Comments on: Quantifying Design

By: Can Duruk

Can Duruk — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 07:08:29 +0000

The first thing I thought when I read the post was John Maeda becoming the next president of RISD. He’s a computer scientist and it hardly gets any more quantified than that and he’s becoming the next president of a very well established design school. But then Maeda’s works can probably be considered “computational design” rather than quantifying design.

I have to say I agree with Jeff on almost all his points. You might remember me saying in class why we like certain colors and why some colors go well with others is a function of our biology. Consider this: when you turn a color picture into B&W, you actually have to change the RGB values according to the number of receptors for certain colors in your eyes. I’m pretty sure people found out about how to B&W a picture before they found out about color receptors but that’s still pretty interesting, to me at least.

Finding out what works best will not bring an end to creativity. It’s true that 6+4=10 but 5+5 is also 10. In fact, there are infinitely many ways to get 10 using two numbers. Taking things that work well apart will only mean that you’ll be able to get where you want faster and easier next time. It does not mean that you’ll actually come up with something along the design process.

It’s been a long night and it was hard for me to add anything to this already fruitful discussion but this is my two cents.

By: Kip

Kip — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 02:00:24 +0000

Sounds like what the lady martial artist says in the movie, “Best of the Best.” “Winning is not a sometime-thing – it’s an all-time thing.”

By: Carl

Carl — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:22:29 +0000

In case you were wondering the source of “habit” discussion:

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. – Aristotle

By: Jamin

Jamin — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:57:31 +0000

Dick asked me if knowledge embodied in the knower is a habit. Carl is just asking how I define habit. In Dick’s case, he introduced the word habit. In Carl’s case, Schon uses the words of a baseball pitcher who refers to “winning habits” during performance. In both cases, habit would not be my word of choice.

However, I don’t interpret Schon to mean that reflection is a habit. By habits, I think Schon means intuitive action. Reflection focuses on the “outcomes of action, the action itself, and the intuitive knowing implicit in the action.”

If a habit is intuitive action, then perhaps my answer to Dick would be yes (earlier I thought it was no). But design isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, about repeating habits, as each situation is different, making any habit only partially useful. Reflection-in-action is a conversation between action and situation. We might say that this yields better habits.

As for habits being practices of reflection-in-action, if Carl means that habits are developed through reflection-in-action, then it would seem we could interpret Schon as he suggests.

By: Kip

Kip — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 23:29:37 +0000

Haha. Jamin, isn’t Carl’s question the exact same question that Dick asked you in January?