I’ve heard “fourth order design” thrown around a lot lately. The more I hear it, the more I would rather hear what the the person is really talking about. It makes me wonder whether the term helps clarify anything or actually muddies design. Can we not call design “design”?
To a degree, I think that’s what the Down with Innovation article was saying:
“Design is now so important, it seems, that designers can no longer be trusted with it, and to make it absolutely clear that control has moved into someone else’s hands, design needs to be given a fancy new name. Call it design thinking. Call it innovation.”
Is fourth order design along these lines? Perhaps not now, but it has potential. I wonder if it would be useful if it was a widely used term, or if it would be as meaningful as innovation.
Speaking of which, this wonderfully illustrated piece coming out of Adaptive Path’s recent MX conference contains the “I” word. Reading it, I wondered why innovation was mentioned at all. Could we not replace “innovation” with “design”? Would it make more sense?
I’m a bit against what I’m about to do, but let’s compare the definitions of innovate and design. Let’s start with innovate, which in Merriam-Webster only has one useful definition.
innovate (transitive verb) to introduce as or as if new
Design, on the other hand, is much richer, with lots of definitions. For brevity, I’ll only pull the first.
design (transitive verb) to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan
Given these two definitions, innovate does not work in the above piece: “Why innovate? To create better solutions, organizations, and world.” Introducing something new is no guarantee of better. This is the problem with innovation as a goal. If I were betting on better solutions, organizations, and world, I would put my money on design.
Personally, I would like to see designers call design by its name. That goes for business folks as well. Calling design something else so that it’s not scary will not help the discipline. Fourth order design, at least, contains the word design.
A concern I have for fourth order design is that while it may encapsulate some ideas about (new?) ways to think about design, it may also splinter design by alluding to a hierarchy. Fourth is better than first, second, and third, assuming higher is better. Though I could see businesses feeling more comfortable dealing with design that is perceived to be on a higher level.
We have a hard enough time being on the same page when talking about design. Throwing around fourth order design does not make it any more clear. To make my point, I purposely haven’t defined fourth order design in this post.
The way I see it, “fourth order” is Dick’s special shorthand way of labeling an area of design practice centered around problems that are highly intangible, wicked, and complex. I wouldn’t get hung up on the term. Nobody goes around saying, “Heyyy, i’m a fourth order designer! Wanna have a drink?” :-) It’s really about applying the design process (and more specifically the rhetorical arts/methods of the architectonic perspective) to problems that have existed forever (culture, process, organizations, systems) but never had the benefit of the holistic, humanistic design/innovation POV, but always more of the entitative system mechanical POV or other less enlightened POV’s. That in itself is the novelty and potential for both the design profession and the targeted problem space, imho :-)
Laid out end to end, Dick’s four orders describe nicely the spectrum of problems from the material to the immaterial, which raises questions about the applicability of design at various points within that spectrum. It’s not about seeing it as “better” or “more elite” than other kinds of design.
In my view, All that other stuff about “designers losing control of design” is just grumping by those not willing to admit the fundamentally liberal, pluralistic nature of design, in all its expanding forms of thought and practice. New connections, ideas, territories, spaces, all contribute to the thriving of the field…