DESIGN PROCESSES -Design Handling –Issues of Design 32

Post 714  –by Gautam Shah

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Designs occur as a concept, idea or theme, expressed in the form explanation, process of creation, or representations like drawings, models, surrogates, samples, digital images. All Designs are documented briefs for realization. Design also carries a meaning of forming a pattern. Creations by artists or craftsperson may occur as experiment or improvisation, and are not truly designs. Designs need not be realized as a physical reality. A design can be a strategy for operational management or conducting services.

For a designer, knowing means to achieve a specific end are very important. Proper record keeping of all design processes helps here. It is very difficult to register dreams, intuitions or inspirations. One needs to recall them in a different time and space context. All intuitions or inspirations, however, absurd, have some physical context of origin. Designers unlike a lay craftsperson or artist, are trained and disciplined, to record their design related thought processes. The thought processes thin out or obliterate completely with passage of time, so must be recorded as early as possible.

Design Processes for a Lay person and a Designer are very different. A creative lay person simply goes on creating (assembling, modifying) things without being aware why certain things manifest in a certain manner. For a creative person the end is important and means irrelevant. A Designer, on the other hand, tries to discover the logic behind it. Selection of an element may be initially intuitive, but there is always a later effort to justify the actions intellectually. A designer justifies all actions like selection, rejection, inclusion or composition of various elements. In doing so the designer refines the intellectual prowess by equipping with an experience that is:

• definable
• repeatable or recreate-able as a whole or in selective parts
• recordable -its perceptive aspects
• transferable to another person
• increase or decrease its intensity (time scale) and diffuse or intensify its concentration (space scale).

For these (above) purposes Designers rely on documents. The expertise of documenting all aspect of design helps a designer to handle extensive or more complex intuitions or inspirations. Personal and impulsively formed systems tend to be Holistic, with few or no recognizable sub systems and being very unique require more extensive definitions and so complex documentation. On the other hand, planned systems, whether personal or evolved through multilateral effort, and over a longer period of maturation, consist of many sub sets. Planned systems have subsets that are already formed by vendors and well prescribed.

Documents are personal method of transmitting a design to stage of realization. In large projects designs are transmitted to professional executors and in different locations. Design transmission and interpretation, require ‘culture’ of protocols. Many such protocols are not defined but accepted as the traditions. Such traditions make a Design transmission and interpretation fast, but are prone to errors.

Designers create both, Closed and open-ended systems. Closed Ended Systems are intentionally made holistic. Closed-ended systems are planned to protect the intellectual rights of the innovators. Closed systems are improvise-able only by the author or inventor, whose capacity to update it continuously is finite. Proprietary computer software may be used by a licensee, but its code remains restricted. The closed systems cannot be dissected for inspection or repair, the form is compact and rigid. Closed ended system need nodes of connectivity or gateways to be useful. Such gateways may or may not allow access to others. Such systems become irrelevant as soon as an open-ended option is available. In the world of mutual dependency, closed systems cannot survive much longer.

Open-ended Systems evolve from multilateral effort or multi trial endeavours. Where large number of people are involved in design and execution, and where these processes are likely to take place at different time and locations, the system automatically becomes Open ended. The subsystems usually offered by venders, to be replaceable, are conceived as substantially independent systems, by their vendors. Open-ended systems have a ‘design-architecture’, formed through common measurements, materials and procedures. To allow these, open-ended systems have a skeleton type frame structure (infrastructure) and fit-in modules. Open-ended systems have built-in reserves or additional safe capacities, often wasteful, but such reserves make systems more persistent. Open-ended systems allow replacements, improvisations and up-gradations of their subsystems and components.

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