Ghost in the Pixel

Speaking to the values designers strive for, Buchanan articulates it this way, from the Governing Ideas white paper for CMU’s School of Design:

“As conceived by designers, the purposes of design are exceptionally diverse. Some designers pursue what is good for human beings and for society at large. Other pursue what is useful in supporting human activities and the quality of human interaction. Other pursue what is pleasurable and delightful in easing the burdens of everyday life. And, still others pursue what is just or fair in the distribution of products and services across all sectors of society.”

Again from Dick Buchanan, in his Governing Ideas white paper for Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design:

1. Designers must be inventive in conceiving the possibilities of a product.

2. Designers must be able to judge which of their inventions are viable in the contingent circumstances of manufacture and human use.

3. Designers must be able to make connections among many fields of knowledge essential for the development of a product and, based on such connections, draw reasonable conclusions or make decisions about the plan of a product.

4. Designers must be able to evaluate the results of conception and planning and choose a final solution based on values, preferences, and goals before a product is carried forward to clients and, ultimately, to human users.

So it’s all about Creating, Judging, Deciding, Choosing:

“The real subjects of the new intellectual free trade among the many cultures are our own thought processes, our processes of judging, deciding, choosing, and creating.” — Herb Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

Update: Jamin Hegeman, MDes 2008, recently posted on Buchanan’s latest thoughts re: the core competencies of design: http://jamin.org/archives/2008/core-competencies-of-design/

Straight from Dick Buchanan, as worded in his Interaction Design class syllabus:

“Design is an art of conceiving and planning products that are useful in supporting the activities of human beings in all areas of experience. Except in the area of crafts, designers do not make final products. They make prototypes and other visualizations, usually with supporting documentation that subsequently serve to guide manufacture and production.”

Continuing further about the nature of the profession of design…

“Design cannot be reduced to a fine art, engineering, or the social sciences without a significant loss in the richness, value, and utility of products. There may be strategic reasons for specialized work in one or another of these areas, but designers draw knowledge and insight from all of these areas in order to conceive and plan effective products.”

“Design is an integrative discipline, independent of specialized subject-matter disciplines. The vision behind this development is perhaps less evident than the visions that have reduced design successively to the fine arts, engineering, and the social sciences. But in the long term, the vision of design as an integrative discipline is more significant. Alliances between design and other disciplines will change from time to time as exciting new knowledge emerges in one or another field due to the contingent circumstances of research. But the essential advance of design–its ability to retain an identity and to incorporate new knowledge in the broader enterprise of design practice–will come from better understanding of the integrative nature of design thinking.”

And finally, the closer…

“Our department’s approach to design is fundamentally rhetorical in nature, in the sense that we regard design as a discipline that is based on the situatedness of products. This is a recognition that all products are situated in concrete, particular circumstances of human use, and that design must be a communicative art directed towards planning shaping human experience. The task of the designer is to conceive and plan products that are appropriate to human situations, drawing whatever knowledge and ideas are needed from all of the arts and sciences. For this reason we have identified communication and the human experience in design as the fundamental theme of the department.”

And one more thing :-)

“Design is an art of practical deliberation oriented towards shaping the argument of all products. The core of design, therefore, is an argument that integrates logos, mythos, ethos, and pathos. This argument is not expressed in words…they are vividly embodied in images, objects, actions/services, and systems.”