Design & Critical Thinking Manifesto (of sorts)

Questioning the designers' role in society.

Written by Marc Baumgartner, based on discussions with Daiana Zavate, Krasi Bosinkova, John Mortimer, Cameron Norman, Johanny Pestalozzi, Jonathan Edwards, and Kevin Richard from and for the Design & Critical Thinking community.

The Question

It’s unusual for a manifesto to begin with a question, but that’s where we are at this point in our journey, or at least it’s where we will begin.

What does it mean to become a better designer?

Over the next few weeks we’ll be exploring that question in different ways. That will require defining the elements within the question:

• Who is a designer?

• How do designers become better at their job?

Pinning down these definitions, even if possible, may not be desirable because they set fixed boundaries. But let’s allow that the question can be valid even with floating definitions (before we decide that this question to be either intractable, or not a worthy starting point).

Crucially, this is not meant to get us into a semantic tug of war. The intention is to allow us to find agency in the conversations. We hope to leave the conversations with a better idea of how critical thinking affects design practice. We think this approach will help us become better designers by whatever definition suits us.

The Starting Point

Herbert Simon stated that:

“To design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”

Designing is one of the most complex activities we, as humans, undertake. It is certainly equally complex to attempt to define it. The statement by Herbert Simon may not be perfect but for two reasons we think it’s a reasonable starting point: first, the author and his work are fairly well-known; second, this definition casts a very generous definition of design (specifically one that resides in the activity and not in a specific discipline).

If we dive into the quote a bit deeper, we can extract three strong themes:

1. Designers aim to effect material change in the conditions of the world (the why).

2. The act of designing looks to the future (the what).

3. Designers devise courses of action, that is to say, not only proposing futures, but advocating the ways and means by which those can be achieved (the how).

The other thing to consider is that by any definition design is both a generalised human activity as well as a set of specific professions and disciplines. That is to say we can ask different questions about design. We can inquire how it pertains to specific disciplines, like the techniques of a given medium (for example the understanding of the strength of materials with regards to furniture design, gestalt principles as they pertain to poster design etc..). And, we can also ask questions about those aspects of design that fall under the auspices of a generalised human activity.

The Middle (where we are currently at)

If we accept the broad definition of design, we can state that some knowledge about design (some design expertise) is common to designers as a whole, and therefore outlines a common “domain” of design.

If there is a common domain of design, it is certainly contributing to materialising a conception of the future.

At this point, we can wonder how do we get “better” at that.

We hope to shape together with the ideas about “design”, “designers”, and “better design.” It’s a journey of discovery.