The argument carried on in a sphere We need not allow ourselves to be abashed by any suggestion that the old metaphors are out of date and ought to be superseded. We have only to remember that they are, and always were, metaphors, and that they are still “living” metaphors so long as we use them to interpret direct experience. Metaphors only become dead when the metaphor is substituted for the experience, and the argument carried on in a sphere of abstraction without being at every point related to life. Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker metaphor
Only in terms of other things No legislation could prevent the making of verbal pictures: God walks in the garden, He stretches out His arm, His voice shakes the cedars, His eyelids try the children of men. To forbid the making of pictures about God would be to forbid thinking about God at all, for man is so made that he has no way to think except in pictures. But continually, throughout the history of the Jewish-Christian Church, the voice of warning has been raised against the power of the picture-makers: “God is a spirit”, “without body, parts or passions”; He is pure being, “I AM THAT I AM”. The fact is, that all language about everything is analogical; we think in a series of metaphors. We can explain nothing in terms of itself, but only in terms of other things. Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker Metaphors We Live ByYou only understand something relative to something you already understand metaphoranalogy
A renaming of the already named A true metaphor is a swift and violent twisting of language, A renaming of the already named. It's meant to expire in a sudden flash of light And to reveal—in that burst of illumination— A correspondence that must be literally accurate. Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing metaphornames
The door handle is the handshake of a building Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses What is this static modernism? metaphordoorsinteraction
The strange familiar and the familiar strange The problem solver, when confronted with a new and yet unsolved problem, overlays the structure of the unsolved problem with an apparently similar problem with which he or she is experienced. Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange are also principally based on the use of analogy. Peter G. Rowe, Design Thinking metaphoranalogy
An emblem of friendship Bridges make connections; they bring people together—a role that has made them a traditional emblem of friendship. Consider the town of Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina. When fighting between ethnic factions broke out there in the 1990s, nothing symbolized the social disintegration more clearly than the destruction of a sixteenth-century stone-arch bridge that had linked the two parts of the town on opposite banks of the Neretva River. And the emblem of efforts to heal the divisions is a rebuilt bridge, opened with fireworks and fanfare in July of 2004. Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape metaphorarchitectureengineering
Metaphors We Web By An Essay by Maggie Appleton maggieappleton.com As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson made clear in their touchstone book Metaphors We Live By, metaphors are the basis of all human thought and reasoning. The metaphors we use to speak about the web are not simply linguistic trivia – they determine how we understand it on a fundamental level. It determines what we think the web is capable of, what risks, opportunities, and challenges it poses. Which means the metaphors we use to think about the web profoundly influence what we think the web is, what we think we can do with it, and how we might change or evolve it. …Out of all of these metaphors [for the web], the two most enduring are paper and physical space. Metaphors We Live ByMenus, Metaphors and Materials: Milestones of User Interface Design metaphorwww
Websites are not living rooms and other lessons for information architecture An Essay by Sarah R. Barrett medium.com While there is a lot that IA can learn from actual architecture or city planning, websites aren’t buildings or cities, and they don’t have to work like them. Instead, they should be designed according to the same principles that people’s brains expect from physical experiences. informationsoftwaremetaphor
Negative Creativity An Article by Scott Alexander slatestarcodex.com Coming up with entirely novel ideas is really, really hard. Misinterpretation as inspirationSit Down And Think About It For Five Minutes ideascreativitymetaphor
The Design of Design A Book by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. www.goodreads.com Design process models: A summary argumentThe spiral modelA grossly obese set of requirementsRequirements proliferationThe architectural contracting model+9 More Design System as Style Manual With Web Characteristics designsoftwarearchitecturemakingstyle
What's Wrong With This Model? A Chapter What's wrong with the rational modelDeciding what to designEvaluating goodnessChanging constraintsThey just don't work that way+1 More
Design process models: A summary argument A formal design process model is needed, to help organize design work, to aid communication in and about projects, and for teaching. Having a visual, geometric representation of a design process model is crucial, for designers are spatial thinkers. They will most easily learn, think about, share, and talk in terms of a model with a clear geometric picture. The Rational Model of design occurs naturally to engineers. The linear, step-by-step Rational Model is highly misleading. It does not reflect what real designers do, or what the best design thinkers identify as the essence of the design process. The bad model matters. It has led to the too-early binding of requirements, leading in turn to bloated products and schedule/budget/performance disasters. The Rational Model has persisted in practice despite its inadequacies and plenty of cogent critiques. This is because of its seductive logical simplicity, and because builders and clients needs “contracts." Several alternative models have been proposed. I find Boehm’s Spiral Model the most promising. We need to keep developing it.
The spiral model The spiral shape certainly suggests progress. It associates successive repetitions of the same activity. The geometric shape is easily understood and memorable. The model emphasizes prototyping, starting with user-interface prototypes and user testing long before an operational prototype is possible. Since a development model is principally used by developers, I believe having it designer-centered is entirely appropriate. With Boehm and against Denning and Dragon, I advocate frequent but not continuous interaction with representative users, with successive prototypes as the vehicles. I strongly believe that way forward is to embrace and develop the Spiral Model. design
A grossly obese set of requirements Who advocates in the requirements process for the product itself—its conceptual integrity, its efficiency, its economy, it’s robustness? Often, no one. As often, an architect or engineer who can offer only opinion based on taste and instinct, unbuttressed as yet by facts. For in a classical Waterfall Model product process, requirements are set before design is begun. The result, of course, is a grossly obese set of requirements, the union of many wish lists, assembled without constraints. Usually, the list is neither prioritized nor weighted. The social forces in the committee forbid the painful conflicts occasioned by even weighting, much less prioritizing. Requirements proliferationA Plea for Lean Software features
Requirements proliferation Any attempt to formulate all possible requirements at the start of a project will fail and would cause considerable delays. — Pahl and Beitz, Engineering Design As Project Manager, I had to reject the requirements document as totally impractical, and have a quite small team of architects, marketers, and implementers extract the essence. Requirements proliferation must be fought, by both birth control and infanticide. YagniA grossly obese set of requirementsFeatures and complexity features
The architectural contracting model It is the necessity for contracts, whether within an organization or between organizations, that forces the too-early binding of goals, requirements, constraints. The pressure for a complete and agreed-upon set of requirements run into the hard fact, that it is essentially impossible to specify any complete and accurate set of requirements for any complex system except in iterative interaction with the design process. How have the centuries-old building design disciplines handled this perplexity? Fundamentally, by a quite different contracting model. The client develops a program, not a specification, for the building. He contracts with an architect, usually on an hourly or percentage basis, for services, not for a specified product. The architect elicits from the client, the users, and other stakeholders a more complete program, which does not pretend to be a rigid contractable product specification. The architect does a conceptual design that approximates the reconciliation of program and the constraints of budget, schedule, and code. This serves as a first prototype, to be conceptually tested by the stakeholders. After iteration, the architect performs design development, often producing more detailed drawings, a 3-D scale model, mockups, and so on. After stakeholder iteration, the architect produces construction drawings and specifications. The client uses these drawings and specifications to enter into a fixed-price contract for the product. Notice how this long-evolved model separates the contract for design from the contract for construction. Even when both are performed by the same organization, this separation clarifies many things.
The rational model of design Engineers seem to have a clear, if usually implicit, model of the process of design. It is usually an orderly model of an orderly process as the engineer conceives it. The notion that the design process should be modeled as a systematic step-by-step process seems to have first developed in the German mechanical engineering community. Herbert Simon independently argues for design as a search process in The Sciences of the Artificial. He was motivated to lay out a strictly rational model of design precisely because such a model was a necessary precursor to automating design. His model remains influential even if today we recognize the "wicked problem" of original design as one of the least promising candidates for AI. In software engineering, Winston Royce independently introduced a seven-step Waterfall Model to bring order to the process. In fact, Royce introduced his waterfall as a straw man that he then argued against, but many people have cited and followed the straw man rather than his more sophisticated models. Even if ironically, Royce's seven-step model must be considered one of the foundational statements of the Rational Model of Design. Large combinatorial spacesThe ordering of steps
Design process models Any systematization of the design process is a great step forward compared to "Let's just start coding, or building." It: Provides clear steps for planning a design project Furnishes clearly definable milestones Suggests project organization and staffing Helps communication within the design team Is readily teachable to novices, and tells novices facing their first design assignments where to begin. The Rational Model in particular brings yet more advantages. The early explicit statement of goals, secondary desiderata, and constraints helps a team avoid wandering, and it breeds team unification on purposes. Planning the whole design process before starting coding or formal drawings avoids many troubles and much wasted effort. Casting the process as a systematic search of a design space broadens the horizon of the individual designers and lifts their eyes far beyond their previous personal experiences. But the rational model is much too simplistic, even in Simon's richly developed version.
The dual ladder The first task for growing designers, as opposed to managers, is to craft a proper career path for them, one whose compensation and sociological status reflect their true value to the creative enterprise. This is commonly called the dual ladder. It it easy to give corresponding salaries to corresponding rungs, but it requires strong proactive measures to give them equal prestige: equal offices, equal staff support, reverse-biased raises when duties change. Why does the dual ladder need special attention? Perhaps because managers, being human, are inherently inclined to consider their own tasks more difficult and important than design and need to deliberately assess what makes creativity and innovation happen. Senior craftsperson work
A platonic ideal As the architecture design progressed, I observed what at first seemed quite strange. For the architecture team, the real System/360 was the Design Concept itself, a Platonic ideal computer. Those physical and electrical Model 50, Model 60, Model 70, and Model 90 things under construction out on the engineering floors were but Plato’s shadows of the real System/360. The real System/360’s most complete and faithful embodiment was not in silicon, copper, and steel, but in the prose and diagrams of IBM System/360 Principles of Operation, the programmer’s machine language manual. I had a similar experience with the View/360 beach house. Its Design Concept came to be real long before any construction began. It persisted through many versions of drawings and cardboard models.
The design concept Is there positive value to recognizing an invisible Design Concept as a real entity in design conversations? I think so. First, great designs have conceptual integrity—unity, economy, clarity. They not only work, they delight, as Vitruvius first articulated. We use terms such as elegant, clean, beautiful to talk about bridges, sonatas, circuits, bicycles, computers, and iPhones. Recognizing the Design Concept as an entity helps us to seek its integrity in our own solo designs, to work together for it in team designs, and to teach it to our youth. Second, talking frequently about the Design Concept as such vastly aids communication within a design team. Unity of concept is the goal; it is achieved only by much conversation. Thus, moviemakers use storyboards to keep their design conversations focused on the Design Concept, rather than on implementation details. Dependence is more profitable than educationI mix it with two in my thought
The Idea The design is thus the mental formulation, which Sayers calls “the Idea,” and it can be complete before any realization is begun. Mozart’s response to his father’s inquiry about an opera due to the duke in three weeks both stuns us and clarifies the concept. For most human makers of things, the incompletenesses and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation. Thus it is that writing, experimentation, “working out,” are essential disciplines for the theoretician. Everything has been composed making
The boldest decisions In retrospect, many of the case studies have a striking common attribute: the boldest design decisions, whoever made them, have accounted for a high fraction of the goodness of the outcome. These bold decisions were made due sometimes to vision, sometimes to desperation. They were always gambles, requiring extra investment in hopes of getting a much better result. Design with courage design
Intuition and systems Systematic design excluding intuition yields pedestrian follow-ons and knock-offs; intuitive design without system yields flawed fancies. How to weld intuition and systematic approach? How to grow as a designer? How to function in a design team? designteamwork