What is Design?......

(truthbeauty - image from gapingvoid.com cartoons drawn on the back of business cards)


Over the years I have been collecting descriptions of design from various sources and I thought it may be interesting to bring them out and look at them together.
To begin with there are these insights from Ranjan, these are from my notes taken during many design concepts and concerns classes.

Design is a specification creating process not a specification following process.
(DCC 2002)

Design is like a sponge absorbing from all fields, unlike the others design is looking at questions which do not have one answer.
(DCC 2002)

Design is a resolution of complex variables.
(DCC 2003)

Design is a process of visualising models which express complexity.
(DCC 2003)

Design is a reflexive situation. You are part of the context and you also impose yourself on the context.
(DCC 2004)

Then there are these form various design thinkers. I noted these when I found them to be a fine articulation of an idea or one that uncovers a new aspect of design, unfortunately I have not noted the sources and dates which i can see now would have been very useful.

“Designing is not a profession……it is the organization of materials and processes in the most productive way” Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

The area of human experience, skill, and understanding that reflicts man's concern with the enhancement of order, utility, value and meaning in his habitat. Bruce Archer

We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context which we cannot properly describe.
Christopher Alexander

"the future job of a designer is to give substance to new ideas while taking away the physical and organizational foundations of old ones. In this situation, it is nonsense to think of designing as the satisfaction of existing requirements. New needs grow and old needs decay . . ."
John Chris Jones

Every human being is a designer.Many also earn their living by design - in every field that warrants pause, and careful consideration, between conceiving of an action and a fashioning of a means to carry it out, and an estimation of its effects.
Norman Potter

‘All men are designers’ where ‘design is the conscious effort to impose meaningful order’ (Papanek, 1972)

"Design is an expression of purpose. It may (if it is good enough) later be judged as art."
Charles Eames' famous response to that question in 1972, during an interview with Madame L'Amic of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris

"Design is the human power to conceive, plan, and realize products that serve human beings in the accomplishment of any individual or collective purpose."
Dick Buchanan

design is creatively extending, elaborating, questioning, and overcoming
existing conceptions in view of the future realities they promote for others
to live in.
---Klaus Krippendorf

We should not underestimate the crucial importance of leadership and design joining forces. Our global future depends on it. We will either design our way through the deadly challenges of this century, or we won't make it. For our institutions - in truth, for our civilization - to survive and prosper, we must solve extremely complex problems and cope with many bewildering dilemmas. We cannot assume that, following our present path, we will simply evolve toward a better world. But we can design that better world. That is why designers need to become leaders, and why leaders need to become designers.
---Richard Farson (noise between stations on design thinking)

In the end, design is about shaping a context, rather than taking it as it is. When it comes to design, success arises not by emulating others, but by using organizational assets and integrative thinking to identify, build on, and leverage asymmetries, evolving unique models, products and experiences -- in short, creative business solutions.
----Roger Martin

Design is a tradition of inquiry and action that predates any of the other traditions. It is the essential competence that identifies us as humans and makes it possible for us to act with intention. Design is the means by which humans continue to participate in the ongoing genesis of the real world. Through our innate capacity to design, we have created our cosmologies, cultures, and technologies. Design is a distinct form of inquiry: not a midpoint on a continuum between art and science, or one of the end points-design is neither applied art, nor science.
---Harold Nelson

We differentiate design from art and science by the concept of service. Design is defined as service on behalf of someone else-a contractual relationship. Artists and scientists engage in forms of service legitimately focused more on their own interests. Artists express their emotions and feelings; scientists express their curiosity about the world. Designers, however, serve the needs and desires of others. This does not mean that designers are not aesthetic or rational, they are both, but most importantly they are empathic.
---Harold Nelson

Designers are participants in the lives of others -- Jan Kuypers

Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.
Paola Antonelli

In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.
Steve Jobs, Founder and CEO, Apple

About a year ago on phd design there was a thread on definitions of design in which one of the participants (Paul Osmond) shared this simple yet profound little gem from Ezio Manzini -

"Design is a process of structuring relationships".
It is my current favorite till another one comes along.

Sustainability: Models for Critical Sectors in India

Sustainability: Models for Critical Sectors in India – Roti, Kapada, Makaan, Bijlee & Rojgaar – Food, Clothing, Infrastructure, Energy and Occupations.

Students of the Design Concepts and Concrens (DCC2009 Foundation) class explored the assigned areas and sectors and this time they went out of the campus in search of multiple perspectives and meetings with people and experts who could give them insights that they did not have when they had explored it on their own during the first brainstorming session. The difference between the first round of exploration and model building and this second round revealed ways of filling areas of ignorance with fresh perspectives and new information from the field. The models showed these new insights and all groups were able to identify and expound on a number of important categories that would be critical for the understanding of the sector that they had been working on. These insights were shared with the whole class with each tram making fairly detailed presentations and the discussions gave further insights as well as several approaches to take these forward from here towards the next assignment dealing with exploring design opportunities and in visualising these for sharing with colleagues and the class as a whole. The images below show each tem with their second stage model that maps out their current understanding of the sector that they were assigned.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Image 01: Composite view of the Roti team (Food) with their model of Food in the Indian Economy and the supply chain that would need to be addressed with design imagination for a sustainable future.

Image 02: Composite view of the Kapada team (Clothing) exploring areas of concern and opportunity to bring sustainable practices and ideas to the sector as a whole. A case study of water in some common T-Shirts was brought to the attention of the class.

Image 03: The Makaan group (Infrastructure & Housing) had a limited view of their field and they explored sustainability issues in housing and shared these with the class.

Image 04: The Bijlee group (Energy) had discoverd many categories of potential action and showed these as parts of a large jig-saw puzzle that formed the strategy for their model.

Image 05: The Rojgaar group (Employment and Occupations) had an elaborate spiders web to explain their understanding of the complex interplay of possibilities and threats in a world that was passing through a financial meltdown.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Sustainability DCC Way: Fun Picture Break

Images from the sustainability presentations across Roti, Kapada, Makaan, Bijlee, Rojgaar. More to come.

Prof. M P Rajan































Prof. M P Rajan

Scenario Visualisation: Indian Village as a visual panorama in DCC2009

Scenario images as a visual recall and reflection on a real experience.

Download the full set of scenario images from the class as an A4 size pdf file 11.9 MB size from this link here (DCC2009_EP Scenarios.pdf) and as a quicktime movie of 24.2 MB size at this link here (DCC2009_EP Scenarios.mov). Village name is used as a prefix followed by the student name and then the image number in both the pdf file as well as the quicktime movie.

M P Ranjan

Image 01: Thumbnail images of six selected student representations from the Bhoira Village group.

Each student is named in the caption and the prefix B stands for Bhoira followed by the student name and the image number. In the images that follow G stands for Gundla village and H for Hingolgadh village respectively.

Image 02: Another six images from the Bhoira group.

Image 03: Thumbnails from the Gundala village.

Image 04: Further six scenarios from the Gundala village.

Image 05: Six scenarios from the Hingolgadh village.

Image: 06: Next batch of six scenarios from Hingolgadh.

Download the full set of scenario images from the class as an A4 size pdf file 11.9 MB size from this link here (DCC2009_EP Scenarios.pdf) and as a quicktime movie of 24.2 MB size at this link here (DCC2009_EP Scenarios.mov). Village name is used as a prefix followed by the student name and then the image number in both the pdf file as well as the quicktime movie.
B – Bhoira village
G – Gundala village
H – Hingolgadh village
N – Ahmedabad city based villages (for those students who missed the village experience)

M P Ranjan

Scenario Presentation: Learning about composite images in DCC

Sharing the visualization of ones experience: Preparing for team work through articulation of ones deep insights and experiences.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Image 01: Scenario presentation to the whole class on Saturday morning in the NID Foyer area. Forty six of the students had completed their work and come forward to share their experiences during their Environmental Perception course at Gundala, Hingolgadh and Bhoira villages in Rajkot District of Gujarat.

Scenario visualization was introduced to the class as a way forward in the early stage of design expression first to articulate an individual designers undestanding of a given situation or experience and in this case all our students had a recent exposure to a village having lived there for a week and interacted with local people in a rich context of sharing and learning. The effort to make a composite image of their week long interaction is an effort to reflect on their experience and to use the skill sets that have been acquired during the foundation programme in order to show their colleagues an exact image of what relationships and priorities each of them had perceived while they carried out their observations in the village.

Image 02: Two examples of scenario visualization from the Gundala group taken at random from the display softboard.

Each scenario was a rich representation of many elements and actions that the students had gleaned from their village exposure, some for the first time in their lives, and learning new things from the environment would be a lifelong task for a designer since in most cases we would be working at the cutting edge of change and in areas that are new and unexplored from which the designers are expected to make sense and bring some clarity to the fuzzy contexts through a variety of processes of sense making. Scenario visualization is one such sensemaking tool that we use as part of our work in the field with rich patterns of people and life actions that are filled with both traditions and change.

Image 03: Students from all three groups volunteered to make presentations and after the first round some were invited by faculty to come forward and share their scenarios with a rich discourse of their insights as well as intangible experiences and feelings. It is this rich discourse that makes design discussions so compelling and insightful to team members. This is also an opportunity for the individual to reflect on ones experience with an external model as an aide memoir and in the process discover deeper patterns that may not have been apparent when the scenario was being created in the first place.

Each student came forward with rich descriptions and some used the image to build another layer of description that added value to the story and showed their insights from the experiences in such a way that shared perspectives could be built with the whole group. What was striking was the different angles from which each student approached the same event or activity and in this discussion they could share their personal perspective with the other colleagues for the first time and the outcome is a multiple view of a situation and not a unitary view from a position of authority of any one individual. This is a useful bit of learning about a typical design situation with multiple approaches and outcomes possible and not just a single outcome as is expected in math and some science results.

Image 04: Hingolgadh village study team in front of their display softboard before commencement of the presentations. Those not present missed the interesting session.

The Hingolgadh team mapped out the contours of their village experience as well as several particular aspects that were highlighted as individual experiences. This is typical of design when many team members are able to provide a variety of insights that contribute to a new synthesis of the whole village while working as a team.

Image 05: Bhoira village study team in front of their display softboard. Those not present missed the discussions in the class.

Bhoira team too mapped out their individual scenarios and many elements and attributes overlapped with those identified by the other teams. However each village had some unique features and these were identified and kept as pointers for future reference as the course went forward with the major assignments that would follow.

Image 06: Gundala village study team was the biggest group but even here some students missed the presentation. Those who missed the event have been asked to submit the work on Monday for a final submission and we hope that they comply with the requirements of this assignment.

When we have a large group looking at one village we can clearly see the variety of perspectives that each of us can bring to a particular situation. This is a very valuable aspect of design learning and action, one which we had seen in the Calico Museum visit when 40 students had created such diverse expressions after one single shared visit to the Museum over one morning in the field in 1999 as shown in the previous post. This Calico Museum visit has been documented and a quicktime movie file with all the individual expressions of scenario as visualized by the group is available for download from this link below:
Calico Museum visit scenarios from DCC1999 class as a downloadable QuickTime movie file of 14.6 mb size.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Scenario Visualisation: Assignment on Composite Images and Mental Maps

Visualising the Rural Experience from the Environmental Perception visit to Hingolgadh, Bhoira and Gundala in one single half-imperial size sheet.

M P Ranjan

Image 01: DCC teachers reviewing the course strategy together and looking at books on sustainability before the class session starts on Monday.

We did not expect to see the full class on Monday since the long weekend was followed by two holidays on Tuesday and Wednesday due to Id and Holi. We therefore decided to have a lecture for those who would be present on Monday and introduce them to the idea of scenario visualization as part of the process of design and we introduced the Systems Model of the NID Way as an approach to design exploration and action. To see the model discussed in class the 4 page 1.1 mb pdf file of “Understanding Design Models” can be downloaded from here along with a paper as a 691 kb pdf file on “Drawing and Visualising Scenarios in Design” also from here. These resources will help in understanding how we use mental images to draw insights and the role that these rich external images help in forming a deep understanding of the context as well as particular items within, all in a organized pattern of relationships that eventually help produce meaning and make sense of the whole system.

Image 02: Environmental Perception course had all the Foundation students travel to the villages for a full week in the field. On their return the course teachers reviewed all the work done in the form of drawings and evaluated the student through a visible process. Each student showed their work in a compact display in the NID foyer over a three day period.

The Environmental Perception course has been part of the NID Foundation since 1976 and it has evolved over the years to help students understand the dynamics of learning from the field a number of complex attributes and relationships in a typical Indian rural setting. We have over the years used this experience to bring the fresh and intense exposure that the students have had into the Design Concepts and Concerns course as a real example to explore and examine in some detail. This scenario visualization assignment was tried out with special field visits to Calico Museum or to the city bazaar based on which the student was required to capture their full experience in a composite image that would show all the significant components of the experience as well as a scenario that was a whole image which could be appreciated at a glance. This year the students are asked to reflect on their field experience to try and fathom the visible as well as the intangible insights about design possibilities and use this reflection to build a scenario of their personal experience that can be shared with the whole class on Saturday morning.

Image 03: The DCC Black Board that shows the concepts that were explored in the class leading up to the setting of the scenario visualization assignment. The context is the DCC course areas of Roti, Kapada, Makkan, Bijlee and Rozgaar – Food, Clothing, Housing, Energy and Employment – all political issues as well as design opportunity areas for all of us.

The larger context of climate change and globalization trends brings us to the theme of this course which is to understand sustainability in the larger context as well as learn to think in terms of sustainable processes and strategies while we design for each of the pressing problems that challenge all of us in India today.

Image 04: An example of the Calico Museum visit scenario visualization (as a 14.6 mb movie) that was prepared in 1999 by Debashree as part of the DCC course. Each student had made their own version of the visit scenario and each was as different as the person who made the drawing. Debashree is seen in her picture wearing a white kurta and a polka-dot pant. This was one of the amazing expressions from that class.

Scenario visualization is a very individual form of expression and any style of drawing can be used and a wide awareness of Indian painting and drawing tradition is a useful asset in carrying out this task successfully. At the end of the Foundation programme at NID all students are usually quite fluent in drawing and visual expression and in this assignment the attempt is to be able to organize ones memories into coherent contexts and to arrange these into a composite image that can be used to tell a rich story about that particular experience. The scenario in its parts ahs rich detail and texture some of it in vivid colour and expression.

Image 05: The students who stayed back at NID sat through the three hour long discussion about scenario visualization and about the nature of design as we know it today. They shared with the teachers and the class many of their insights from the recent visit to the village.

We hope that the other students who have rushed back to meet their families will return refreshed and join the task of preparing the scenario visualization which is required to be done on half-imperial size paper set in the landscape format. Each student can make a rough sketch of the various parts of the scenario and much like a painter who makes quick sketches to shape the contours and details of a new painting, each student may need to explore both style and content on a series of doodles and then prepare the final layout of their scenario visualization on the cartridge paper for presentation to the class. The final presentation will be held in the NID foyer on Saturday 14th March 2009 at 10.00 am and some refreshments will be served. The class will meet for a lecture on scenario visualization on Thursday 12th March 2009 at 9.30 am and the following Friday can be used fully for the exploration and completion of the scenario of the village visit to Hingolgadh, Bhoira and Gundala during the Environmental Preception course last week.


M P Ranjan

Business Models: Learning from the Field

DCC2009 Business Models assignment: Learning from the Field in a design setting

Prof M P Ranjan

Image 01: Omlette-walla group with their visual presentation of the Ahmedabad street vendors who serve egg based food offerings.

Business Models are all around us and these are manifested in the form and structure of all the business that are active and working in the environment in which we all live and work. It is therefore possible for a sensitive designer to use their senses and the knowledge gleaned from the field to discover and articulate these into visible and invisible relationships through a process of observation, interaction, analysis, discourse and visualization based on which they could arrive at a new level of realisation about these. The particular business models that are embedded into each specific business that they wish to study in order to improve or compete with are laid bare in front of their eyes as the work progresses and they would then be able to explore alternatives to make these better or more effective as desired.

The assignments offered to the students deal with the intensive study of street food vendors in the field in Ahmedabad city using observation and interaction to gather insights about the particular vendor and his strategies as well as to look for more general situational characteristics and entrepreneurial behavior that helps the incumbent to succeed in a fairly hostile but opportunity rich environment of the city in need of certain types of services which are being addressed by the vendor in question. The students were assigned five types of street food vendors in Ahmedabad – The Omlette-wallah (Egg Omlette maker), The Bhajiya-walla (Fried Indian Snack), The Chai-walla (Tea vendor), The Pav Bhaji-wallah (Bread and Curry maker) and The Pani-Puri-walla (Fried Puri with liquid chutney) – and each group was required to study several live examples in the field in order to make a composite visualization of their insights that could be shared with the class at the end of this process.

Image 02: Bhajiya-walla group made a number of models to describe their understanding of the business models but their final offering was a paper model of the proposed hand cart which offered many new features and promised to solve many of the aspirations of the vendors as well as the imagined features that the group liked to provide to these vendors.

Here, when a design student is in learning mode, it is far easier to start with small and micro enterprises such as street food vendors who are easily accessible and can therefore be a very useful source of business learning and about a number of finer aspects of entrepreneurial behavior. Each of these micro businesses is indeed homologous to a huge multi-national business conglomerate in a similar line of business such as the ones involved in the preparation and delivery of food to their customers across several continents. The large and the small businesses all have to carry out much the same activities in much the same space in a city with the same collective audience but at a very different scale and reach but the components are all very similar.

Image 03: Chai-walla group showed the processes and relationships at the macro and the micro level of discourse and at the micro-level they used a literal flow of the liquid Chai – from cooking vessel to tea pot to tea cup and then to the mouth which is followed by the customers hand giving money to the maker who in turn uses the money to make more tea and make a profit in the process – a business process, all in one single flow…

Learning from the field is the way forward for designers who wish to work at the cutting edge of change and be able to shape the future with their insights and contributions. In real life too this would be the way they will have to work by gathering insights from the events and activities that are live and happening in their business space and with these insights they would be able to propose the new offerings that would go to the creation of the future landscapes around them. Design has moved forward from being focused on objects and spaces alone to include the business processes through which these objects, services and spaces are created and offered to the customers and managers too are now taking this area of design creation as an important part of their area of expertise.

Image 04: Pav Bhaji-walla group made a model of the street vendors cart using a table and a couple of bicycle wheels along with a few props as a backdrop for their skit which showed their understanding of the business models used by the vendor groups they had studied. The flow-charts in the background showed their understanding of these processes.

Another aspect of design learning that the assignment design has taken into consideration is that designers need to learn to work in teams and to collaborate with a large number of professionals from other fields of expertise. These group assignments that require the students to go outside the classroom and engage with public at large is an important element of design education that prepares them for the future where we would expect them to work in co-creation modes with stakeholders of their particular business and in doing so build the attitudes, abilities and knowledge that would help them perform at a high level of creativity in the rich matrix of our reality in urban and rural settings. This does imply that design education with these methods needs peace and security to be taken care of when the students move into the field, however we have had situations where student teams have had to confront with hostile reception due to various factors, some within their control and others which are not. However they need to be sensitized to these issues so that they can recognize any threat and take precautionary measures as may be needed while they are in the field.

Image 05: Pani Puri group made a meticulous model with a very well classified structure that showed their complex understanding of the business models and strategies followed by their street vendors, all supported by highly expressive renderings of each aspect of the structure and a flow of arrows that linked all these elements into a complete whole.

The kind of learning that happens in such a group interaction mode and in contact with the field is very rich with first hand experience and deep insights are formed in all the stages of the assignment, particularly at the stage of visualization and presentation since these are carried out in a reflective mode based on the real experiences in the field and not just on bookish information or on the internet download type of knowledge that is delivered by remote experts in a loaded form of professional jargon which may or may not be truly accessible to the student. After three days and nights in the field with their respective street vendors and a good deal of time back in the studio as a group to process all the field data into images and texts that made sense the students spent a full day in making presentations to each other and the teachers, all resulting in a great deal of learning for all concerned.
Prof M P Ranjan