Lesson 4: What is Design?

My experience has shown that many people find it hard to make their design ideas precise. They are willing to express their ideas in loose, general terms, but are unwilling to express them with the precision needed to make them into patterns. Above all, they are unwilling to express them as abstract spatial relations among well-defined spatial parts. I have also found that people aren't always very good at it; it is hard to do..... If you can't draw a diagram of it, it isn't a pattern. If you think you have a pattern, you must be able to draw a diagram of it. This is a crude, but vital rule. A pattern defines a field of spatial relations, and it must always be possible to draw a diagram for every pattern. In the diagram, each part will appear as a labeled or colored zone, and the layout of the parts expresses the relation which the pattern specifies. If you can't draw it, it isn't a pattern.

One anxiety inherent in the design methods is the hierarchical nature of complexity. This anxiety moves in two directions, escalation and infinite regression. I will use a story, "The Warning of the Doorknob," to illustrate the principle of escalation.

This has been my experience in Washington when I had money to give away. If I gave a contract to a designer and said, "The doorknob to my office doesn't have much imagination, much design content. Will you design me a new doorknob?" He would say "Yes," and after we establish a price he goes away. A week later he comes back and says, "Mr. Eberhard, I have been thinking about that doorknob. First we ought to ask ourselves whether a doorknob is the best way of opening and closing a door." I say, "Fine, I believe in imagination, go to it." He comes back later and says, "You know, I have been thinking about your problem, and the only reason you want a doorknob is you presume you want a door to your office. Are you sure that a door is the best way of controlling egress, exit, and privacy?" "No, I'm not sure at all." "Well, I want to worry about that problem." He comes back a week later and says, "The only reason we have to worry about the aperture problem is that you insist on having four walls around your office. Are you sure that is the best way of organizing this space for the kind of work you do as a bureaucrat?" I say, "No, I'm not sure at all." Well, this escalates until (and this has literally happened in two contracts, although not exactly through this process) our physical designer comes back with a very serious face. "Mr. Eberhard, we have to decide whether capitalistic democracy is the best way to organize our country before I can possibly attack your problem."

On the other hand is the problem of infinite regression. If this man faced with the design of the doorknob had said, "Wait. Before I worry about the doorknob, I want to study the shape of man's hand and what a man is capable of doing with it," I would say, "Fine." He would come back and say, "The more I thought about it, there's a fit problem. What I want to study first is how metal is formed, what the technologies are for making things with metal in order that I can know what the real parameters are for fitting the hand." "Fine." But then he says, "You know, I have been looking at metal forming and it all depends on metallurgical properties. I really want to spend three or four months looking at metallurgy so that I can understand the problem better." "Fine." After three months he will come back and say, "Mr. Eberhard, the more I look at metallurgy, the more I realize that it is the atomic structure that's really at the heart of this problem." And so, our physical designer is in atomic physics from the doorknob. That is one of our anxieties, the hierarchical nature of complexity.

Eberhard (1970) quoted in Teague & Pidgeon (1985) and Yourdon (1989).