waste
Ending is better than mending
Less, but better
Flying a kiwi
The mirror-image economy
Wasting light
- Poured
A timeless quality
Of all Rams’s products, the 606 Universal Shelving System is perhaps his most successful in fulfilling his own principles of good design. It is still in production today, some fifty years after its conception. The system is distinctive yet unobtrusive, and when the shelves and cabinets are filled, its slim profile allows it to fade quietly into the background.
Its ‘plainness’ lends it a timeless quality that has transcended the vagaries of fashion like no other of Rams’s designs. It was conceived in such a way as to optimize its function as simply and in as many different situations as possible, while still permitting upgrades and alterations without falling into obsolescence: all later adaptations and additions could still be integrated into the original structure and sizes.
"Fashion objects are not capable of being long-lived," said Rams in 2007. "We simply cannot afford this throw-away mentality anymore. Good design has to have built-in longevity. I believe that the secret of the longevity of my furniture lies in its simplicity and restraint. Furniture should not dominate, it should be quiet, pleasant, understandable and durable."
Consumption
The proponents of technology in the 1840s were very enthusiastic about replacing workers with machines. But somehow I find no indication that they realized that while production could be carried out with few workers and still run to high outputs, buyers would be needed for those outputs. The realization that though the need for workers decreased, the need for purchasers could increase, did not seem to be part of the discourse on the machinery question. Since then, however, technology and its promoters have had to create a social institution – the consumer – in order to deal with the increasingly tricky problem that machines can produce but it is usually people who consume.
The Factory Photographs
A Book by David LynchI love industry. Pipes. I love fluid and smoke. I love man-made things. I like to see people hard at work, and I like to see sludge and man-made waste.
Bowellism
A DefinitionLloyd’s Building, London.
Bowellism is a modern architectural style heavily associated with Richard Rogers. The premise is that the services for the building, such as ducts, sewage pipes and lifts, are located on the exterior to maximise space in the interior.
Muda, Muri, Mura
An ArticleEliminating waste is the key to efficiency – in the Toyota Production System, this is termed as:
Muda (waste),
Muri (overburden),
and Mura (irregularity).Working with Brian Eno on design principles for streets
- Think like a gardener, not an architect: design beginnings, not endings
- Unfinished = fertile
- Artists are to cities what worms are to soil.
- A city’s waste should be on public display.
- Make places that are easy for people to change and adapt (wood and plaster, as opposed to steel and concrete.)
- Places which accommodate the very young and the very old are loved by everybody else too.
- Low rent = high life
- Make places for people to look at each other, to show off to each other.
- Shared public space is the crucible of community.
- A really smart city is the one that harnesses the intelligence and creativity of its inhabitants.
What's Wrong With This Model?
What's wrong with the rational model
- We Don’t Really Know the Goal When We Start
- We Usually Don’t Know the Decision Tree – We Discover It as We Go
- The Nodes Are Really Not Design Decisions, but Tentative Complete Designs
- The Goodness Function Cannot be Evaluated Incrementally
- The Desiderata and Their Weightings Keep Changing
- The Constraints Keep Changing
Deciding what to design
We Don’t Really Know the Goal When We Start
The most serious model shortcoming is that the designer often has a vague, incompletely specified goal, or primary objective. In such cases, the hardest part of design is deciding what to design.
I came to realize that the most useful service I was performing for my client was helping him decide what he really wanted.
Today, we recognize that rapid prototyping is an essential tool for formulating precise requirements. Not only is the design process iterative; the design-goal-setting process is itself iterative. Knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm. Therefore, goal iteration must be considered an inherent part of the design process.
Evaluating goodness
The Goodness Function Cannot be Evaluated Incrementally
The Rational Model assumes that design involves a search of the decision tree, and that at every node, one can evaluate the goodness function of several downward branches. In fact, one cannot in general do this without exploring all the downward branches to all their leaves, which is possible in principle, but leads to a combinatorial explosion of alternatives in practice.
Changing constraints
The Constraints Keep Changing
The explicit listing of known constraints in the design program helps here. The designer can periodically scan the list, asking, “Can this constraint now be removed because the world has changed? Can it be entirely circumvented by working outside the design space?”
They just don't work that way
Perhaps the most devastating critique of the Rational Model, although perhaps the hardest to prove, is that most experienced designers just don’t work that way.
“Conventional wisdom about problem-solving seems often to be contradicted by the behavior of expert designers. Empirical studies of design activity have frequently found ‘intuitive’ features of design ability to be the most effective and relevant to the intrinsic nature of design. Some aspects of design theory, however, have tried to develop counter-intuitive models and prescriptions for design behavior.” — Nigel Cross
We must outgrow it
Why all this fuss about the process model? Does the model we and others use to think about our design process really affect our designing itself? I believe it does. I believe our inadequate model and following it slavishly lead to fat, cumbersome, over-features products and also to schedule, budget, and performance disasters.
The Rational Model, in any of its forms, leads us to demand up-front statements of design requirements. It leads us to believe that such can be formulated. It leads us to make contracts with one another on the basis of enshrined ignorance. A more realistic process model would make design work more efficient, obviating many arguments with clients and much rework.
The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.