The Doctrine of Placements

A deep dive into the Four Orders of Design and the systems for and in which designers design.

Note: This was originally shared in my Revue newsletter, “Explorations in Design.” With Twitter sunsetting the app I needed a home for some writings, so I’m putting them on Medium for now.

Making Sense of Design

When it comes to making sense of design, I have a confession to make: over the last few years I have been struggling with design, which maybe isn’t a thing you’re supposed to say as the president of a design organization, but here we are. I have always loved design for what it helped me understand about myself, for how it taught me that learning through making is actually a thing, and that you can get paid pretty well to do it in service of capitalistic enterprises.

And then design kind of stopped making as much sense to me, and my connection with it became unmoored. I won’t bother you with the confluence of factors that contributed to this, but for a while I thought I was done with design and similarly design was done with me (hence a very silent newsletter)! And yet! Design kept coming back, kept tugging at my shirt sleeve asking to be picked up, and just wouldn’t leave me alone. Invariably, it seems, all roads lead to design. I can’t seem to stop thinking about it and so I’ve given in, accepted it back into my life, and have returned to writing, practicing, and trying to understand it.

The Doctrine of Placements

Speaking of understanding, I’ve recently spent a good chunk of time trying to really wrap my head around Dick Buchanan’s Doctrine of Placements, more commonly referred to as the Four Orders of Design. It’s too bad the original framing never caught on because the idea of placement is pretty central when it comes to retaining the dynamic nature of the Four Orders as places of intervention. Which is to say, designers use placements to shape a design situation and each placement will offer a different perspective for inquiry. Let me talk a little bit more about the Four Orders, and then we’ll look at an example.

As far as I can tell, the Doctrine of Placements was first mentioned in “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” (Design Issues, 1992) in the context of understanding the expanding role of design thinking (not the IDEO kind) and how it shapes the human experience. Buchanan identified four areas where design activities take place (professional or otherwise):

1. Symbolic and visual communication (signs)
2. Material objects (things)
3. Activities and organized services (actions)
4. Complex systems or environments for living, working, playing, and learning (thoughts)

Once you see the list you’ll be temptated to collapse these four areas into static categories that can be used to organize the outputs of design, (e.g. an advertisement, a chair, online banking, and the four-year environment of an undergraduate program) or the professions of design (e.g. graphic, industrial, interaction, service). But don’t fall into this trap! Placements outline different ways of understanding, framing, and exploring design situations. The four orders are often represented in a 4x4 matrix:

From “Surroundings and Environments in Fourth Order Design,” Buchanan, 2019

Let’s look at this through the lens of an example. If you were to apply placements to, say, the design of a chair, some of the placements or interventions might looks like:

1. Symbolic and visual communication: a throne is a chair that encodes the status and power of the person sitting on it. Through the placement of the first order of design, a chair may be considered through what it communicates and relays about the person who has the chair.
2. Material objects: the second order is where chairs are classically considered, where the chair is an artifact, a thing, an object. We think about form and style, expression, aesthetics, and sometimes designers also take into account comfort [1].
3. Activities and organized services: in the third order, a chair is not a thing but a place of activity or action. Henry Thoreau had three chairs at Walden Pond: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. What possibilities for action open up when we consider a chair as a service or a location of activity?
4. Complex systems: a chair through the fourth order might be considered in relation to other chairs and objects around it, not statically but how they come together to enable ways of living, working, being, and doing. The book ‘Creativity, Inc’ opens with a reflection on tables and chairs. A long board room table infers hierarchy through placement. A square table communicates equality and inclusiveness. The nature of the conversations changed dramatically according to how people were sitting in proximity to each other.

I like the Doctrine of Placements because of how it exposes the scaffolding of what happens when we design, and how we can move between placements to understand and reveal particular design situations in novel and different ways:

“Placements have boundaries to shape and constrain meaning, but are not rigidly fixed and determinate. The boundary of a placement gives a context or orientation to thinking, but the application to a specific situation can generate a new perception of that situation and, hence, a new possibility to be tested. Therefore, placements are sources of new ideas and possibilities when applied to problems in concrete circumstances,” (p. 13, “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking”)

What comes next?

We talk about how design is an inventive practice that enables possibilities and creates desired futures. We have frameworks like the Doctrine of Placements to understand what happens when we design and how unexpected/novel solutions come into being to create meaningful products, services, and systems. But in all of this talk the design is out there, rendered in the objects of our own making. Occasionally people like Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores point out that what we design in turn design us, a kind of ongoing ontological shaping through relational ways of being and becoming.

But there is no out there. As designers we are not outside of the systems in which we design. We are in them, shaped by them, of them. If we are to take to heart the Einstein quote that we cannot solve our current problems from the same level of consciousness that created them, then how do we go about thinking about, exposing, shifting levels of consciousness? Ostensibly this is what Design Thinking says does, but in the hands of designers that inhabit and express the same consciousness as the system, it doesn’t feel like it gets us very far. The work happening around decolonizing design has been critical in exposing the fallacy of universalism and recasting Western cosmologies in a provincial light. And! And I want to push on this area more, this intersection of being and cosmologies and design.