Design Theory
From Igad
In the end, the question "What is design?" is in my opinion best answered as follows:
- Design is the management of constraints.
Many people, including my students, when faced with this view, may not agree. They may search for something more. They may view my definition as restrictive. However there is, for me anyway, no more useful definition.
I say useful because being a designer [1] and perhaps more importantly, being a designer who likes to make things that work, I want a definition that is useful. I find this definition very useful. It allows me to explain what I am doing to people, when I am acting as a designer.
The first question to ask when you feel the need to design something is "what are the constraints?". Until you understand the constraints, you will not be able to design effectively.
Expanding on this theme, I find it useful to split constraints into two groups: negotiable and non-negotiable.
At any given time, a design has constraints declared as non-negotiable. It is the structure of these non-negotiable constraints and the way that they interact that gives form to a design. In essence, they give a design its identity. Generally, designs that have well chosen non-negotiable constraints that were intentionally non-negotiable and really are non-negotiable[2] tend to be good designs. A useful term I use to describe this is Integrity.
footnotes
- ↑ I should point out that I am more than just a designer. Us human beings seem to find it difficult to apply multiple labels to people. I blame Microsoft. Microsoft stuck doggedly to the concept of sorting email by putting them in folders. They love folders. And paper. And waste baskets. Sorry where was I? Oh yes... of course, you could only place an email in one folder, not two... without making a copy. I like to blame Microsoft for everything, to be fair, so I would not take that too seriously. But Google introduced us to the concept of labeling email, and of course allowing emails to have multiple labels. This makes me happy, and perhaps Google might be subliminally flicking switches in the human brains of the world that will make the concept of people being able to be more than one thing at a time commonplace. Yes indeed, if I speak as a designer, them I have to acknowledge that my credibility as a programmer suffers and vice versa. I believe myself to be expert in both fields. Unfortunately, having said that I will immediately get labeled as an egomaniac, and everyone will be able to happily ignore me without any feelings of regret.
- ↑ A great example of a declared non-negotiable constraint in design that turns out to be negotiable in practice is any piece of software that claims to be easy to use, but which many or even most users find quite difficult to use. Usually this state of affairs arises because the real non-negotiable constraints are hidden away.
