My view point on design

This is something I wrote for school blog.

Last semester has been a whirlwind of knowledge exchange for me. Now, as I leisurely freeze each vortex, I find some things right at the top of the swirl. One such is development of my new view point towards design. To start with-being an engineer, Design for me has always been in relation to material things- from the design of a new boiler to the newest comfort footrest. However, I was sure of one thing all along i.e. design increases the utility of a product. Later, the discussions in Fred’s class (Design practice by Fred Collopy) have imbued in me the relevance of extending this point to systems and processes. I remember this one particular example

This led me to explore more in the direction of process design and I stumbled upon video game developer Dino Dini’s view point on design, which is-

Design underpins every form of creation from objects such as chairs to the way we plan and execute our lives. (From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design)

As I tried to embrace and apply this to things in my life, I noticed that any improvement we seek for a process /product is a reaction and the very best reaction leads to the best design. The most important process design I witnessed was how our LEAD team improved the way a team meeting has to be conducted in order to finish a project effectively. Each new change was a result of reaction to existing process. And the talk by design legend Mr. John Spirk at management society meeting (Thank you Professor Taylor!) has reconfirmed my observation. So did the lecture – The changing nature of design: The case of China by Victor Margolin, organized by Department of Information Systems. A very interesting discussion emerged from the lecture- Consider how Wikipedia works. A contributor contributes and then the content is available for everyone to edit/react. These edits lead to the improvement in quality of the article. A much more interesting aspect of the discussion was that, is it possible to build a blue print of a city plan by using the same method. In my opinion it is not possible to arrive at a best city design by this method. In the Wikipedia example, the content is information and information is the same for everyone, may be the way each person uses it might be different. However, in the later example, a design which could be a utopian haven for a city dweller could be a nightmare for another. For these reaction changes to work, the product/process should have the same kind of utility for everyone. In the LEAD team example, if our united goal was not to complete a project effectively, we would not have come to the best design.