“Meaningful diversity”, writes Anna Lowenhaupt Sing in The Mushroom at the End of the World, is “diversity that might change things.” (p38)
The difference between a transaction and an encounter is the creation of a relationship and therefore a change in those who’ve encountered each other. A transaction ends. A meeting is only a start.
Is education – teaching a course – a transaction or an encounter?
When presenting the results of a design project, including a prototype test, I tend to recommend this chapter order:
This order is based on typical peer reviewed papers presenting the ‘design and validation’ of ‘a novel device’ or something. It also assumes a substantial difference between the final design and the chosen concept that is not the direct outcome of exploratory testing with a prototype. This order works well when the test is aimed at validating a specific part of (the performance of) the design. The final design, in this set-up, functions as a type of hypothesis, that is then empirically tested.
In a course that I teach where students usually dive right into prototyping after concept selection, this order doesn’t always work. And it’s confusing for them. Especially for those students who end up effectively using (early versions of) their prototype as a sketch model to discover things about their concept and to iteratively develop their design. There is also little time available in this project (and too little technical knowledge amongst these particular students) to really develop the design as a whole very much after the concept selection.
In these cases, it would probably work better to change the order:
You might even skip the ‘final design’ section entirely in favour of a discussion of future development. The prototype test, then, becomes not so much a focused validation of one key element within a larger complex design, but more an exploration and/or proof op principle of the chosen concept, more a validation of (the choice for) a certain solution principle than of a full design.
In the coda to her book Dust, Jay Owens writes that destroyed landscapes and ecosystems cannot be ‘saved’ or ‘restored’, that it makes more sense to think in terms of ‘salvage’ – to repurpose, rebuild, reform into something new. Improved, but never back to its previous state. Start with what’s still there and nurture it. Regrow, don’t repair.
This seems to be as giving up, but optimistically. Accepting that what is gone is gone, letting crumble and disappear what is beyond hope and salvage, but at the same time hopefully building back.
Perhaps that’s the approach to take with universities as well. Instead of trying to drag the dead wood of the current structure and leadership back to something resembling what it’s supposed to be, accepting that that’s never going to happen and look for ways to start regrowing something in the cracks.
This is my entry for Indie Web Carnival May 2024. It’s my first time participating.
I started making little zines like this (this is #4), and this seemed like a good topic for one. It’s fun making these. A cover and three spreads is just enough to make it challenging to come up with enough fun variations on a (graphic) theme. But it can also be done in 10 minutes. Low effort. Low stakes. But you make a thing!
Creativity needs boundaries. In time, physical space, and scope.
Ironically, I wanted to join the Indie Web Carnival last month when the topic was ‘good enough’. But for that round I had an idea to do something too polished. Which means I didn’t even start. Only this month did I commit to just doing it. Quickly and in one go. No polishing. Spent half an hour, including documentation. Good enough is good enough.
Looking around for a new backpack, I fell down the rabbit hole of Every Day Carry (EDC). It was simultaneously nice to get into a new product category, with all the enthousiasm for good design that comes with it, and kind of troubling to discover how consumption-oriented this supposedly minimalism-loving subculture is.
It’s all men. And even though everyone is super particular about their water bottle and having the correct pouch for it, no-one seems to be carrying any food. No lunch boxes. Let alone fruit. When you search for ‘EDC fruit’ all you get is knives!
The size of these ‘everyday carry’ collections also seems to be based on a car commute. Huge bags with a lot of stuff…
After watching countless videos of people zipping up pouches and tetrissing everything into a bag just right, everything in its proper place, I did get that same feeling as I sometimes get from reading a good novel that really puts you into a different world and atmosphere. Zipping up my headphone carrying case and dropping it into my old backpack, I suddenly noticed how viscerally pleasing that can be. It suddenly clicked why you’d spend so much effort thinking about the way you carry and store your everyday stuff.
I also got another familiar feeling, though. Something I notice at work, with engineering. The feeling of being interested in/enthousiastic about the same thing as an existing community on the surface but noticing a fundamental difference in values that makes me not want to be a part of the club…
In the introduction to Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant points out that the workers who started smashing machines at the turn of the 19th century had never been taught to see technology as inherently progressive.
We have. And not just that. Also that technological change – or ‘development’ – is both unavoidable and desirable.
For some reason this remark reminds me of the architecture students I’m working with at the moment who’ve been given a brief to design ‘a sustainable home’. Many of them are designing massive mansions. Constructed of rammed earth, or floating on water to be climate-resilient, but hardly ‘sustainable’. All of them, I think, are designing free-standing single household houses. And most wouldn’t even house a family, they’re one bedroom affairs, perhaps with a study.
Isn’t a sustainable home by definition a collective home? Something terraced, small, or built for collective or multi-generational living?
It really strikes me how little even those in a creative and in some ways highly socially conscious and critical field such as architecture seem to be thinking of redesigning the way we live. The form of our technology.
Perhaps that why that remark by Merchant brings up this experience: the ingrained assumption that the technology and design of society are one some fixed, natural, unavoidable path. We’re just along for the ride. With little more agency that to build a fantasy mansion or two.
Design decisions are taken in the context of the design as a wole. That whole is subject to change throughout the design process. Therefore, logically speaking, all design decisions remain up for debate and themselves subject to change throughout the design process.
This is highly impractical, of course. In practice, therefore, important decisions are ‘frozen’ at some point during a design project. In practice, the reason for some decisions then becomes something like ‘because that follows from what we decided earlier’ or ‘it would cost too much to change’.
The philosopher Agnes Callard argues in her book Aspiration that it is possible to want to become something you cannot yet understand. That it is possible to rationally pursue a way or view of life of which it is currently impossible for you to judge the value. For example, to aspire to become a music lover, a parent, the kind of person who enjoys long walks – or a designer.
There is a paradox here because it is impossible to (fully) judge the value of achieving such goals before achieving them. So how can you pursue them rationally, Callard asks. Their value is only properly visible from the inside, to those who have already become music lovers, parents, walkers, or designers – those who have already passed through the looking glass.
This may be a good metaphor to use when explaining this predicament to design students and teachers. That experienced designers have stepped into a world or bubble that can be described accurately, but only to those who are also inside. As if they’ve put on a AR headset and now see things the other simply doesn’t. Also similar to the difficulty of explaining or characterizing a new taste to someone who has never eaten a particular snack or food. There is a truth to how it tastes. Most people who’ve eaten the thing will agree to its character. But it cannot fully be explained in words to those who have never tasted it.
Reviewing a number of (engineering) design textbooks, it strikes me that none of them discuss what a good set of concepts looks like, other than that they are the most promising options.
Together with the fact that these textbooks give little to no guidance on how to construct and present the complete case arguing the final design, this lack of discussion on the collection of concepts as a collection – and what defines it as such – seems to be a result of these books’ framing of design and the design process in a professional context.
One big difference between that professional context and an academic context (including many educational settings) is the role and presence – or lack thereof – of a client. Concept selection seems like a particularly good example of this. In a professional setting, you would present your concepts and your evaluation of them, together with a recommendation on which to proceed with, to your client(s). You would give them the final say or ‘OK’ on that decision, or at least come to a consensus. And because that decision is taken together, at a specific moment in time, in a specific project context, it matters less whether that set of concepts has a particular logic to it.
In an academic context, however, if you present concepts and a comparison at all, you present them only at the end of the project, together with the – further developed – final design. You write it all up in a single (peer-reviewed) paper. In that context, where you’ve selected a concept yourself and already further developed a design based on one, the concept comparison and ‘selection’ is no longer a forward-looking strategic proposal but a component in the justification/support for your final design. Rhetorically and epistemologically, it’s doing (can do) something quite different.
First of all, what is the aim?
Here, I consider concepts as a means of exploration and – as a set – as the basis for arguing why the final design embodies/is based on the concept that is does/is.
What if we take the game SET as an analogy for how your concepts should differ.
When ONE aspect varies, you have something that looks like a controlled experiment. You’re changing one variable and seeing how that impacts the design’s properties and performance. Of course, when ‘one’ aspect is different, many more aspects will also be different. The world (and thus, physical artefacts) are infinitely complex.
When MORE THAN ONE aspect is varied, you either have to do the full combinatorics or find some way in which different choices in those aspects hang together (in effect, going back to the situation where only ONE overarching aspect is varied). Or, if there are no significant interaction effects between the aspects (sub-functions, domains, components) then it’s better to decouple them and decide per aspect which is preferable.
What of the case of the get-up-chair combined with two knee orthoses? What when you have A/X, A/Y, and B/Z? Could that make sense? Yes, I think so. In this case, there is a ‘wildcard’ concept. This could be a sound strategy in cases where there seems to be an obvious best option for one or a set of aspects (in this case: a powered knee orthosis). The function of the wildcard concept, then, is to check/justify that assumption. Trying to find the wildcard by asking ‘What do my two ideas have in common?’ can be a way to discover hidden or unconscious assumptions (and thus also, to find ‘more creative’ options). The emergency Covid ventilators also fall in this category, with only one departing from ‘modern, digital control system’.
(Examples from my slide deck of concept set examples)