Design Process

DESIGN PROCESS Evolution of designs within design space

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Design as Information processing A computational view of design requires the understand of design activity as an information processing activity that commences with limited amount of information and culminates with the complete informational model of the artefact.

It is known that design is a process through which uncertainty is reduced and complexity is increased.

There is a direct link here between creative freedom and uncertainty; it is uncertainty that holds the creative space around design propositions. If there is low levels of uncertainty it means that you are at the tail end of the design process dealing with a mature representation of design. It also means that you have exhausted the promise of possibilities that uncertainties hold within its folds.

High levels of creative freedom are always coupled with high levels of uncertainty and vice verso; low levels of creative freedom is coupled with high levels of certainty. You will also observe that, conditions of reduced creativity generally accompanies routine design activity, (most of which can be automated) and conditions of high creativity always accompany creative design but that too only in the early stages of design where the levels of uncertainty is high. By the same token even creative design always involves more routine design activity at the tail end of the design process. It will be therefore safe to state that creative design comes to play in full force only at concept stage.

It is also known that most of the important decisions are made in the early stages of design with high levels of uncertainty. In other words, the performance space of early stage design is highly unreliable, because of the uncertainties involved. Yet, important decisions need to be made at this stage and these decisions will have significant impact in the final design outcome. It is precisely such uncertainty that makes creative design a complex activity. Often, designer makes ill‐informed judgments at the early stages of design (which they find out only later on) and this is part and parcel of the creative design process. Well informed decisions can only be made further along the line, once the design representation reaches a level of maturity required to make well informed decisions. You may have seen designers going 2

back and forth in their design process not because they are inefficient (as many design researchers make them out to be) but because they have discovered something that they did not know about at an earlier stage in the design process. Creative design entails iterations and the designers understanding of the solutions space develops throughout the design process. In other words the designer’s understanding of the design and performance space co‐evolve during design development. This is the basic of the Concept Knowledge theory (or CK theory).

C‐K theory of design Before C‐K theory, there were so many other design theories wishing to eradicate the messiness of the design process and instill some kind of procedural order that engineers are familiar with. This pipe dream, espoused mainly by design academics created considerable damage to university level design according to Fred Brooks. Luckily, much of design practice took little notice of academic theories of design – as practicing designer had a better understanding of the complexities involved in real world design problems and they developed their own way of dealing with it. C‐K theory is of recent origin and to a large extent captures what happens during a design process.

C-K design theory or concept-knowledge theory is both a design theory and a theory of reasoning in design. It defines design reasoning as a logic of expansion processes, i.e. a logic that organizes the generation of unknown objects. The theory builds on several traditions of design theory, including systematic design, axiomatic design, creativity theories, general design theories, and artificial intelligence-based design models. Claims made for C-K design theory include that it is the first design theory that: 1.

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The name of the theory is based on its central premises: the distinction between two spaces:

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 From Wikipedia

Offers a comprehensive formalization of design that is independent of any design domain or object Explains invention, creation, and discovery within the same framework and as design processes.

a space of concepts C a space of knowledge K.

The process of design is defined as a double expansion of the C and K spaces through the application of four types of operators: C→C, C→K, K→C, K→K

CK theory quite rightly points to the relationship between concepts and knowledge. Creative Designs is modelled as knowledge expansion activity. Design representations are objects through which designers gain a better understanding of the design problem and related performance issues. Design activity therefore creates new knowledge that re‐directs the search – giving rise to the emergent nature of design; in that, the direction of its evolution is informed by previous actions thus making it somewhat unpredictable. Design is now accepted to be a “emergent” process by more enlighten design researchers but attempts to streamline it also continue. Simply stated, as designers develop designs they develop a deeper understating of the relationships between design aspects under their control and how it would

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affect the performance of the design under development. This is correctly seen as knowledge expansion resulting from concept exploration in CK theory.

Creative design processes are fundamentally messy Thought this is obvious to most designers, it may be not so to many others especially those who are trained in engineering and other forms of “rational” sciences. The development of science in the western world was based on rationalisation. It was built around a culture of removing all that is irrational and subjective and replacing it with numeratable certainties. Design never sat well with this culture and soon it was separated out and assigned to humanities that deals with all issues that are human and therefore complex and un numeratable. Design sat happily within schools of humanities till recently till developments in biology and computer sciences dragged some parts of design into its core. Thanks to this we now have a greater biological and computational understanding of design. Biological and computational frame works have enriched our understanding of design and have made it now into something else that is far more fundamental in its relationships to many emerging fields of science and technology – that are yet to come to terms with its messiness (in the hands of human designers).

Accepting the messiness of creative processes has important implications as it forces a clearer distinction between routine and creative design. It also allows us to see merits in its inefficiencies which include wild goose chases, visitation of dead ends, worn out reverse gear and occasional crashes. Designs processes that do not entail these are not creative design processes. Given the need to continuously re‐scheme and re start design exploration makes methods that require the setting up of special procedures for exploration impractical. Mental and computational methods that work on top of or in parallel to CAD systems become much more feasible.

The implications of uncertainty in optimisation Any performative measure of early stage concepts involves inaccuracies due to incomplete information.

Those who we are guided by the false belief that they can create a single value (or fitness function) to reliably ascertain the goodness of the design need to consider the cumulative effect of uncertainties. If there are five factors involved each with an uncertainty of 10% then the total level of uncertainty could reach up to 50%. This cumulative error perhaps explains the high ratio or research publications on multi criteria optimisation and its dearth of use in real life creative conceptual design. In addition the impracticality involved in formulating numerically the right mix for goodness induces an equally large portion of uncertainly. The very ability to define the right goal is seen by many as the most difficult challenging part of any design activity. It is also known that goals themselves change and evolve during creative design development process due to new knowledge emerging out of design explorations. Setting a goal and shooting towards it does happen in design but on an iterative basis. While iterative optimisation with evolving design representations and evolving goals states could fit well (if it is practical) within design processes, the notion of a singular optimisation process makes little sense in creative design.

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: again inducing a significant dose of uncertainty. Hence multi criteria optimisation is rarely used in creative design development.

When can optimisations be used in design?

All optimisation process work extremely well on paper: Thanks to this, the mathematics behind optimisation processes is extremely well developed and much published. They work well for single criteria problems operating in conditions of high levels of certainty – that do not exist in most designs problems. If they exist, it is because the designer has shrunk the design space to a sliver within which the optimisation process can happily operate. Often in such cases the numerical certainty compensates for the suboptimal selection made within a calculable portion of the design space. Optimisation without the consideration of the nature and extent of design spaces ends up being fundamentally sub‐optimal – defeating the very propose of optimisation which is often to find the best solution according to a set of Thought single criteria design problem – rarely exist in the real world design problems, optimisation methods can be used to point to the direction of desirable solutions. In other words in the CK frame work they can help create knowledge. However, it can also be argued that if a design can be numerically optimised it is not a “design” problem – in the real sense of world. One of the factors that differentiate routine designs from creative designs (or what used to be called wicked design problems) is the difficulty in mapping between design space and performance space. If the relationship between design space and performance space is known then the design problem is of a simple kind and may even be disqualified by some as a “design problem”. Problems of this type can be solved by using “look up tables” which connects design parameters to performance parameters. Lookup tables were extensively used in engineering design before the proliferation of computers which now facilitate multi dimensional look up tables. Computation also allows the calculation of performative aspects on the fly – without the need to create and store performative values. Engineering design processes involve many single criteria optimisation problems devoid of uncertainly – which are easily solved. Optimisation methods are ideally suited for such problems.

Why human designers will continue to be in demand

Human Imagination

Creative design processes require designers to make important decisions early on in the design process when the design is not fully formed in conditions of high uncertainty. It is human imagination that forms the unformed aspects of the design allowing designers to anticipate what the design may be. Human designers do not think in terms of design spaces. They think in multiple spaces all at the same time. But their thinking is always centred on a design representation (thus the need for sketching).

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A human imagination enlarges the reach of these instances – thus facilitating the exploration of much larger design spaces. Hence, the designer’s ability to imagine plays a critical role in the enlarging the extent of design exploration. This is where creativity, experience and awareness of the designer in terms of what is possible and what is desired comes into play. It is known that designers think in multi dimensional spaces; eg, social, cultural, political. These influence the every instance of design exploration both as a source of inspiration and as a source of reference. We suspect the mapping between these external spaces and early stage design exploration to be very complex and is beyond our reach for now.

But we must acknowledge their existence and their importance. Our focus here is the mapping between design space and performance space as designs undergo development. We must also take note that multiple design representations are created, discarded and sometimes re‐combined during the design development process, through which the designer develops knowledge about the performative aspects of the prospective solutions.

Aesthetic

Political

Cultural

Creative Expansion Design Instance

The messiness of design exploration is shown as a zig zag line travelling through the parametric representational space of a design. In reality, designers will start off with multiple sketch representations.

Parameters come into play much later when the design enters a more mature stage; but the concept of mapping remains valid throughout design development. Such mapping happens within the designers mind. The zig zagness is caused by knowledge expansion as designers hit performative walls and are forced to change directions. These direction changes are triggered by complex performative surfaces and the designers awareness of their existence and the ways in which they react to them. This makes it not only unpredictable, but dependent on previous design actions. This aspect of the creative design process is recognized as emergence.

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We can now see how the creative exploration (mostly done with pencil) maps into the performance space (in the designers mind) as the designer scribbles on. You can also see how these regions are expanded by the designers own imagination. In short the designers’ creative imagination plays an expansion role in design development allowing creative designers to explore larger tracks of designs space around design instances than those who are not. Much of the mental energies of the designer is consumed by this. This explains why cup of coffee laced with brandy (to help expand the creative space) seem to have beneficial effects in early stage design.

The energetic of human design exploration Human design processes is powered by the most complex machine in the universe – the human brain. It’s capacity is often underrated especially by those who are seduced by the powers of computers.

“To put our findings in perspective, the 6.4*1018 instructions per second that human kind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second” – World's total CPU power: one human brain

This machine of unbelievable complexity and capacity has limitations in terms of energy; in that it can only dispense a limited amount of energy. This is a significant limitation that sets the limits of the extent of the design space that can be explored mentally. But the human brain is brilliant in many ways with capacities to develop methods that work within such limitations. The human design process is one such development – not to be seen as inefficient by any standards. Human design processes have so far evolved under the limitations of human brain capacity – a limit that we many now transcend: But only now.

We need to study the human design processes with interest because of its high efficiencies. This is not the way many design research approach the subject – many are focused on removing its apparent inefficiencies. There are many publications to this effect by optimisation experts who see themselves as design theorist, wanting to optimise the way the brain works; not that it cannot be. It can be by appropriate design training but not by procedurizing design. Design training introduces designers to the messiness of design and how to navigate complex design spaces. There are many skills to be learnt. But each designers has his/her thinking pattern which leads to particular types of design and design training is about exposing design students to such patterns while encouraging to develop their own. This should explain the fundamental differences between studio based training and a lot more procedural training that engineering students go through. Thought the ultimate aim of computational design may be to outdo the human brain and exceed its capacity; like all good students we need to respect and appreciate its marvellous abilities. We should not be guided into thinking that by purely re‐working mental procedures into a more orderly state, we can improve design processes despite the efforts of many who continue labour in this direction. A trained designers mind is perhaps already near to an optimal state in the way it approaches design problems – within the limits of experience and conditions of training and 7

practice. We need to appreciate the workings of the human desing process in the context of the energetic limits of the human brain. We need to explore instead on new possibilities that may arise if these limits are extended through computational means.

Knowledge is a double edged sword Great designers are called Creative – not knowledgeable. Knowledge and creativity seem to have an uneasy relationship. You may have found knowledgeable people to be less creative – because they know everything. But then extremely knowledgeable people behave differently – for they know the limits of their knowledge and are curious about what lies beyond those limits. They have a childlike inquisitive nature and are open to new thoughts and new experiences. So it seems that limited knowledge ahs a constraining effect where greater knowledge and confidence has a liberating effect. We have to be careful here, in that knowledge makes us efficient as it provides us the means to guide our actions towards fruitful ends. Those without knowledge are less successful in this. But then this guidance is in fact a form of constraint – that makes us less creative and more objective. It is known that designers need both abilities. They need to be creative as well as objective. Pure creativity or pure objectivity will lead to either dysfunctional or uncreative design.

Because designs is about pushing boundaries greater knowledge especially about constraints – will help designers push that boundary enabling them to explore creative possibilities that we closed to those with less knowledge. We will refer to such knowledge as “boundary knowledge” which is different in flavour to procedural knowledge. Procedural knowledge is what is required to realize the design in the latter stages of design when the level of uncertainty is sufficiently low. Procedural knowledge creates efficiencies not in search but in execution. Boundary knowledge extends the design space allowing designers to consider greater possibilities. The way in which the use of knowledge and creativity is deployed remains an art.

Too much creativity can be chaotic and too much knowledge leads to constriction of design space.

Obsession with efficiency also forces designs to charter pre‐charted territories.

In most complex designs performance spaces are found to be treacherous terrains – like mountain ranges with canyons where small changes can push you over the brink. Whiles routine designs will keep you within the safety of pre‐charted territory; creative design is bound to take you into territories where others have not ventured – depending on your appetite for risks – because dangers await you there. It is precisely the knowledge of these dangers that limits the bounds of known territories. Well honed design processes train you to identify those danger zones and stay clear off the edge. While experienced designers know how to identify those edges and stay off them. Expert designers know how to fall of them and climb back in. Brilliant designers know how to move those edges. They become famous by doing so, because once the edge is moved others follow suite to start playing in newly established but safe territories. Knowledge sets limits on creative exploration and creative exploration creates new knowledge – this is the essence of CK theory.

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Creative designs often lie at the edge of the viability space. Those who push the limits can we divided into two categories: 1) Those who do not know that such limits exist 2) Those who know and are willing to push it

Viability Boundary Unviable

Most of the flashy creative designs coming out of designs schools belong to the first category. Schools are understandably keen to attract more students to do “cool” stuff even thought mature designers will classify them as idiotic (if they are not involved in teaching). In this context creative solutions are easily conceived and presented as real by those who wish to take leave from reality – because they have a licence for it called the “creative licence”.

The students who get lower grades are often those who do not exercise this licence out of integrity, fear or inability (making it difficult to assess which one). But often in my experiences duller students come up with more creative results in cases where they are encouraged by staff who are keen to show off the creativity coming out of their studios. It is the acceptance of the constraints of reality that make designs appear common and uninteresting. But if licences are issued freely every one can fly.

Then there are those who out of sheer naivety take leaps that take them well beyond the region considered viable by others. If they are determined enough not to be discouraged by bruises and ridicule they may suffer, they may clamber back into safer grounds; the exceptional ones amongst them will move the bounds of viability to make their designs viable. Apple is known to do this. They were able to push the limits of manufacturing to enable them to achieve edge conditions that they desired. This gave their products creative distinction and helped create barriers that only other well resourced companies can cross in a short time. Let us call them “boundary pushers”. Boundary pushers create boundary knowledge taking designs into new territories.

Then there are those who know that the bounds have already moved due to enlargements of markets, technologies and preferences and direct their creative exploration into newly opened regions. While they do not expend effort in pushing the boundaries they are able to move in there. This is the strategy that companies like because it reduces investments and risk required for pushing boundaries at the same time creating differentiation that the customers may value. The same happens in architecture. It is a “me too “ approach and works well in conditions where the possibility spaces has expanded suddenly due to changing market, demography and manufacturing technologies. While the designs that appear out of such schemes seem creative they are soon overrun by bolder companies that have greater commitment to creating sustainable competitive advantages by mastering the art of boundary pushing.

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Then there are others who work well outside the bounds of performance. We can divide them into two categories. One that is genuinely ahead of time, where while the designs cannot be currently realized – but they could be in the future. The other is the random type and may serve as eye candy to attract clients, get into magazines. They may also be created out of sheer frustration of real life constraints or out of pure joy; or they may be created simply to demonstrate that their creative license is not close to expiry.

Efficiency in design exploration The limits of exploration are set my many factors, design constrains, time, team size and so many other factors. In the context of design exploration, given the vastness of design space the energies required for exploration is a major factor. The quality of the design outcome is dependent on both the extent of the design space covered the quality of designer’s ability, imagination and judgment. The extent of the design space covered will depend on the number of distinctively different (covering different regions of design space) design concepts explored and the extent of the regions (around it) considered. The designer’s ability may be seen in terms of setting up exploration schemes and navigating it. The designers’ imagination will come into play in defining the extent region around emergent solutions and ability to spot promising candidate solutions (which comes from experience and awareness) and finally judgment.

Judgment here relates to the understanding of the performance landscape. A designers with poor judgment will dispense larger amounts of time in design regions with poor performative characteristics (without knowing it) where as a designer with good judgment will be aware of regions of more promising possibilities and will dispense more energies in those regions than in regions of low performance. A well developed designerly mind will not only explore a larger area of performance space it will dispense such effort within the viable region: Whereas, an untrained designer will dispense a larger portion of efforts outside the viable region. It is thus the knowledge and experience of the designer that guides the judicious navigation of the performance space.

But this not how it happens We are trying to trace here the exploration of design in design space, a hidden underlying layer that is not visible. This is not how designers conceive design exploration. Designers are often “personality buffs” in that they hone their designerly personality and through that define thier behaviours in search space. One particular designer hates purple – so he would avoid the design spaces that involve the colour purple. His work will be concentrated in regions of the design space where there is a predominance of the color pink.

The designs of Frank Gehry will be in regions where there are no vertical walls. The works of Frank Loyed Wright will be concentrated in regions where there are dominant horizontal lines. The work of designers can be seen to occupy particular regions of design space. The work of really great architects initially appear beyond on the very edges of performance space (visual characteristics are also part of performance space) . If they are particularly successful others will soon move into the same region.

A better way to view this is to look at the computational characteristics of designers through the window of their work habits and belief systems. These are the real ways through which designers navigate design space – without a conscious frame work. Many designers are serious about design: So serious that not only their design but their life is defined by it. They both suffer and benefit from this high level of 10

integration. They benefit from it because their entire emotional and mental state is highly tuned for design exploration. They suffer from it, because they are locked onto a life‐long process of tunning their ways in non‐computational ways – that the vast majority remain unable to accept/participate/come to terms with the vast world of possibilities opened up by computation.

How computation is changing the nature of design There are many aspects of design that are currently beyond computation, but there are many more that now fall within its folds. What we are seeing is the massive increase in the complexity and sophistication of computational tools making them easier and easier to use and more affordable as well. In terms of design exploration there are three main benefits : 1) Better mapping of performative space (increasingly in early stage design) 2) Reducing the imagination load ( computers can display 1000s of designers tirelessly) 3) Expansion of exploration through generative methods We are increasingly seeing the combined use of computational and mental energies of designers being used effectively in design. But step 3 is yet to come into full force. And when it does, it will create a seismic shift in design.

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