Design of Design: Summary of Chapters 1-3

Chapter 1: The Design Question
Is Bacon Right?

• Bacon's hypothesis is that if there are properties that are alike across a wide range of media of design, then it must be true that designers in all types of fields can fulfill their desire to learn new things about their design/work by analyzing their own life-situations such as an experience or an insight.

What is Design?

• The definition of design is broken down into three parts according to Brooks.
• Design is:
1. A plan
2. In the mind
3. Execution
• Three Distinct Aspects according to Dorothy Sayers:
• Idea: The formulation of the conceptual constructs
• Energy: Implementation in real media
• Interaction: Interactivity with users in real uses.

What's Real? The Design Concept

• The term "Design Concept" was identified as important by Luck of the University of Reading.
• System/360 Design is used as an example of a "Design Concept"
• The Design Concept for System/360 is broken up into three different activities.
1. Architecture
2. Implementation
3. Realization

What's the Value?

1. Designers who recognized the Design Concept as an object that exists could easily help them seek the integrity in their own individual design. It taught them to work together as a team to achieve the goal and focus on it. This allowed many designers to understand that this quality is essential and needs to be taught to their youth.
2. Communication is key in a Design Concept
3. Decimal datatype is used as an example.

Thinking about the Design Process

• This section talks mainly about the long history of designs and refers back to several different historic architectures.
• One example used was Vitruvius.

Kinds of Design

• System Design versus Artistic Design
• Talks about the contrasts between designs done by artists and writers, who focus mainly on delight and conveying a meaning to its readers, or through their design.
• Architects and industrial designers fall into both categories.
• Routine, Adaptive, Original Design
• Talks about the emphasis on Original Design in this book versus routine redesign of objects or adaptive design, which just means that a design/object is modified to serve a new purpose or to take care of another need.

Chapter 2: How Engineers Think of Design - The Rational Model
The Model

• Goal
• Primary Goal: "One wants to build a beach house to take advantage of wind and wave at an oceanfront lot."
• Desiderata
• Secondary Objectives: "The beach house should be reinforced to withstand hurricane-force winds; it should sleep and seat at table at least 14 people; it should exploit the stunning views;"
• Utility Function
• Optimizing design to provide some goodness function that weighs the several secondary objectives as to their importances.
• Constraints
• Setbacks that don't allow you to reach your goal as easily.
• Resource Allocations, Budgets, and Crucial Budgets
• Constraints can be caused because of fixed resources.
• Most common fixed resource constraint is total cost budget.
• Design Trees
• Building a design tree according to the design decisions made by the designer.
• At each node in the tree, designers can add one or more paths, so the designer can think of the design process as a systematic exploration of the design space.

Whence Formulations of this Model?

• Formulations of a model should take place as a step-by-step systematic process.
• This technique was developed by the German mechanical engineering community.
• Simon argues that design should be formulated as a search process.
• Royce introduced the seven-step Waterfall Model to bring order to the process.

What's Right with this Model?

• Provides clear steps for planning a design project.
• Sets clearly defined milestones in the design schedule and for judging progress.
• Project organization and staffing are suggested.
• Communication is key among all team members.
• The Rational Model brings more advantages.
• Early statements of goals, secondary desiderata, and constraints to help the design team avoid leaving focus from the goal.
• Casting process as a systematic search of a design space which broadens the horizon of the designers.
• This model is much too simplistic.

Chapter 3: What's Wrong with this Model?
We Don't Really Know the Goal When We Start

• Talks about how most designers don't have a clear set goal, instead most of the time the designer is often vague.
• Gives an example about a student working in a missile company where the student realized he was providing the designer a useful service by helping the client decide what he really wanted.
• Goal iteration must be considered a basic part of the design process.

We Usually Don’t Know the Design Tree - We Discover It as We Go

• Designers discover what they want and the design tree as they work by making important decisions and sometimes seeing alternative steps that can be taken to accomplish their goal.
• Each major design effort has enough novelty in the
• Goal
• Desiderata, and the utility function
• Constraints
• Available fabrication technologies

The Nodes Are Really Not Design Decisions, but Tentative Complete Designs

• At each node in the tree, designers face not a simple alternative choice amount options of one design decision, but an alternative choice among multiple tentative complete designs.
• The explosive combinatorics of these complications to the tree model boggle the mind.

The Goodness Function Cannot Be Evaluated Incrementally

• Experience
• Intuition helps aid designers in this process.
• Example of the designers of OS/360.
• Simple Estimators
• Computer architect use instruction mixes to do rough-cut early estimates of computer performance.
• A danger is that the rough estimator may not work with the design branches of the very approximation involved in the estimator.

The Desiderata and Their Weightings Keep Changing

• For designs that must be separately fabricated, designers learn from the builders a growing understand of the interactions between design and fabrication. So many desiderata and constraints shift and refine.

The Constraints Keep Changing

• Even if the goal is fixed, constraints will keep changing even if the design process has been set, and branched off into systematic approaches.
• Designers have to work around the constraints, a process that calls forth much invention and exploration of unconventional corners of a design space.

Others’ Critiques of the Rational Model

• A Natural Model
• The Rational Model as presented may seem a bit naive. However this model is a very natural model for people to understand.
• Designers Just Don’t Work That Way
• Most designers don't use the Rational Model; the hardest to prove is that most designers just can't work with the Rational Model.
• Royce's Critique of the Waterfall Model
• Royce describes the Waterfall model so that he can point of its deficiencies.
• He argues that even with back-arrows describing counterflow between adjacent boxes in the waterfall, the model doesn't work.
• 
  

  Schon's Summary of the Critiques
• A excerpt of his critiques.

But Despite All These Flaws and Critiques, the Rational Model Persists!

• Verein Deutscher Ingenieure Standard VDI-2221
• Adopted the Rational Model as an official standard for German mechanical engineering.
• DoD Standard 2167A
• Talks about the U.S. Dept of Defense enshrined the Waterfall Model.

So What? Does Our Design Process Model Matter?

• Not Every Design Thinker Agrees with Me
• Professor Ken Wallace of Cambridge believes the best way to take major steps forward is to build some kind of model that is readily understood and communication.
• Suzanne and James Robertson say that the deficiencies in the Rational Model don't really matter. "People who understand what design is, know better."
• Right-Brained Designers.
• Designers are often right-brained people, visually and spatially oriented.
• Software design groups invariably scrawl diagrams, not words or code, on their shared whiteboards.
• A more realistic process model would make design work more efficient, restraining many arguments with clients and much rework.

I have spent 9 hours on Assignment 2.