PART I: Design as Dreamcatcher
The Role of Design pg.73
Our inventions are likely to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. —– Henry David Thoreau
The process is represented as a funnel, since the number of concepts to emerge is always anticipated to be fewer than the number that enter. Design is a process of elimination & filtering as well as generation.
It is just as inappropriate to have an engineer manage the design process as it is to have a designer who graduated from art college be responsible for the products’s engineering details.
A representation of the proposed ongoing responsibilities of the various teams throughout the overall process. Of central importance for our purposes is the notion that “design” includes the design of the business & engineering plans, as well as the product itself. In this way it is no different than filmmaking.
The Question of Design pg.95
Societies do not evolve because their members simply grow old, but rather because their mutual relations are transformed. —- Hya Prigogine
The activity of sketching is design. So, even if we can’t define design, we can perhaps nevertheless still gain some insights into its nature & practice by taking some time to delve the nature of sketching.
Figure 32: Two Renderings of a Mountain Bike
The above view is expository. It shows the design in an objective way. In the one on the facing page, it was decided to render the bike in a stance that was less neutral —- one that started to project some character, a kind of embedded playfulness.