
How designers work (Ph.D. Dissertation) - martian
http://www.lucs.lu.se/Henrik.Gedenryd/HowDesignersWork/
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ryanmahoski
This challenge to overconfident amateurs is relevant and well argued. In
short, get out the pencil and paper, it's time for a renaissance of sketching.
In Ch 3 he critiques [amateur design technique] which he views as too
cerebral. In Ch 4 he evangelizes a more pragmatic, physical approach which he
calls cognitive interaction. The paper is involved - he backs up his thesis by
citing its philosophical, evolutionary basis among other tediousness - so you
might want to skim Ch 0 and skip to Ch 3.

From Ch 5:

Why are experiments (and simulations) in the physical world superior to models
and simulations in the head? The reason is that you want to find out both what
you _can_ figure out and what you _can't_ figure out, i.e. what you cannot
simulate mentally. That is, you want to know also about the effects of your
actions that you cannot predict or forsee.

[Then he talks about iterating over "fine-grained pieces of activity, a
continuous attention to feedback that replaces complex pre-planned actions,
and simpler and smaller actions..."]

Why is this better? Remember dead reckoning: it starts from a known position,
but the shortcomings of prediction yield an accumulating error that makes the
computed position deviate more and more from the actual position. Position
fixing instead reestablishes accuracy each time a fix is made. So the more
often you make fixes, the more often you can make the proper adjustments to
your course, and the less will your measured position drift away from the
actual one.

~~~
martian
Beyond the critique of the amateur, he's also tackling larger trends of
thinking about design methodology. The trend is from formal to informal, from
abstract to concrete. From ideas without context to ideas that receive
immediate feedback from their environment...

Gedenryd quotes: "The writings of design theorists imply that the traditional
method of design-by-drawing is too simple for the growing complexity of the
man-made world. This belief is widely held and may not require any further
justification. (Jones 1970, p. 27)"

But recently we've seen a resurgence of such "simple" methods like sketching,
storyboarding, model-building, etc. Here's where we see the Renaissance of
Sketching.

Basically it seems to me the trend is that a bunch of theoreticians in the
mid-20th century thought that abstract thought and logic could (by themselves)
produce perfect designs. But in fact recent research and writing about design
are suggesting that the world's best designs come about because they were
designed using processes like sketching that have a direct, real-world,
tangible feedback. My favorite passage is maybe "Quist's demonstration of
sketching" in ch 4, which directly addresses this dichotomy of formal/abstract
vs informal/specific design processes.

I think many people have realized that overly formal methods do not produce
designs that are all that beautiful or engaging. Most people hate cube-farms.
Most programmers can't stand the waterfall model. Most consumers hate
corporate bloat-ware. Maybe it's always better to use paper prototypes,
sketches, extreme programming, and so on.

In some ways this whole debate was foreshadowed by Spock's musings in Star
Trek I: it is an embrace of what is most human.

