Summary of the description of design

After reading two weeks’ articles on the topic of engineering, I come across some different approaches to define what is engineering. As I read more, my uncertainty in understanding the word “engineering” grows. When I read a new article, I keep revisiting articles that I read before and try to find some similarities to help me link the fragment of ideas together. The most unfamiliar word in my understanding of aspect of “engineering” is “design”. Now I want to summarize my understanding related to “design” from the articles of Jonassen et al, Seely, Dorst, and Figueiredo.

The paper written by Jonassen et al. talked mainly about the attributes of workplace problem to address the need of redesigning curricula and experiences that better prepare students for workplace. They did mention a bit about “design problems” by saying that they were the most complex and ill-structured problems, which were usually vaguely defined or had unclear goals with unstated constraints. They said “design problems” had multiple solution paths, solutions and criteria for evaluating solutions.

In Seely’s paper, I simply interpret “design experience” to be problem-solving skills and practical experiences, and “design” to be problem-solving and practice.

I find lots of concepts related to “design” in Dorst’s article, which need to be further digested (especially the underlined phrases). He introduced several people’s approaches to “design”. 1. Simon defined the concept of “well-structured problems” as opposed to “ill-structured problems”, and considered “design” to be the solution to “ill-structured problems”. But in his definition, whether a problem was ill- or well-structured depended on the availability of solution methods, not by the property of the problem itself. 2. Dorst and Cross described “design” as a coevolution of the problem and the solution. 3. Dreyfus and Suchman described “design problems” as situated problems - if the designer thought the situation to be problematic, then the problem was a “design problem”. Meanwhile, the problem-solving steps could be logical, routine, and implicit, without any real choice by the designer. 4. Hatchuel illustrated that “design” was not merely problem solving, but it also contained other processes. 5. Dorst described in his article the term “design” without using “design problem”. He used paradox instead. He illustrated that “design” was the resolution of paradoxes between different aspects in a design situation.

When I revisit Figueiredo’s paper, I find he tried to give an all-sided definition of “design”. He said that the epistemology of “design” was related to “wicked problems” – the problems that were so complex and close interdependence with social and organizational factors that could not be handled by traditional scientific approaches. He stated that the evolution of systems design had been described as incorporating four categories: design as functional analysis, design as problem-solving (Simon’s approach), design as problem-setting, and design as emergent evolutionary learning (Dreyfus and Suchman’s approach).

To this point, the concepts of “design” are still fragments in my mind and need to be integrated. I could just figure out some key words related to “design”: problem-solving, ill-structured problem, vague and unclear. I hope that my understanding of the word “design” will get clearer by reading more materials in following weeks.