A Brief History of Design

The basis for our thinking about Design in Web3

The designing Web3 Series is a set of articles that will be published throughout Q1/Q2 2023 to explain what design means to Verum Capital and why we believe our updated approach to digital design is so important for solving problems within the Web3 space. In this second instalment we summarize the history of design as a discipline and explain how “design thinking” has undermined the disciplinary ambition as a precursor to our next article which explains how we intend to reinvigorate design science for applicability in the context of the fourth industrial revolution and for application in the Web3 space.

Part 1: Design as Response to Change in the 20th Century

Step 1: Be Rational (Making design “scientific” in the 1920’s)

The search for a scientific design method began in the 1920’s during the rise of modernism, as the western world urbanized and mechanized. As businesses took their first steps toward automation, introducing assembly lines and new forms of production, creative forerunners like Theo Van Doesberg, the founder of the De Stijl, and Le Corbusier, the pioneer of modern architecture, were leading movements to capture a new spirit of design that would support their progress. Their interest in objective methods was representative of a widespread societal interest in a design process that was based on the values of science, namely objectivity and rationality. (Cross, 2001)

Step 2: Be Wicked (Solving problems in a post-war context)

In the 1960’s, World War II had once again introduced new and complex circumstances that were driving commercial and social changes. 40 years later, design once again emerged as a rational and objective approach for solving the unfamiliar challenges related to the management of complex war-time efforts, mass-production, and industrial design. The post-war design-science movement expanded on what the modernists of the 1920’s had achieved and led to what radical technologists at the time called “a design science revolution”. This revolution, they said, would be the means to overcome the “human and environmental problems” that could not be solved by politics and economics. ‘Wicked problems’ was the term used to describe these problems because they were ill-formulated, confusing, occurring at an incredible scale, with system-wide ramifications. (Rittel & Webber, 1972) It was in the post-war era, that designers, engineers, economists, business leaders, politicians, and academics agreed that solving wicked problems was the highest and best use of design’s rational approach, which was now purposefully called design-science.

Part 2: How Design became the OG Problem Solver

By the late 20th century, design-science had emerged as the most appropriate tool for society to confront drastic changes and usher in new technological paradigms. How was a single discipline able to confront the challenges brought about by two distinct moments in modern history?

Design as a discipline was born within the liberal arts education, a Renaissance invention that experienced centuries of development before eventually becoming the 19th century encyclopedic education. (Buchanan, 1992) History, natural sciences, mathematics, and philosophy were among the subjects pursued in the 19th century because each had a specific method of exploration and provided an understanding of human experience based on available knowledge. As time progressed, each subject’s approach became more refined and the liberal arts disciplines slowly became the functional silos of academia.

The evolution of these subjects has been the main contributor to the advancement of human knowledge. However, it has also led to the fragmentation of our knowledge. As each discipline became more focused, it forfeited any ability to solve the common problems of daily life, and so the need for an integrative discipline became apparent. (Buchanan, 1992) Design was born in this context and designers were left to combine theory with practice for new productive purposes.

Part 3: Design’s New Day Job: Digital innovation & “design thinking”

In 1991, as the 20th century ended, a rational design methodology was celebrated once again, but this time under a new name. “Design thinking” was introduced to the world by IDEO, modelled after work they had developed at the Stanford Design School. The design consulting firm was able to bring this new twist on design into the mainstream by developing user-friendly terminology and toolkits. “Design Thinking” became easily sold as a professional service and an essential aspect of executive education, turning it into a field of its own and sacrificing its capabilities as an integrated discipline. (Buchanan, 1992)

The desire for an isolated approach came, in large part, from the business world, which needed new ways to unpack the increasing business complexity that was being brought about by digital technology. This complexity came in a variety of forms, but most pressing was the fact that software was increasingly at the center of a product and needed to be integrated with hardware, while also being made intuitive and simple from the user’s point of view. (Kolko, 2015) For this specific challenge, design science was reduced to a focused set of principles, which included empathy with users, prototyping, and tolerance for failure. This reduction allowed “design thinking” to become widely accepted as a best practice for the digital design being done by businesses at the beginning of the 21st century. (Kolko, 2015)

The Three Phases of Design Thinking

Since the 1990’s, we have seen three phases of “design thinking” applied to the business world: digital advertising, UX and interaction design, and organizational design. Each iteration has moved “design thinking” further from the original intentions of design as a discipline and the rational approach of design science.

Phase 1: Digital Advertising

Digital advertising was pioneered by firms like Razorfish, which was founded in 1995 as one of the first interactive agencies. Razorfish was one of the first to create interactive and animated online advertising campaigns and it used the new tenets of “design thinking”, namely empathetic digital experiences, to help brands stand out. The big shift here was that design was now being used to sell products and services rather than as a method for solving the problems people experienced in daily life.

Phase 2: UX & Interaction Design

Later, UX and interaction design became a field all their own, driven by the need to create novel user interfaces that supported new digital services. As universities began to offer degrees and certificates in UX, design became a specialized technical skill rather than an integrated approach. In the mid-20th century, students of design were a collective force, trained to solve a myriad of problems in any sector. Today, under the rigidity of job descriptions for the digital economy, designers must devote themselves to a specific set of skills, undermining their potential to confront wicked problems.

Phase 3: Organizational Design

Finally, “design thinking” has been an important toolkit to address the needs of the contemporary organization. Agile teams, working in remote offices, feel like a logical byproduct of a globalized workforce. It seems natural that the same tools a digital company uses for production could be used for its organization. Although design science was used to arrange assembly lines and organize mass-production capabilities in the early 20th century, it did so under clear social debate. “Design thinking”, on the other hand, is now strictly an organizational tool, not a social one.

Part 4: Seeking New Tools (“Design Thinking” was a Red Herring)

Design science emerged alongside significant societal shifts in the 1920’s and 1960’s, what we now refer to as the second and third industrial revolution. The second industrial revolution, in the 1920s, brought about a search for scientific design products, whereas the third, in the 1960s, came with a concern for the scientific design process. According to design historians in the mid-20th century, this 40-year cycle would come around again and many design academics expected to see the re-emergence of design science in the early 2000s. (Cross, 2001) “Design thinking” in the 1990s was not the re-emergence that academics forecasted because it did not correspond with a new set of challenges brought about during a period of technological change. Rather, it capitalized on business needs at the tail-end of the third, digital revolution. Although its continued praise from the business world is impressive, the ongoing hype cycle that “design thinking” has created is distracting organizations from the essential re-emergence of design science that was forecasted. We currently have an urgent need for a new wave of design science that evolves the original interdisciplinary and rational approach for the purposes of confronting current, compounding crises through the technologies being introduced by the fourth industrial revolution.

Sources:

Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked Problems in Design Thinking. Design Issues, 8(2), pp. 5–21.

Cross, N. (2001). Designerly ways of knowing: Design Discipline versus Design Science. Design Issues, 17(3), pp. 49–55.

Frakes, J and Linder, N. (2020). A New Path to Understanding Systems Thinking. [online] The Systems Thinker. Available at: https://thesystemsthinker.com/%EF %BB%BFa-new-path-to-understanding-systems-thinking/ [accessed February 22, 2020].

Kolko, J. (2015). Design Thinking Comes of Age. Harvard Business Review. pp.66–71.

Rittel, H and Webber, M. (1972). Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. In: Working paper presented at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development. City: University of California, Berkeley.

Schwab, K. (2016). The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Geneva: The World Economic Forum.

Shaked, H and Schechter, C. (2017). Systems thinking for school leaders : Holistic leadership for excellence in education. Available at: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from teacherscollege-ebooks. [accessed February 22, 2020]