensions, features, or phenomena that turned out to be the most relevent, and how they shaped (and justify) the final form and properties of the part or construction.

Third, design features can also be the outcome of calculations that determine their correct or optimal value. Such design decisions may also have gone through iterations, or have been considered next to alternatives, but that history is no longer relevant for arguing the final outcome. Such decisions (a gear ratio, the length of a lever, the thickness of a beam) are best and most clearly justified by presenting a mathematical model, or formula, incorporation particular assumptions, constraints, and safety margins, leading to a single correct or optimal value.

Deschooling Society

I’m reading Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society. Illich argues against the institution of compulsory schooling. Quite persuasively.

Schooling teaches that learning is the result of instruction. And thus, Illich argues, the mere existence of schools creates an ever increasing demand for schools. Society and students come to believe that (important) learning only happens through professional instruction. Even after the age at which attending school is no longer legally obligatory, it continues to be what you need to do if you have a desire to learn. The process of education (according to a curriculum set by others) becomes the important thing, not what a person actually learns.

The “convivial” alternative is “an educational network or web for the autonomous assembly of resources under the personal control of each learner”. It should be made illegal for employers to ask about someone’s educational history. People should be judged only on their knowledge and ability, not on how that was acquired. The process of completing an educational programme does not actually guarantee that a student has learned what they were supposed to learn, precisely because the process is compulsory, predefined, and imposed from without.

The idea of students seeking out their own education is an attractive one. And not new, of course. This is how the schools of ancient Greece worked, how students came to sages like Confucius, or the master-apprentice model. I also agree with Illich that it is an interesting question how modern technological tools and cognitive science could support a contemporary version of that model.

In fact, this is a little bit how certain YouTube channels, newsletters, and other online communities work. They gather a community of people interested to learn about a topic, and can engage in activities that look a lot like coursework, but in a free and voluntary way. That model is hampered by its commercial underpinning, although funding through Patreon and other subscriptions is highly similar to the direct payment of professors by students in early European universities.

What Illich (and those educational YouTube communities) miss, however, is the fact that students do often need to do stuff of which they can only see the value after they’ve done it a few times. In my own field – design education – it really takes (being forced through) a few projects before you can effectively start to reflect on the process and the required skills to build expertise. It may be difficult to learn anything meaningful when you’re only there because you have to be, but that does not invalidated the concept of a predesigned course and teacher-directed instruction (?).

I find this idea of deschooling and putting learning under “the personal control of the learner” interesting. But education also sometimes requires committing to a programme or submitting to instruction for an extended period – voluntarily entering into a series of obligations. It is a good question, however, how long you can productively sustain such a suspension of disinterest – and when you can expect it from aspiring students in the first place.

Teaching as gift-giving

It’s easy – and common, I think – to think of education as the teacher giving a gift to their students. You have something valuable – knowledge, or a skill – and you give (something of) that to your students. Or you try to, in any case. You give back. Or you hand on what you yourself received when you were a student, or a novice.

This looks like a very positive view of education. And I don’t know whether I think that there is always something wrong with it. But it is not how I want to view and do education.

In Freire’s terms, education as gift-giving is humanitarian, not humanist. In terms of Sadie’s grandmother (in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin), it’s charity, not friendship.

Even though the image of giving a gift is positive and full of good intentions, it is hierarchical. Authoritarian, even. It’s a variation on the ‘banking’ model of education.

Is education an act of friendship? Of love? Perhaps, in a general fellow-feeling-with-other-humans kind of way. We could say it’s an act of fellowship. Or solidarity? In any case, education should be a collaboration, a dialogue, an encounter. For this, it needs to not be hierarchical. Or as non-hierarchical as you can manage.

How do you teach other things than the climate crisis in a time of climate crisis?

In April, I’ll teach a new round of the course ‘Designing Medical Technology’, an introductory design course for students in the BSc programme ‘Clinical Technology’. I’ve been making an effort in past years to collect assignments focused on improving healthcare in the Global South and to emphasize the downsides of high-tech high-energy healthcare systems.

I still feel conflicted about the course as it is. The goal is to teach basic design skills and have students experience a design process from problem definition through exploration and development to validation. But should you even teach other things than the climate crisis, in a time of climate crisis? If so, how?

One way to say ‘Yes’ to that is when you teach a skill that is valuable or necessary even to deal with the crises we’re in. And designing seems to qualify for that.

OK, so if we accept that it’s perfectly sensible to still teach design in the current situation, how should we teach that now? Because it’s certainly not a given that students are going to use their design abilities to deal with the climate and social justice crises. In fact, I feel there is quite a big risk that the opposite will happen if they exercise those skills within the current extactive and destructive system.

Design problems that lend themselves to introductory courses often call for a new or improved product. When you focus on functionality, reliability, or usablitity, the results (if designed by first-time novice designers) are likely more resource and energy intensive instead of less. Electronics are added; extra materials are used; whole new product categories are invented.

So why not focus on sustainability instead? Wouldn’t that be an easy fix? I’m not so sure. This is where the conflict is, for me. Because function, construction, and use can be straightforwardly and realistically explored and experimented with by naïeve designers (through sketching and modelling). And that experimental, explorative way of thinking (by doing and making) is at the core of learning to design.

I’m afraid that the (abstract) systems thinking required for going after more sustainable systems is both too complex and too difficult to make accessible in an understaffed, too short, introductory course. At the very least, my own toolkit of exercises, prompts, and instructions has developed around experimenting with the more basic industrial design domains. And therefore those do not lend themselves well for a systems-critical approach. Industrial design starts from the assumption that the ‘solution’ to ‘the problem’ is going to be an industrially produced, commercial product. Something that a company can market and turn a profit on. Something that does something new, or outperforms current products. Industrial design tends to lead to more.

But what we need, of course, is to start doing less. Use less energy. Waste less. Dump less. Rely on complex supply chains and cheap exploitative labor less. Fewer electronics. Fewer products. Coming to terms with the fact that our dreams about improved medical devices are often actually impossible as soon as we admit the rest of the world, and the future of our world, into the system boundary of ‘the problem’.