Designing
fact I was beginning to see des=gn not so much as a
Designing
J. CHRISTOPHER JONES
OUTLINE OF THE PAPER
The evolution of hardware (craft processes)
Conscmus design of hardware (design by drawing)
The designing of intangibles (system designing,
software designing, etc)
Design thinking (ratmnal and intuitive)
Designing the design process (designing des=gnmg)
Des=gn process control (five criteria)
Design process rewews (changing one's mind as one
learns)
D~vergent des0gn processes (exploring the situatmn)
Transformational desIgn processes (perceptmn of
problem/solution interdependency)
Convergent desagn processes (limits, alternatwes,
evaluations, etc)
The essential point o f m y paper Is that to invent
somethmg new, and to brmg it into being, zs to change
not only one's surroundings but to change oneself and
the way one percewes, to change reahty'a httle
perhaps ~
Thus the design process Is one o f dev, sing and
experiencing a process o f rap~d learmng about some-
thing that does n o t y e t exzst by exploring the inter-
dependenczes o f problem and solution, the n e w and
the old
A questzon ~s ]t necessary, or even possible,
to understand completely the complex~tles o f a
product and o f zts operation when one zs deszgnmg ~
DESIGNING AS A CREATIVE ACTIVITY*
Some years ago I wrote a book about designing it was
meant to be my goodbye present to the subject, which
I then proposed to ret=re from after twenty years or
so I thought I had been =n it long enough and I was
beginning to feel that it was not such a creative or
Or6gmallv pubhshed under the title 'Designm9 as a Creat=ve
Act=v~ty', =n/nfotech State of the Art Report, Structured
Software Development, (ed Peter Walhs), Infotech,
Maidenhead, Berks, 1979
V i i . 1, No 1, July 1979 0142-694X/79/010031-05/$02 00 © 1979 IPC BusinessPress
liberating actwlty as I had once fancied it to be In
process of creatmn as a process of control, a way of
fixing things, in the drawing office, that would be
much better left to the decision of those whose lives
were being conditioned by the shape and form of
man-made things But, having written the book, there
was no escape I am continually being drawn back,
from the actwlt=es to which I tried to move, to g=ve
talks like this one to audiences who apparently like
to hear about the subject from one who has been =n =t
yet not entirely of ~t, part enthusiast, part sceptic
However, I did escape from designing for
long enough to learn something from the other arts,
the time arts hke film, poetry, mus=c and theatre, to
which I became attracted. In particular I learnt a lot
from the composer John Cage and began to copy his
methods of composing by chance, giving up deliberate
control of the result. Another lesson learnt from him
is that, if you want to preach, the best way ~s by
example. Everything John Cage does is, as far as I can
see, an example of what he recommends. So, now
that I am asked to write this summary of some of the
mare aspects of 'how to design', I am reluctant to do
so unless I can make the paper itself an example of the
methods I am to describe. How to do that7
Looking for a clue as to how to begin, how
to m=tmte a pleasant f l o w of thought and words
(pleasant for both of us, reader and writer, I trust~)
I examine closely the very clear instructions provided
by Infotech for speakers at the conference The first
instruction, which had to be completed three weeks
before sending the paper, is to prowde a short hst of
major topics, '10-12 subject headings' I prowded ten.
Another mstructmn calls for a written paper of
minimum length 3000 words. I calculate that this
would take about ten pages of typing so I immediately
demde to accept these two instructions as determinants
of both the length and the form of the paper I take
out ten blank sheets intending to write exactly one
page on each of the ten topics. At thins point I am m
much doubt of the feaslbdlty, or even the w=sdom, of
taking such arbutrary decls*ons, but I persist, trying to
adopt the attitude of 'trusting the process', the
intuition, which tells me that this wdl turn out
allnght even though at this moment I have no evidence
that it w o n ' t be a flop
Next I reahze that, though often m the past
very attuned to the subject, and full of words ready to
come out, today my mind is not on it at all. I am
still thinking of some quite ddferent matters that
have this week demanded attention, and I can't see
any way of getting my thoughts about des=gn back
into the forefront of my mind w i t h o u t a lot of t=re-
some re-reading and note-making, and there is not
time for that the paper has to be posted t o m o r r o w So
I dec~de that I need a qulckly-accessmble source of
variety on each of the ten topics, something to react
to The most accessible source I have =s the book I
wrote and my favourlte way of consulting a book ts by
chance process, using random numbers to decide the
page and the sentences to read I have often found
that an amazingly small number of sentences, picked
m th~s unbmsed way, and stud~ed carefully, gives much
of what one can learn by reading the whole text This
paper, I decide, will include one sentence from each of
the chapters to which my ten titles refer And each
section of it wdl consist of whatever that quotation
brings to mind, now that I am thinking about the
des=gnlng of computer software.
31

DESIGNIhG THE DESIGN PROCESS (deszgnlng d#~x~n~ru)
A great advantage of the f o r m a l ~t~tement ~,* I [~o slbl,
strategy ~s t h a t e v e r y o n e w h o l ~ e~peet{ I L, T,ut ±t ~ntu
~ffeet is able to c o n t r z b u t e to th~ chr,~, ~ m-thod~
~irl c a n see clearl~ h~w his n~ {otlon~ e mtriY,ut~ to, tn~
wholo.
Fig 1 Typical 'prepared page' on which this paper was t y p e d
after pre-msertlon of a title, at the top of each page, and a
q u o t a t i o n wh ich was selected by r a n d o m n u m b e r from the b o o k
Design Methods and typed at a r a n d o m l y selected point in the
page
Looking now at the first quotation, which is
about the evolution of the complex and the beautiful
shapes of farm waggons by craftsmen who knew
exactly what to do, m detad, but seldom knew why,
I am reminded of what might, by now, be called the
collective folk-art of writing computer programs, an
art m which many collaborate m an evolwng work
that ~s seldom seen and understood as a whole by any
individual To make my process of composing this
paper as much hke that as possible, I decide to p~ck
all the quotations, randomly, before starting to write,
and to type each quotation at a randomly chosen point
on its page before writing anything else Now all I
have to do ~s to think of words that wdl h t my
thoughts exactly into the spaces before and after each
quotation This seemingly ~rrat~onal decision feels to
me as ff ~t's going to add some difficulty, but also a
httle excitement, to the process of writing, as I tmlor
my words to fit the spaces dec~ded in advance
Certainly th~s design of the composing-process wdl
get me over the writer's perenmal difficulty of 'how
to get going' whde being only too aware of the many
objections that readers might have to any thought that
comes to one's mind, and being equally aware that
any false move may upset the structure of the paper
as a whole and drive one back to square one (a
famdlar enough place to all designers, as well as
writers) W~th my arbitrary design of the form of the
paper to adapt myself to I wdl have httle time or need
for these worries
1. THE EVOLUTION OF HARDWARE (craft
processes)
I was asked, m this paper, to describe 'how, m general,
you do it' ('it' being design) how one creates THE
NEW And also to say how one evaluates alternatives,
how one formulates requirements for a system w~thout
pre-judgmg how to do it, etc Before attempting to
answer these modern questions, which assume that
the designing of man-made things ,s a wholly conscious
process m the mind of one person, the chief designer,
it is helpful, I think, to look at the works of the past,
32
many of which, though ot complex and coherent
form, were not 'designed' at all but were evolved over
generations by shght modifications made by craftsmen
responding to the trials and errors of practical necessity
m a social and physical situation that, by modern
standards, remmned stable for centuries It ~s also
helpful to think about the evolution of natural forms,
a process that is even slower, is probably more complex
than anything we do in design, and is even less a
conscious process And we, w~th our abd~ty to evolve
and design things, tangible and intangible, are,
apparently, one of the results of t h i s e v o l u t l o n It's
hard to beheve
My knowledge of craft evolution comes largely
from the writings of George Sturt, one of the few
people to have practised an ancient craft and afterwards
to have puthlsexperlence m t o w n t l n g Normally
craftsmen are, perhaps of necessity, people of few
words, and often ilhterate He describes how, m
making a farm wagon, he rehed on knowledge 'which
was set out m no book'
I knew that the hind-wheels had [o be fwe feet t w o inches
h~gh and the fore-wheels had to be f o u r feet t w o , that
the 's~des' must be cut f r o m the best four-inch heart of
oak, and so on
Yet the results of this 'mystery' as he calls it, this
body of knowledge 'residing m the folk collectwely'
is a precision, m relating one part to another, and m
relating the whole to the shghtest differences m needs
and preferences of particular customers, that now
seems lost forever Cybernetlcally, we might say,
there is a hmdden mtelhgence in seemingly blind
evolution A n d a s u b t l e f l e x l b l l l t y
2. CONSCIOUS DESIGN OF HARDWARE
(design by drawing)
It seems that, traditionally, craftsmen used no sketches
or scale drawings In fact the pictures which George
Sturt drew for his book are pathetic examples of
mabdlty to draw and envisage in two dimensions,
apart from the object itself But 'design-by-drawing'
evolved, out of craftsmenshlp, perhaps by putting
together, on one sheet of paper, the curves and
templates used for recording cross-sections, and the
like, which could not be retained sufflmently exactly
in memory alone Oncedlscovered, thlsputtmg-
together on to one sheet, into one data structure as
we'd call it, permitted many new developments
which were outside the scope of the dispersed
{ntelllgence of craft evolution For instance ~t allowed
a jump m scale
Imtlally this advantage of drawing-before-making made
posskble the planning of things that were too big for a
single craftsman to make on h~s own, eg large sh~ps and
buddmg~
This advantage, together with others, equally
great, comes of gwmg up the craftsman's flexlbdlty,
his freedom to adjust each part to ht the next and to
fit the umque requlrements of each customer Crafts-
men are replaced by operatives obeying, w i t h o u t
knowing why exactly, the precise dimensions and
tolerances of a scale drawing, so that designers, a new
class, are enabled to orgamze the works of several
operatwes so that they wdl h t together even though
manufactured by people working at different times m
different places Thus it becomes possible to switch
from ptecemeal evolution, at the scale of the part of a
design which itself is largely stable, to the conscious
changing of the design as a whole, using a symbohc
DESIGN STUDIES
geometric model, the drawing, to perm=t experiment
that ~s not possible when changes are hm=ted to the
product itself What strikes me most, about this new
freedom to design instead of just evolve, ~s that =t is
obtained at such h~gh cost, the loss of the abd~ty to
adjust the shape of things to reflect what makes hfe
really human There arises a profound confhct
between the geometric u n i f o r m i t y of what the
designers have understood and the barbaric ignorance
of everything non-wsual that the scale drawing fails to
represent
3. THE DESIGNING OF INTANGIBLES
(system designing, software designing, etc)
The traffic problem (congestion, parking, acmdents,
etc) =s typ=cal of the seemingly insoluble problems
arising today when the growth of designed products
(eg veh=cles, roads, car parks, traffic signals), each
des=gned m lsolat=on by spec~ahsts, creates enormous
difficulties outside the range of what designers and the
drawing process can respond to So now there exist a
number of new des=gn methods that are intended to
operate at the scale of these problems, the scale of
system, the scale of the mv=sible and intangible
patterns of experience and use
Unfortunately the reformation necessary to assessthe
feas~b~htyofa ,ew system proposal ~sscattered among
many brains and many pubhcat=onsand some of ~t may
have to be d~scoveredby new research
That reason is one of several that explain why
these new methods of desigmng at the scale of system
are not yet very successful To solve the problems
created by the speciahzatlon of the craft process, ~ts
fragmentat=on into a growing number of profess=ons
each h~ghly spec~ahzed, requires more than a change
in methods of thinking and of modelling It requires
an abd~ty we do not yet have the ab=hty to communi-
cate fully and quickly across the barriers that separate
professions and which =solate their thmkmg from the
experience of users Perhaps =t requires the d~sbandmg
of our trad=tion of separating plannmg from using,
and a return to much less spec=ahzed, and more
integrated, forms of respons~b~hty and work
Certainly tt needs some really fresh thinking about
how to use computers and commumcat=on media
Our efforts so far to orgamze hfe at the scale of the
system seem to rely not on rethinking the a~ms and
purposes and modes of operat=on of activities hke
transport, education, med=cal treatment, housing,
telecommunications, etc All we have done so far is to
homogenize to force hfe to fit increasingly standard-
Jzed systems that are simple to design but insensitive
to how ~t feels to use them Our excuse, as pro-
fess=onals, as non-persons, ~s '1 only work here' It ~s
clear to me that no big change is poss=ble till we
change ourselves and our ideas
4. DESIGN THINKING (rational and intuitive)
There ~s plenty of evidence, apart from what I have to
say about the inadequacy of our design methods and
the over-spec~ahzed way we work as professionals,
that we inherit a poor way of thmkmg about reahty,
a p~cture of the world, of hfe, that fails to reflect the
connect=ons between thmgs, and in particular the
connect=ons between aspects of hfe wh=ch we
hab=tually d~vtde into seeming oppos=tes art and
sc=ence, theory and practice, work and leisure, fact
and opinion, etc We have a spht wew of life, a wew
that may well have been necessary to the solving of
Vol 1, No 1, July 1979
physical problems, mechanically, but which has now
become the main obstacle to solving the problems
creates by mechamzatlon In designing, this difficulty
appears as the separation of the ratmnal from the
Intuitive, the pract=cal from the creat=ve But the
briefest study of how the most successful art=sts,
engineers, scientists, etc work and think suggests that
they have one thing in common they have found ways
of avoiding this spht, of combining reason with
imagination, of being both creatwe and practucal, of
knowing when =t's rat=onal to be ~rrat=onal and when
rat's rational to work by experience To reconcile what
seem to be oppos=tes, to resolve contradictions, ~s
the essence of design To do th~s one has to rely on
one's nervous system, one's uncontrollable msptratron,
one's mind-body
The techmque can be regarded as one of remowng the
social mh=b=tlonsthat each person normally apphes to h~s
output during a conversation it is a dehberate return to
the dloglcal and'ego-centr~c'talk of chddren that has been
recorded and explained by Plagetand others
That Is a description of brainstorming, one
of the new techniques for deliberate, rational, stimu-
lation of the irrational, the seemmgly crazy, the source
ofmstghtandorlgmahty Itlstheratlonaleforusmg
the =rrattonal Equally, a description of what is
happening in a seemingly rational technique, hke
classiflcat=on, shows that tt depends upon intuit=on,
upon making dec=s~ons w=th an tuner confidence that
that cannot be justified by reason
5. DESIGNING THE DESIGN PROCESS
(designing designing)
The new design methods (brainstorming, system
engineering, operational research, and many others)
are not easy to use They very easdy become uncon-
trollable and confusing so that the designers get
swamped in a mass of reformation, and a rigidity of
procedure, that prevents common sense, intuition,
and one's own ability to thmk, from remaining in
control This =s because they are presented as what
they are not panaceas, complete substitutes for
thinking for oneself, for being responsible for what
one ts doing The missing element ~s what I call
'designing designing' the conscious direction of part
of one's activity and energy, while des=gnmg, into the
meta-process of des=gmng the process of design A t
any point one should be aware of 'what you are domg'
and 'why'
A great advantageof the formal statement of a possible
strategy =sthat everyone who =sexpected to put tt =nto
effect =sable to contribute to the eho*ceof methods and
can see clearly how h~s own actions contribute to the
whole
The des=gn process, or strategy, can be
expressed as a program or sequence of proposed
techmques, each likely to generate the answer to a
question and enabling the next question to be posed
Thus the design process is the designer's way of
dlscovermg what he knows, and what he does not
know, about this new thing that he has promised to
invent, and to integrate anto the world as tt fs When
the desmgner is a group of people, unused to each
other and to the problem, as ts so often the case today,
the conscious attempt to continually design, and
redesign, the design process ~s an excellent way of
seeking the kind of understanding of what ts afoot,
and willingness to do ,t, that is so easily lost m
workmg in a design team The essential step ts to
recognize that nobody, least of all the chief designer,
33
 has, at the start, the knowledge to say how the design
wdl turn out, or even what the problem really is -
how ~t wdl seem when, eventually, everyone's
Intu~t~ons become reformed by the experience of
havmg designed it At the start one's~ntu~t~on ~s
hkely to be wrong, informed by what is, but not by
what ~s to be conjured into existence
6. D E S I G N P R O C E S S C O N T R O L (five
criter=a)
One of the most obvious ways of trying to ~mprove
one's des~gmng is to identify, and take steps to avoid,
the causes of design fadure, the reasons why such a
high proportion of new products do not succeed (its
sa~d to be 4 out of 5) T h e r e ~ s q u ~ t e a l o t w n t t e n by
experienced designers about how and why design
blunders occur and how to avoid them, eg
The actions expected of the design team members must
be those of which they are capable, ~n which they have
confidence, and which they are motivated to carry out
From such very obvious-seeming, but appar-
ently easdy-overlooked, statements, by those who
have learnt the hard way, I have compded a hst of
five most-common causes of fadure and expressed
these as the following criteria to be apphed when
asking oneself '~s my design process adequate?'
(1) Identify the critical decisions (those which,
~f wrong, mean certain fadure, eg choice of
objectives), and rewew these at ~ntervals
using the best avadable advice
(2) Relate the cost (of destgn and research
effort) to the penalties for not doing ~t,
trying always to ~denttfy the questions ~t ~s
supposed to be answering
(3) Match the design activities to the ab~ht~es,
motivations, and confidence of those
expected to carry them out
(4) Before seeking the answer to any question
assess the rehabd~ty and relevance of the
sources one intends to consult
(5) Always explore the interdependency of the
product and its enwronment, ~e assess the
sens~t~vtty of the supposed deflmt~on of the
problem to change when seen in the hght of
novel solutions
A more detailed description of these criteria
appears on pages 57 and 58 of my book Design
Methods
7. D E S I G N P R O C E S S R E V I E W S (changmg one's
mind as one learns)
One of the simplest ways to organtze one's design
thinking and documentation is to keep three sets of
papers for three categories of thoughts and data set 1
being for reformat=on about the problem and attempts
to analyse and understand ~t, set 2 being for tentatwe
solut=ons (which should always be developed and
noted at the moment of their occurrence and never
=nh=blted =n favour of more rat=onal work, they can
also be usefully categorized as (a) ~mmediate =mprowsa-
t=ons, (b) new designs which fit the status quo, and (c) more
fundamental solut=ons which call for considerable
reorgan=zat=on), set 3 being for spontaneous thoughts,
feehngs, doubts, hunches, etc which may well confhct
with what is ~n sets 1 and 2 and which wdl be useful
=n per=od~c reviews of one's strategy, tethng one how
one's mind and morale =s reacting to the procedure one
34
has dec~ded to f o l l o w If one externahzes all these
kinds of thinking, instead of just experiencing them,
one has the begnnmgs of the meta-process w~th
which to control one's designing so that ~t does not
get out of touch wtth reality (reahty, ~n design, being
as much one's suppositions, ~magmattons, and feehngs
as ~t ~s one's p~cture of the so-called 'real-world')
Design process rewews should be occastons when the
contents of these three accumulating results of what
has been doing are stud~ed, compared, pondered,
slept-on, etc In reviewing, and changtng, one'~
design process one t~ les to keep ~t sensitive, human
The new te~ mmolog~es and procedures of destgnmg and
planning lose both thmr ~eahsm and their vahd~ty as soon
as they cease to reflect the personal ~ssues which matter
most to the people who take decisions or are affected b~
them
Th~s means that, at any point, no matter how much
has been invested m what has been done so far, one
retains the readiness to abandon anything that feels
wrong, absurd, m~sgu~ded, etc, and to sw~tch, at all
costs, to what seems sensible and right ~n the hght of
what one has Just learnt
8. D I V E R G E N T D E S I G N PROCESSES
( e x p l o r m g t h e situation)
Divergence ~s a polite w~rd, borrowed from mathe-
matics, for the process of letting oneself become
dehberately confused, uncertain, unworried, un
Inhibited, etc, in one's th~nking about what the
problem really is and what kinds of solution are
relevant to Lt Asone~s, ln fact, mole likely to be
oversure, anxious, mh~bited, narrow-minded, etc m
one's imtial assumptions about how to tackle the
problem ~t is useful to accept the discipline of some of
the newer design methods which are intended to help
the delsgnet to break out of pre-conceptlons and thus
to be able to see the problem, and its possible solutions,
In a fresh light There are methods such as
brainstorming and synecttcs, which help one to change
and widen one's point of view, and methods like
observing users (ergonomhcs) and rapid searching of
hterature which get one out of the desk-bound
mentality into some d~rect contact w~th the people
and s~tuatLons one ~s supposed to be trying to assist
It's obvious, once you think about ~t, that no new
thing, no ongmahty or creattveness, ts going to
emerge if one sticks rlgtdly to an orderly design
process Ln which one never gets ~n a mess, never loses
touch w~th one's pre-concept~ons, never lets go of
the known The first practLcal step, to th~s end, ~s to set
aside the oblecttves, as g~ven by the sponsor, and to
treat them as tentative guesses which are I~kely to be
rewsed once the desJgn situation has been explored
Equally, one sets aside one's own ~deas of what is rele
vant and what ~s not Creattv~ty ~s not so much hawng
good Ldeas as being wdhng to attempt what ts unfamdlar,
being wdlmg to change one's mind
It rnay be useful to think ot divergent search as being a
testing for stabdlty, or mstabd~ty, m everything connected
w~th the problem, an attempt to d~scover what, Ln the
hterarchy of c o m m u m t y values, systems, products, and
components (and also ~n the m~nds of those who wdl take
crtt~cat decisions) ts susceptible to change and what are r{~
be regarded as f~xed points of reference
Without th~s divergence, thts rough-and -
tumble, des~gmng ts merely an mgemous perpetuation
of the status quo, the self
DESIGN STUDIES
9. TRANSFORMATIONAL DESIGN
PROCESSES (perception of problem-soh,tion
interdependency)
Many design situations do not call for a change m how
one perceives the problem, or =n the kind of solution
that Is seen as appropriate They resemble the situation
of the wagon maker, the craftsman, sensitively assisting
m a vast collaborat=ve process m which the creat~vCty
resides outside the conscious reach of any one
designer, and whmh calls for a selfless dedication That
~ttltude has been, perhaps, the real strength of
engineering, as it has been the strength of Chinese art,
Noh theatre, etc. Ego-free, modest, and extraordm-
ardy effective m the tong run. But now, In the new
situation of partml breakdown of technology itself,
brought about by the unquestioned expans=on of all
feasible technologies regardless of how harmfully they
interact, we seem to require a drast,c change m how
designing is done To be creative now Is not to per-
petuate technology but to fred new directions, to fred
ways of acknowledging, m the development of the
new, the mterconnectedness, the coherence, of hfe
Particularly, is this so, m the designing of new means
of commumcat~ons, and of computing. Transforma-
tional des~gmng ~s the process of finding new points of
reference, whde discarding the old, and out of th~s,
an reduced doubt, a new scept=c~sm, making a new
picture of reahty
Out of all th=s comes the general character, or pattern, of
what ~sbeing designed, a pattern that .s percewed as
appropriate but cannot be proved to be r~ght
This =s the new, and enlarged version of the
'flash of insight', the eureka-feehng, that comes of
finding a new way to perce=ve the design s,tuatlon as a
whole, a perception in which the confhcts, and
apparent opposites, of an qnsoluble' problem are
resolved by finding a new kind of solution m which
those contradictions do not even arise One cannot
force one's mind to hit upon such insights to order
But what one can do is to plunge boldly, and
mtelhgently, into the previous state of divergent
search, confident that, ~f one tolerates its uncertainties,
one's nervous system wdl do the rest
10. CONVERGENT DESIGN PROCESSES
(limits, alternatives, evaluations etc)
One is the conventional out-m strategy, such as an
arch=tect may employ when proceeding from the external
shape of a budd=ng to the arrangement of rooms with=n ~t
Vol 1, No 1 , J u l y 1 9 7 9
That ~s a description of the customary design strategy
~n professions hke architecture and engineering
where, until recently, it has been both possible and
desirable to rely, for the general pattern, the
organizing idea, upon the experienced judgement of
one person, the chief designer But now, when the
thing to be designed is often outside the experience
of anyone, particularly ~n ~ts effects and interactions
w~th other things, man-made and natural, the out-m
method ~s a recipe for fadure, for perpetuating what
is wrong, in the situation as a whole The strategy for
converging on the general form of the des,gn Is more
hkely to be right If it begins with the detads, the mass
of seemingly confhctmg and lrreconc,lable requirements,
and, out of this confusion, seeks a new order There
are, in the repertoire of new methods, several whtch
are very helpful in the data-handhng problems of
Jugghng with far more alternative sub-solutions than
can be held m memory, and these, as one would
expect, make use of computer programs (eg A I D A ,
and morphological analysis). However, it Is hkely that
this m-out procedure, ~f rehed upon as an automatic
pathway to ongmahty, wdl turn out to be as unhelpful
as was the earlier rehance upon the back-of-the-
envelope-sketch, the design tool of the over-confident
chief I suspect that the best designers, m the past as
now, have always used a personal mixture of these two
approaches, contradictory as they seem, and somehow
found ways of getting the advantages of each speed,
clarity, combined with detaded reahsm
Now, hawng come to the end of my ten pages
of text to be composed to fit titles and quotations
pre-arranged upon the page, I am wondering which
of these strategies, and of the others mentioned, I
have managed to demonstrate m the writing?
SOURCES
The first quotation, about wagon making, comes
from George Sturt's book The Wheelrlght's Shop,
Cambridge University Press, London, 1923, which is
a marvellous little book and has remained in print
since it was first published
The other quotatton are from my book
Design Methods and are the copyright of the
publishers John Wdey & Sons, London, New York,
1970 The specific methods, such as brainstorming,
synectlcs, A I D A , etc, mentioned in the paper, are
described in some detail in this book, which is a
review of the newer design methods and an intro-
duction to the principles of design
35