

What is a Design Attitude and Why Would a Manager Care?  - astrec
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/fred-collopy/manage-designing/what-design-attitude-and-why-would-manager-care

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tdonia
Haven't read the author's book, but the ideas sound very much like Christopher
Alexander's work in systemizing collaborative design. If you're not familiar,
i highly recommend these:

[http://www.google.com/books?id=Kh3T3XFUfPQC&printsec=fro...](http://www.google.com/books?id=Kh3T3XFUfPQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Notes+on+the+Synthesis+of+Form&ei=NINDSLj8Cp2yjAHgtLT9DQ&sig=sB9x2Q6GU0i01mDROwdRIn5ht9U)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Experiment>

and finally:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20070528030431/http://www.rainmag...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070528030431/http://www.rainmagazine.com/architecture/oregonexperiment.html)

basically, alexander pointed out back in the 60s/70s that the simplest design
problems, when approached from a conscious design perspective & properly
considered, spiral out to millions of small relationships that are well beyond
any one human's grasp. and so he formulates a system for organizing the people
involved with the project & defining a hierarchy that enables the big problems
to be settled before the small problems & for individual domain
specific/'problem owners' to be established at the right place within overall
the process.

that said, for all the beauty in his theories, in practice (in architecture at
least) political issues often affect the design process far more significantly
than he anticipated - which is why this article is interesting, as it
addresses the political value of this approach first.

+1 for social hacking.

------
jacobscott
"...humans have a limited cognitive capacity for reasoning when searching for
a solution within a problem space. Given the relatively small size of our
brain’s working memory, we can only consider a few aspects of any situation
and can only analyze them in a few ways... The first step in any problem-
solving episode is representing the problem, and to a large extent, that
representation has the solution hidden within it (pp. 8-9)."

Always love a good economics quote -- behavioral economics, cognitive costs
and etc are, generally speaking, awesome topics. See recent edge posting:
<http://edge.org/3rd_culture/thaler_sendhil08/class4.html>

Not a designer so the rest of the article doesn't apply to me as much...

