Action orientation in design methodology.

“Don’t think, observe!” demanded Ludwig Wittgenstein from his readers in order to overcome academic prejudices on human speech. We demand from the readers of this paper that they follow us through part of a development process and compare our observation with their own design experience. Afterwards, we consider the question “Where does ‘good design’ emerge in the product development process?”. In our opinion, an unprejudiced analysis of the observation reveals that ‘good design’ mainly has to be elaborated upon “between” the methodical landmarks of the development process. Because of this, we suggest a model of the basic development process which distinguishes between a level of action and a level of results. A survey of the development methods available, shows that most of them are description and documentation oriented design methods which focus on structuring the level of results. Only a few, albeit the more popular development methods, support concrete design work on the level of action. This fact indicates that we should review the assumptions upon which we base the development of new design methods. In particular, methods coming from the academic community tend to ignore the basic laws of design work on the level of action. This is the reason why we will try to state, once again, the laws of design action using concepts coming from the psychological theory of action. We will conclude our paper by defining design work as a discursive process and showing some of the consequences which arise from this understanding for the development of methodical support.     «

“Don’t think, observe!” demanded Ludwig Wittgenstein from his readers in order to overcome academic prejudices on human speech. We demand from the readers of this paper that they follow us through part of a development process and compare our observation with their own design experience. Afterwards, we consider the question “Where does ‘good design’ emerge in the product development process?”. In our opinion, an unprejudiced analysis of the observation reveals that ‘good design’ mainly has to b...     »