Everyone knows that designers make choices. They sketch out dozens of options, then they choose the best one(s) and refine it/them. Eventually, they end up with a detailed design that can be realised in some way.
This account of design makes sense for product design, graphic design, fashion, interiors and architecture, and most 'craft' disciplines within design. However, not all designers sketch. Many designer-makers work directly with their materials. They may well design (i.e., sketch and draw) before making, but they do not need to, and some prefer not to. Potters may play with clay, and wood turners literally have to go with the grain. Once the latter have cut into their wood, there is no going back, whereas a potter can collapse and squash their turned form into a lump of clay and start again. There is a sense in which any choices by wood turners are final, due to the resistant nature of their materials, whereas a potter's choices can be erased, due to the pliant nature of theirs.
When sketching, new options are simply added by sketching something else. Unlike a hands-on designer maker, sketchers must neither live with existing cuts into resistant materials, nor must they reform pliant ones to move onto the next option.
Designing is thus not just a process of choosing between options, it is also, sometimes predominantly, a question of choosing which options to explore. A wood turner quickly gets committed to a course of action, whereas a potter can erase history, and design sketchers simply add another sketch, often on the same sheet of paper. The question arises as to whether these designers are making different sorts of choices.
If we consider the end points of making and sketching, then there are different types of choices here. For the potter and the wood turner (and also the software hacker), the designer-maker is making choices about the final artefact, forming it directly, hands-on. For the sketcher (who may also be a potter or wood turner), the designer is making choices about a conceived artefact, which does not yet exist, and most probably never will, given the extent of options under consideration. However, these are still choices about artefacts, so types of design choices exist in some form of hierarchy.
Getting from a sketch to the final artefact may not be straightforward. A fashion designer has to cut patterns, which they or a supporting craft technician must then use to guide the process of fabric cutting and garment assembly. Similarly, product designers need to convert sketches into technical drawings (engineering/CAD) that represent the first step of a (increasingly automated) manufacturing process. No further design choices may be made at this point, since all materials and components may have been chosen and sourced. During manual garment assembly however, design decisions continue to be made, especially during the phases where a 2D drawing becomes a 3D assembly of a pattern on a tailor's dummy before reversion to a 2D patten on paper or in digital form. Again, the choices appear to be different here, but whether these are different types of choice depends on your level of abstraction. At the most abstract level, all the examples here are still choices about artefacts.
It is thus possible to conceive of design as a set of stages that begins with ideas and ends up with things. Some product design methodologies are clearly structured in this way, such as the Stage-Gate Model in product design and the Waterfall Model in engineering design, where initial divergent exploratory research and discovery stages (including conceptual design) are followed by scoping, requirements definition, detailed design, testing and launch stages. Such views of design are wholly artefact- or technology-centred. However, in choosing to test, design teams have to make choices that are not about what an artefact could or should be, but instead are about how the (finished) artefact performs in some way(s). It is very hard, if not impossible, to identify an abstract concept that can span both choices about artefacts and choices about how they will be tested. Put more briefly, what something is (essence) and what something does (performance) are hard to unify within the same category. If there were one, then there would be a word that spanned, e.g., both requirements/specifications and validation/verification, and to my knowledge, there isn't. This isn't to say however that the two are not linked: clearly what gets validated or verified should relate to some extent to the requirements or specifications, but these will not always be coterminous. Testing often reveals gaps and flaws in requirements or specifications, even when choices over validation/verification were determined primarily by feasibility or a range of cost considerations.
All designs get tested in some way. Even amateur designer makers who are not producing to sell will form their own judgements as to whether a design 'worked' or not. Commercial designer-makers can test their designs directly with gallery owners, retail outlets and consumers. Fashion designs may similarly be evaluated via orders from retailers and consumer sales figures, but these in turn may be influenced by press reviews. We can reasonably conclude that choices about artefacts and choices about evaluations are distinct types of design choice, and that there is no level of abstraction at which they could become instances of the same type of choice. Each type of activity can be carried out by different roles, often in different organisations (e.g., product designers/manufacturers and reviewers/consumer organisations or the press).
Artefact development and evaluation are separable. They can be independent activities, although when they are, evaluations may fail to deliver value for design, but in philosophy the latter is a pragmatic axiological question (i.e., about what is valuable), whereas the distinctions between choice types are conceptual ontological ones (i.e., about what exists). However, the issues here are not idle philosophical ones, since if there are distinct types of design choices at the highest possible levels of abstraction, then a comprehensive framework of approaches to design and evaluation would need to cover all such types of choice. Furthermore, in so far as the value of distinct design activities is increased by co-ordination with other activities (e.g., in engineering design between requirements specification and verification/validation), then approaches are not only required to generate options and to make different types of choices, but also to co-ordinate these different types of choices.
Choices about artefact features/qualities and choices about evaluation activities are thus distinct. The question arises as to whether there are further types of design choice at a similar highest level of abstraction, that is, choice types that can be shown to be ontologically distinct in a philosophical sense. A further question arises as to whether such abstract choice types can be arbitrarily combined in different design settings, or whether some combinations are specifically favoured within specific cultures of design's historically separate craft disciplines such as interior design or product design. My next post will offer some answers to both these questions.
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