Read an Excerpt
Foreword
By Peter Lloyd
The first edition of Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures was written in 1970. It’s author, John Chris Jones, sensing a growing complexity in technology, and concerned that designers should make their decisions demonstrable, looked at how to formalise the process of design. No longer should design be a craft process, a slow intuitive shaping of form and function, but a structured, controlled process. “We should really know what we are doing when we design,” thought Jones. In the America of the 1960s, designers like Henry Dreyfus had already begun to integrate ergonomic studies into the process of design; Jones just took the idea a bit further. Design Methods introduced systematic ways of analysing a wide range of what might be termed ‘situations’. The methods themselves had been inspired by the precision found in scientific language: investigating, selecting, classifying, ranking, and weighting. The design process itself was a process of divergence, transformation, then convergence; paradoxically inspiring something vaguely religious-sounding, like three consecutive John Coltrane albums. It turned out to be a fully realised theory of designing.
Designers could now exercise their creativity from solid theoretical ground – not the shifting sands of individual craft knowledge. And other designers could stand proudly with them. That was the theory anyway; in many ways it was laudable. After all, it was human futures that we were talking about, the seeds of a new world. History tells
it somewhat differently, of course, as history would. The book was well received, a breath of (nearly) fresh air. More power to the fist of the designer who, slowly but surely, began to thump the cover of the book in design meetings. “This is how we’ve done it” he’d say (for it was mostly a he), “we followed the method, we did the analysis,
we know this is the right decision because it was properly ranked and weighted”, he’d continue, “the solution structure perfectly fits the problem structure.” The misgivings anyone had were forced to adopt the same language and consequently were revealed as a sham. Indefinable judgement, a niggling feeling that things were not quite right, was ignored unless evidenced. The book thumping continued as text was quickly transformed into pretext.
Once the boat was floating, other people clambered aboard, desperate to be part of the journey. The “-ologist” – the not-quite scientist looking for a discipline – acquired a “method” prefix, and
a discipline was born. Bruce Archer worried about the boundaries of science, art, and design. Nigel Cross collected best practice. Stuart Pugh, perhaps after watching the Dutch football team at the 1974 world cup, came up with Total Design. Pairs of oarsmen climbed aboard: Roozenburg and Eekels, Hubka and Ernst Eder, Pahl and Beitz. All with the best intentions of course. Design problems were getting increasingly complicated, and their scope extended much further than anyone had first thought. Urban planners and architects were even fetching up in the boat. What nobody realised, however, was that Jones had already, quietly, disembarked.
Jones continued walking on foot. Maybe he was following the river; maybe he was finding his own path. Either way he worried about being misunderstood. The methods were not meant as blunt instruments to beat people with, thought Jones, they were tools to think with, to play intuition off against. If we follow a set of rules properly we arrive at a place that we couldn’t have foreseen, outside of the intuitions we had when the problem was first put in front of us. Intuition must form part of the ongoing process, thought Jones. Together, analysis and intuition balance one another out. And following rules creates new intuitions. The methods were meant to make things discussible and questionable, not definitive; to bring private thoughts out into the social world; to share responsibilities. The problem was that the most obvious question to ask after applying a method was always, “Do I like the answer?” Intuition always seemed to hold the best cards.
Somewhere on his long, still continuing walk, Jones embraced the idea of chance. “If we create a method that has elements of chance within it, we can really find out what we think”, thought Jones, “our intuitions become explicit.” This was method as revelation. If you can design a process that includes chance and live with the results, then you really know where you are going. “Method and intuition are two sides of the same coin,” thought Jones, as he carried on walking…
