Unfolding
Design Space
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DesignIf we observe theories of design,(1) we may unfold two extreme views on what design is. In the first view design is the specific transformation of materials according to a certain idea or pattern in an artistic or industrial production, where each specific aspect of design has its own rules, traditions and technologies. This is a rather traditional view of (industrial) design, often seen from the outside by the historian, the economist or the technologist. We could quote the economist and professor of design John Heskett for such a view:
In the course of its historical development, the role of industrial design has focused on making technology usable in forms that are accessible and comprehensible to the greatest possible number of people. Design has become a specialized activity in the industrial division of labor, one of a number of activities clustered under the general title of research and development, in which the creative activities associated with inventing and defining forms have become separated from the work-processes by which they are realized.(2)
Heskett’s view on design from 1980 does not only separate the ‘fine’ design from the ‘dirty’ production, and design in general from other branches of the society. It also divides design itself into several specific realms of expertise which only relate because they are all carried out step by step in the same chain of production, with only one direction and goal – to reach the greatest possible number of people. The designer is seen as the keeper of the ideas or pattern that are executed by the production apparatus at his/her disposal.
This is also the traditional way to look at a design process in architecture, as a predictable top-down scholastic chain of procedures, which in the end will result in a building, a landscape or a city. The design theorist Donald A. Schön identifies this as technical rationality, where “… professional activity consists in instrumental problem solving made rigorous by the application of scientific theory and technique,”(3) and does have four essential properties: “…It is specialized, firmly bounded, scientific, and standardized.”(4) According to Schön this way to look at design is derived from 19th century positivism, which culminated in the early 20th century Vienna Circle, where it became what he calls ‘the positivist epistemology of practice’,(5) and should in this context be compared to Rudolph Carnap’s empirical design teaching at Bauhaus as described in the previous chapter.
In the second view, design is seen as the dynamic interaction between all the aesthetic, technological, sociological, economic and political aspects that together construct our world – in the words of the “design guru, critic and business provocateur”(6) John Thackara, the aspects that are “beyond the object”.(7) This dynamic view on design has been described by Donald Schön as an opposition to the technical rationality, he writes: “From the perspective of Technical Rationality, professional practice is a process of problem solving … But with this emphasis on problem solving, we ignore problem setting, the process by which we define the decision to be made, the ends to be achieved, the means which may be chosen.”(8) Schön goes on to suggest what he calls Reflection-in-Action. He writes:
When someone reflects-in-action, he becomes a researcher in the practice context. He is not dependent of the categories of established theory and technique, but constructs a new theory of the unique case. His inquiry is not limited to a deliberation about means, which depends on a prior agreement about ends. He does not keep means and ends separate, but defines them interactively as he frames a problematic situation.(9)
Schön identifies the reason for this shift in the design paradigm as the failure of professions to solve society’s problems, mainly because of the categorical separation of researcher and practitioner in the paradigm of technical rationality.
There are many parallels to be drawn from Schön’s design paradigm of the reflective practitioner to other issues in this dissertation. To the crisis between science (researcher) and architecture (practitioner)(10) as Pérez-Gómez, Kenneth Frampton and John Rajchman pointed them out in the previous chapter and to the structures of science as Thomas Kuhn laid them out. We could see Schön’s reflective practitioner as deliberately seeking a critical position toward normal science, and also in the development of new collaborative environments for design through the use of digital media such as the application TOPOS and the constructions of The Virtual Architect, SARIE and FIE.(11)
In a less historical and more practical way, that same view on design as dynamic and interactive has been described as integrated design. This involves almost all aspects of design, which are not inherently uncontrollable or unstructured,(12) be it the social integration between the designer and the user, the vertical integration(13) of techniques and technological objects, the integration of dependencies and needs through cultural probes, or the integration of a gamut of parameters. All integrated through a collaborative design process with shared structures or terminologies. This is a modern bottom-up way to look at the design process, and it has been given different names. The design firm IDEO(14) labeled it Interaction Design in the early 1990s, which has even been included in the name of the leading design school in Northern Italia, Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.(15) Another design firm, Frogdesign,(16) labels it integrated design as a bit more rigid form of interaction design. This redefinition of design has opened up for new kinds of design, one coming from Thackara:
A new kind of design – design for emergence – increases the flow of information within and between communities. Such a design process does not deliver finished space or fixed equipment; if a building behaves like frozen software, it won’t work. The re-framed objective of design is to decide what inputs to plumb into a particular context: what questions? Which people? What experimental qualities? In what kind of space?(17)
In the architectural and urban field, a few firms have clearly defined design paradigms that echo the reflection-in-action or integrated design. The architect Neil Denari’s approach to design is ‘gyroscopic logic’, which goes against a monological structure and advocates multiplicities. The urban design group MVRDV defined their diagrammatic approach to urban and architectural design in the 1998 book FARMAX around concepts like:
Datascapes: sublimized pragmatism? Under maximized circumstances, every demand, rule or logic is manifested in pure and unexpected forms that go beyond artistic intuition or known geometry and replace it with ‘research’. Form becomes the result of such an extrapolation or assumption as a ‘datascape’ of the demands behind it. It shows the demands and norms, balancing between ridicule and critique, sublimizing pragmatics. It connects the moral with the normal. Having found the opportunity to criticize the norm and the moral behind it, it constructs a possible ‘argument’. Artistic intuition is replaced by ‘research’: hypotheses that observe, extrapolate, analyse and criticize our behaviour.(18)
While the office of Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos defined their design strategy – Deep Planning – in the course of forming the interdisciplinary UN-Studio, they write:
Deep Planning is architecture at its least autonomous; the information at the basis of Deep Planning must be gleaned from other fields of expertise and the goal of Deep Planning is not a design proposal, but the visualization of a development policy. The typical product of Deep Planning is therefore a situation-specific, dynamic, organizational structure plan achieved with the aid of parameter-based techniques and cooperation with other disciplines, entailing the mapping of political, managerial, planning, community and private relations, using scenarios, diagrams, parameters, formulas and themes.(19)
These three design paradigms have all diversified the design production to include almost anything that can be designed – including ideas in writing – and have sought to eliminate the traditional top-down role of the architect. So, even though some may argue that integration and reflection of such design paradigms always have been part of design – maybe as the necessary integration in the chain of production – the radicalism of the reflective practitioner and integrated design may have yet unseen and very widespread consequences that goes against separate design modules as isolated regimes. Not only does integrated design define a new therapeutic role for the designer, who has to be a ‘go-between’ that makes the whole integration work, it also creates new products of design, new design disciplines and new ways of working that has not yet been experienced.(20)
Design SpaceNevertheless, how do these views on design affect the design activity, and what does this mean for space? First of all, it is too easy just to see these views in a historical context, as an old view, defined by the technologies of industry and mass production, and as a new view, defined by the technologies of information and networks. We cannot just disqualify the former as unusable and obsolete; they are both being used everyday, and they both have the aim of the optimum state of design – the best solution to the problem, the broadest appeal or the highest profit margin. It would be more productive to see the former as an operational view and the latter as a constructive view on design. We could say that in the first view, design aims to optimize the internal sequence of operations that together define the chain of production, while in the second view, design aims to optimize the environment in which, the design activity takes place. As such, we can compare them to the discussion of a culture of space above, and especially to the connection between science (technology) and architecture (design). The operational view may be an expression of a strict utilitarian connection with well-defined borders and the constructive view may be an expression of a dynamic flow between areas of great conceptual mobility.
The professor at the Research Policy Institute, School of Economics and Management at Lund University, Rikard Stankiewicz, offers us two concepts that are directly related to the two views on design – namely that of evolutionary regimes of technology and the construction of design spaces. Stankiewicz’ argument begins as a critique of how the evolutionary process of technology has been the succession of revolutionary paradigms, which did not have the ability to cumulate knowledge, techniques and information, but instead separated design into discrete design regimes that had very little exchange with other regimes, and therefore wasted valuable information and time. (21) Stankiewicz states: “Unfortunately, despite its great success at the rhetorical level, the concept of a paradigm fails to recognize the eclectic character of technological knowledge. In fact, technologies appear to be so ‘multi-paradigmatic’ that the concept itself virtually loses it’s meaning. As a corollary the paradigm model overemphasizes technological discontinuities.”(22) Even though Stankiewicz is focused on professions in hard science like physics and engineering, his critique offers a view on what the complex connection between design, architecture and science may be. Stankiewicz’ answer to the failed evolutionary processes of technology, is the concept of design spaces, which can be seen as a spatial construct of operands. He writes:
… a design space is the combinatorial space generated by a set of operands – e.g. components, unit operations or routines. Operands in their turn are defined as the structure-function (or process-function) relationships, which are used in the designing and assembling of artifacts. Any technical object (artifact, system) is either an operant in its own right or a configuration of operands … Design spaces shape problem-solving processes. They do so mainly by generating the domain of possibilities within which the search for technical solutions is undertaken. The richer and more finely grained the design space, the more precisely it can be used to map the corresponding fitness landscape, and thus optimize the actors’ ability to identify and articulate goals.(23)
Should we apply this concept of design space and operands to an architectural design process, we can say that an operand can be the overall project and in itself be constructed from a very wide range of operands like parameters, rules, strategies, materials and so forth, which have to be taken into consideration. Instead of seeing the design task as a diffuse cloud of issues, Stankiewicz’ concept creates a clear structure, where the single operand can be isolated and solved. Further, could the culture of space – the shared consensus of space that Stephen Kern describes – be seen as criteria for the selection and structuring of the operands, more than an operand in itself. The culture determines which operands are relevant at that time, which we may choose to follow or not.
As we will see later, the selection, hierarchy and structure of operands changed throughout the 20th century, and was to a large extent determined by the function, time and place of the design space. In a current architectural context we could compare this to the spatial diagrams that UN-Studio did of the bus terminal in Arnhem(24) or IFCCA New York,(25) which are both designed through the dynamic interchange of operands like housing, leisure, industry, commerce, office, movement, sightlines etc. MVRDV,(26) Lars Spuybroek(27) and Greg Lynn,(28) just to name a few, have all constructed similar design spaces by operands or configuration of operands in space.
The concept of operands can, on a more practical level, facilitate quality control and project management, when different tasks are identified as operands and linked in an operational space to construct certain work routines. It would clarify the design process and form the basis for shared collaborative design environments, as concurrent engineering and mediated workspaces, which I will present and discuss later in the dissertation, especially in the part Construction. However, Stankiewicz’ concepts have the greatest potential, when they are applied on operands and constructions of operands that are already spatial, so the diagrammatic design space overlaps and augments the real design space. This would mean an entirely new kind of clarity to the design process, where the actions, parameters and rules, that have an effect on real world artifact, are displayed as we interact with the early stages of a real design object. Such an expansion of Stankiewicz’ concept is what I want to suggest by an embedded space – not so much an expansion of the design space itself, but more so of its use. An embedded space could be an active tool, which may be applied to a range of different problems. A space that is embedded with operands from the real world, analysis, mapping, aims and ideas, and then itself embedded in the final design object, be it an artifact, another space, an application or a building. This aspect will be a primary aim for constructions like The Virtual Architect, The Blind Architect, SARIE and FIE, which are to follow later in the dissertation.
We could argue that Stankiewicz’ design space is a combination of the two ways of designing, as mentioned above. He subscribes to the idea that design is the act of combining discrete elements – operands in his terminology – but combined through multiple dimensions, and not just as a one-dimensional chain or sequence. In this way, the operands themselves are spatialized to form a network of interconnected elements, where each one is more than just a single procedure. Stankiewicz then combines the operands with the environment or structure of the design space, making the structure of the space itself the actual design. In this way, the solution to a given design problem becomes a question of selecting the right operands and combining them in the right way – in other words, to construct the right design space. In this approach, Stankiewicz is close to Donald Schön’s concept of problem setting and reflection-in-action. Schön writes: “Problem setting is a process in which, interactively, we name the things to which we will attend and frame the context in which we will attend to them.”(29) We could ask if the operands of the design space are the naming of things in the design process, and if the design space itself is the framed context, in which we design.
I believe the answer is evident. The concept of the design space also carries the aspect of embedding, which is essential to our more general argument. According to Stankiewicz, the designer is embedded in an acquired design space as a technological community or culture, and the design space is embedded in the artifact because of the designer’s combination of the operands in his or her particular design space.(30) Stankiewicz writes: “An engineer is a person who has mastered a particular design space. Normally that space is not his personal invention. He acquired it, both in its soft- and hardware aspects, from his predecessors,”(31) and further that “… operands can be embodied in artifacts and transferred in that form.”(32)
Stankiewicz’ concept of design space is perhaps colored by his academic background in economy, management and research policy – in his rather formalistic use of the Meccano game as a metaphor for his construction, and in his description of the architectural design process as constituted by the styles and orders of a high level design language.(33) The concept of design space can in this light be seen more as an analytical tool, than as a performative tool for the production of design and architecture. Stankiewicz’ design space creates an instant mapping of a design organization from the point of view of the manager, rather than the designer himself. Therefore, we could argue that this concept has to be challenged and developed further, to become an active design tool, as formulated in the concept of embedded spaces.
Nevertheless, it is possible to position Stankiewicz’ relative to the design theorist Christopher Alexander, but in another way than Stankiewicz does himself.(34) Rather than focusing on Alexander’s wish to let users design, we could focus on Alexander’s so called pattern language and the idea of effective space that they both share. This design method – which we in current terminology could call a dynamic catalog of pragmatic diagrams – could serve as a shared terminology in a collaborative design environment and clarify the design method, so it can be analyzed and optimized, by relating patterns of events to patterns of space. In the context of Stankiewicz’ design spaces it is interesting that also Alexander had space play an import role, both as a metaphor of containment and as a passage between the real world and the world of the design method. Professor of design C. Thomas Mitchell writes: “The strength of Alexander’s work is that in the patterns he explicitly links the patterns of events that take place in a space to the layout of the space itself, rather than focusing, as did the designers of the industrial era, on geometrical criteria alone.”(35) Mitchell goes on to quote Alexander for saying: “The action and the space are indivisible. The action is supported by this kind of space. The space supports this kind of action. The two form a unit, a pattern of events in space … (but) this does not mean that space creates events, or that it causes them,”(36) and “… if we hope to understand the life which happens in a building or a town, we must therefore try to understand the structure of space itself.”(37)
In an architectural context, the design space may be seen as an accumulation of parts or operands, which are necessary for the design process. However, the presence of parameters and properties in the design space does not lead to an inherent set of patterns, rulers or orders that must be followed. The design space can just as well be the context for exploration and abduction or as parts that may be predefined and acquired but nevertheless combined to produce entirely new constructions.
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(1) As this project is research into the act of designing, the word ‘design’ is primarily understood as a verb and not as a stylistic label or stigmata of an object. It is neither used for a normative judgment of what makes good design and bad design, nor is ‘design’ limited to traditional industrial design. Therefore, the research problem is at the same time very broad in its investigative nature, crossing widespread issues both in time and space, but also very specific in its subject matter; the use of space as a tool for integrated design. In other words a complex terrain seen through a single lens. One first possible path through the space that lies ahead is the ‘claim–evidence–warrant–qualification’ structure that is suggested by Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb and Joseph M. Williams (1995), The Craft of Research, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Even though the structure is rigid and almost has the expression of a legal argument, it does provide a clear progression of a research method. A critique of this research method could be that it proves the existence of dependencies that are already known, which would be justified had this been a historical project or a project of natural science. What the method lacks is the normative aspect that is a key character of an architectural manifestation – the suggestive research into how, why and with what these dependencies should be manipulated.
(2) Heskett, John (1980), Industrial Design, London: Thames & Hudson, p. 201.
(3) Schön, Donald A. (1991 (1983)), The Reflective Practitioner, New York, NY: Basic Books, p 21.
(4) Ibid., p 23.
(5) Ibid., p 31.
(6) Quote from www.thackara.com.
(7) John Thackara quoted in Mitchell, C. Thomas (1993), Redefining Designing, From Form to Experience, New York, NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold, p. 1.
(8) Schön (1991 (1983)), op. cit., p. 39-40.
(9) Ibid., p. 68.
(10) Schön identifies architects as ‘minor’ professionals being close to practice.
(11) Please refer to the Construction part of this dissertation.
(12) Even though there are and must be ‘pockets’ of the uncontrolled and the unstructured in an integrated design process, other design processes may be entirely based on intuition, impulse or an expression that is guided by what seems to be a lack of structure.
(13) Winner, Langdon (1977), Autonomous Technology, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
(14) See http://www.ideo.com.
(15) See http://www.interaction-ivrea.it/en/index.asp.
(16) See http://www.frogdesign.com.
(17) Thackara, John (1999), “Designing the space of flows,” from http://www.thackara.com/steal_these/space_of_flows.html, n. p.
(18) MVRDV (1998), FARMAX, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, p. 103. It should be noted that it is primarily firms involved in what earlier was labeled ‘industrial design’ or ‘product design’, which are the keenest to formulate design strategies. Firms in architectural and urban design tend to keep their design strategies to them selves.
(19) Berkel, Ben van & Caroline Bos (2002), Unstudio Unfold, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, p. 39.
(20) A new product of design could easily be a design process to be used by other designers as a rule or a manual, as it was the case with MVRDV’s FARMAX project.
(21) This critique is the same as the critique of ‘shifts in paradigms’ in architecture in the chapter On Doing Architectural Research, especially on the issue of mechanical nostalgia. Stankiewicz’ critique is clearly guided towards Thomas Kuhn. Stankiewicz, Rikard (2000), “The Concept of ‘Design Space’,” from http://www.lri.lu.se/pdf/Crafoord00/rsws.pdf (modified version published in Ziman, J., ed. (2000), Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
(22) Ibid., p. 2.
(23) Ibid., p. 4.
(24) Berkel, Ben van & Caroline Bos (1999), Move, Amsterdam: UN Studio & Goose Press.
(25) Berkel & Bos (2002), op. cit.
(26) MVRDV (1999), Meta City Data Town, Rotterdam: 010 publishers.
(27) Spuybroek, Lars (1999), “A Straight Line is a Badly Informed Curve,” transcript from audio file of lecture from http://www.creativebase.com/interview/template/?d=nox (mp3, 240501) (http://www.classic.archined.nl/extra/archi_tv/tv1/eng/hoofdframe1.html), London: RIBA.
(28) Lynn, Greg (1998), Folds, Bodies & Blobs, Collected Essays, introduction by Ole Bouman, Bruxelles: La Lettre Volée.
(29) Schön (1991 (1983)), op. cit., p. 40.
(30) We could also say that the designer has the role of the initiator or decision-maker of a design process that will manifest the ‘design space’ in a series of artifacts through the addition of material – real or virtual.
(31) Stankiewicz (2000), art. cit., p. 3.
(32) Ibid., p. 4.
(33) Ibid., p. 14 Stankiewicz makes references to Christopher Alexander, who, some might say, has a rather deductive approach to architecture seen as patterns or The Nature of Order, which is the title of Alexander’s recently published magnum opus.
(34) Ibid., p. 14-15.
(35) Mitchell (1993), op. cit., p. 52.
(36) Alexander, Christopher (1919), The Timeless Way of Building, p. 62, 65, 70, 72, quoted in ibid., p. 53.
(37) Alexander (1979), The Timeless Way of Building, p. 74, quoted in ibid.
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