Linkography: Unfolding the Design Process

Linkography

Design Thinking, Design Theory

Ken Friedman and Erik Stolterman, editors

Design Things

A. Telier (Thomas Binder, Pelle Ehn, Giorgio De Michelis, Giulio Jacucci, Per Linde, and Ina Wagner), 2011

China’s Design Revolution

Lorraine Justice, 2012

Adversarial Design

Carl DiSalvo, 2012

The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design

Mads Nygaard Folkmann, 2013

Linkography: Unfolding the Design Process

Gabriela Goldschmidt, 2014

Linkography

Unfolding the Design Process

Gabriela Goldschmidt

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goldschmidt, Gabriela, 1942 –

Linkography : unfolding the design process / Gabriela Goldschmidt.

   p.  cm.—(Design thinking, design theory)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-02719-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-262-32216-4 (retail e-book)

1. Design — Methodology. 2. Design — Evaluation. I. Title.

NK1520.G64 2014

745.4 — dc23

2013034867

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

d_r0

for my late parents, Hedwig and Zeev-Wilhelm

Contents

Series Foreword

Preface

1    Beginnings

2    Design Thinking Research

3    Design Synthesis

4    The Linkograph: A Network of Links

5    Critical Moves

6    Design Creativity

7    Further Insights

Epilogue

Appendix: Sources of Data

Notes

References

Index

Series Foreword

As professions go, design is relatively young. The practice of design predates professions. In fact, the practice of design—making things to serve a useful goal, making tools—predates the human race. Making tools is one of the attributes that made us human in the first place.

Design, in the most generic sense of the word, began over 2.5 million years ago when Homo habilis manufactured the first tools. Human beings were designing well before they began to walk upright. Four hundred thousand years ago, they began to manufacture spears. By 40,000 years ago, they had moved up to specialized tools.

Urban design and architecture developed 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Interior architecture and furniture design probably emerged with them. It was another 5,000 years before graphic design and typography got their start when Sumerians developed cuneiform.

Today all goods and services are designed. The urge to design—to consider a situation, imagine a better situation, and act to create that improved situation—goes back to our prehuman ancestors.

Today, the word design means many things. The common factor linking them is service. Designers engage in a service profession. Their work meets human needs.

Design is first of all a process. The word design entered the English language in the 1500s as a verb, and the first written citation of the verb is dated 1548. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines the verb design as to conceive and plan out in the mind; to have as a specific purpose; to devise for a specific function or end.

The first cited use of the noun design can be traced back to 1588. The Collegiate Dictionary defines the noun as a particular purpose held in view by an individual or group; deliberate, purposive planning; a mental project or scheme in which means to an end are laid down. Today, we design large, complex processes, systems, and services, and to achieve this we design the organizations and structures that produce them. Design has changed considerably since our remote ancestors made the first stone tools.

At an abstract level, Herbert Simon’s definition covers nearly all instances of design. To design, Simon writes, is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones (The Sciences of the Artificial, second edition, MIT Press, 1982, 129). Design, properly defined, is the entire process across the full range of domains required for any outcome.

However, the design process is always more than a general, abstract way of working. Design takes concrete form in the work of the service professions that meet human needs. These professions include industrial design, graphic design, textile design, furniture design, information design, process design, product design, interaction design, transportation design, educational design, systems design, urban design, design leadership, and design management, as well as architecture, engineering, information technology, and computer science.

The various design professions focus on different subjects and objects. They have distinct traditions, methods, and vocabularies, used and put into practice by distinct and often dissimilar professional groups. Although the traditions dividing these professions are distinct, common boundaries sometimes form a border. Where this happens, they serve as meeting points where common concerns from two or more professions can lead to a shared understanding of design. Today, ten challenges uniting the design professions form such a set of common concerns.

Three performance challenges, four substantive challenges, and three contextual challenges bind the design disciplines and professions together as a common field. The performance challenges arise because all design professions act on the physical world, address human needs, and generate the built environment. In the past, these common attributes were not sufficient to transcend the boundaries of tradition. Today, objective changes in the larger world give rise to four substantive challenges that are driving convergence in design practice and research. These are increasingly ambiguous boundaries between artifacts, structure, and process; increasingly large-scale social, economic, and industrial frames; an increasingly complex environment of needs, requirements, and constraints; and information content that often exceeds the value of physical substance. These challenges require new frameworks of theory and method. In professional design practice, we often find that design requires interdisciplinary teams with a transdisciplinary focus. Fifty years ago, one designer and an assistant or two might have solved most design problems; today, we need skills across several disciplines, and the ability to work with, listen to, and learn from each other.

The first of the three contextual challenges is that design takes place in a complex environment in which many projects or products cross the boundaries of several organizations. The second is that design must meet the expectations of many organizations, stakeholders, producers, and users. Third, design has to deal with demands at every level of production, distribution, reception, and control. These ten challenges require a qualitatively different approach to professional design practice than was taken in earlier times, when environments were simpler. Individual experience and personal development were sufficient for depth and substance in professional practice. Though experience and development are still necessary, they are no longer sufficient. Most of today’s design challenges require analytic and synthetic planning skills that cannot be developed through practice alone.

Professional design practice today involves advanced knowledge. This knowledge is not solely a higher level of professional practice. It is also a qualitatively different form of professional practice that emerges in response to the demands of the information society and the knowledge economy to which it gives rise.

In a recent article (Why Design Education Must Change, Core77, November 26, 2010), Don Norman challenges the premises and practices of the design profession. In the past, designers operated on the belief that talent and a willingness to jump into problems with both feet gave them an edge in solving problems. Norman writes:

In the early days of industrial design, the work was primarily focused upon physical products. Today, however, designers work on organizational structure and social problems, on interaction, service, and experience design. Many problems involve complex social and political issues. As a result, designers have become applied behavioral scientists, but they are woefully undereducated for the task. Designers often fail to understand the complexity of the issues and the depth of knowledge already known. They claim that fresh eyes can produce novel solutions, but then they wonder why these solutions are seldom implemented, or if implemented, why they fail. Fresh eyes can indeed produce insightful results, but the eyes must also be educated and knowledgeable. Designers often lack the requisite understanding. Design schools do not train students about these complex issues, about the interlocking complexities of human and social behavior, about the behavioral sciences, technology, and business. There is little or no training in science, the scientific method, and experimental design.

This is not industrial design in the sense of designing products, but industry- related design—design as thought and action for solving problems and imagining new futures.

The Design Thinking, Design Theory series emphasizes strategic design to create value through innovative products and services, emphasizing design as service through rigorous creativity, critical inquiry, and sustainable ethics. This rests on a sense of understanding, empathy, and appreciation for people, for nature, and for the world we shape through design. Our goal as editors is to develop a series of conversations that help designers and researchers to serve business, industry, and the public sector for positive social and economic outcomes.

The idea of this series is to present books that bring a new sense of inquiry to design, helping to shape a more reflective and stable design discipline able to support a stronger profession grounded in empirical research, generative concepts, and the solid theory that gives rise to what W. Edwards Deming described as profound knowledge in his 1993 book The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education. For Deming, a physicist, engineer, and designer, profound knowledge comprised systems thinking and the understanding of processes embedded in systems; an understanding of variation and the tools we need to understand variation; a theory of knowledge; and a foundation in human psychology. This is the beginning of deep design—the union of deep practice with robust intellectual inquiry.

A series on design thinking and theory faces many of the same challenges as the design professions themselves. On one level, design is a general human process that we use to understand and to shape our world. Nevertheless, we cannot address this process or the world in its general, abstract form. Rather, we seek to meet the challenges of design in specific challenges, addressing problems or ideas in a situated context. The challenges we face as designers today are as diverse as the problems our clients bring us. We are involved in design for economic anchors, economic continuity, and economic growth. We design for urban needs and rural needs, for social development, and for creative communities. We are involved with environmental sustainability, with economic policy, with agriculture, with competitive crafts for export, with competitive products and brands for micro-enterprises, with developing new products for bottom-of- pyramid markets, and with redeveloping old products for mature or wealthy markets. Within the framework of design, we are also challenged to design for extreme situations, for biotech, nanotech, and new materials, and for social business, as well as facing conceptual challenges for worlds that do not yet exist, such as the world beyond the Kurzweil singularity—and for new visions of the world that does exist.

The Design Thinking, Design Theory series explores these issues and others—meeting them, examining them, and helping designers to address them.

Join us in this exploration.

Ken Friedman

Erik Stolterman

Preface

This book has been very long in the making. My work on linkography was initiated in 1988 while I was at MIT, on leave from the Technion—the Israel Institute of Technology. After further development of the concept, a first paper on linkography was presented at the Tenth European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research in Vienna in 1990. Much to my surprise, the paper was received very well and was honored as one of the two best papers presented at the conference. This was encouraging, of course, and in the next few years two more papers about linkography and its use as a research method were written. One of these was honored as the best paper published in the journal Design Studies in 1995.

For more than a decade now, colleagues have been encouraging me to write a more comprehensive text. Some years ago, I wrote a few dozen pages. That beginning was not followed through, however, because I felt that something was still missing; that more work would have to be done before a book could be undertaken. Only quite recently have I been able to convince myself that I am as ready as I will ever be to finally write the book, though clearly more work still remains to be done on many aspects of linkography.

Portions of the studies featured in this book have been published as journal papers, by me and by others, but the book is in no way a compendium of papers. Rather, existing publications served as inputs to the book. The original empirical research that informed the studies described in the book (excluding chapter 7) is briefly reported in the appendix.

Although I cannot point to a specific influence that led to this book, there are certainly people and institutions that contributed indirectly by shaping my thinking and serving as intellectual stimulation. First and foremost among them was my teacher, and later colleague and dear friend, the late Abraham Wachman, whose morphology classes were exciting and thought provoking, and who set me on a path of scholarly pursuit. He challenged me more than once with his demands for precision and clarity, which were lessons for life. Donald Schön was a valuable source of inspiration, and during my time at MIT he was helpful in serving as a model for inquiry and providing critical feedback, which was invaluable to me while I was struggling to turn from a practitioner to a researcher. A two-year stay at MIT in this crucial phase of my life was a wonderful opportunity to be exposed to academic pursuit at its best. I consider myself very fortunate for having had the opportunity to gain inspiration and insights from countless formal and informal encounters with great thinkers whom I met at MIT. I would like to single out John Habraken, William Porter, and Larry Bucciarelli, who remain close colleagues to this very day. I am grateful to MIT for instilling in me values and passions that have guided my academic pursuits.

Another institution to which I am grateful is the Delft University of Technology, in particular the Department of Product Innovation Management in the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. I have been associated with this school for two decades, and I spent a sabbatical year there in 2005–06. The friendship I encountered there, the encouragement, and the openness to new ideas made for an ideal work environment. In particular, Petra Badke-Schaub was a wonderful hostess, fully supportive of the linkography enterprise. Thanks to the faculty members and students who were so kind and supportive, Delft has become another home away from home, as MIT had been.

Howard Gruber, Tamar Globerson, and Bernard Kaplan, and later Sidney Strauss, helped me come to grips with questions related to developmental psychology and creativity. Danny Gopher provided an introduction to experimental cognitive psychology, and the seminar on Human Factors Research he headed at the Technion, which I attended for years, was both instructive and a model of exacting research standards.

Sincere thanks are extended to the many participants in the empirical studies reported in this book. They volunteered their time and were patient with occasional mishaps that prolonged the experimental sessions. Where names of participants are mentioned, they are fictitious.

I also want to thank the many students who took part in my graduate seminar Cognitive Aspects of the Design Process, wherein linkography was introduced as a possible addition to classical protocol analysis. Their challenging questions and comments forced me to think of new ways to develop the theory and application of linkography. Some of the students went on to write brilliant term papers, and in some cases master’s theses, using linkography. They taught me that there is no limit to inventiveness and creativity, and what they did with linkography was always a refreshing and pleasant surprise.

I am grateful to Eilam Tycher for his kind, careful, and patient work in upgrading many of the figures. I would like to extend my heartiest thanks to the individuals who wrote the code that made digital production of linkographs possible. The first version, meant for Macintosh computers, was called MacLinkograph. It was written by Shahar Dumai, then a teenager, who also wrote a manual for it. Later a new version was written on a Java platform. The budget allowed for only a very limited amount of development, but we still use this application, called Linkographer, which was written by Konstantin Zertsekel, Robert Sayegh, and Hanna Mousa. Hanna Mousa has been a talented and kind savior angel ever since, solving sticky problems that came up occasionally. Many thanks also to Doug Sery, my editor at the MIT Press.

I am also indebted to the National Endowment for the Arts for research grant 87-4251-0169 at the outset of this endeavor, which allowed for an incubation period that was crucial to the formation of the initial concepts of linkography.

1

Beginnings

Beginnings, I

Linkography is the outcome of a long chain of experiences that can be pinpointed only partially and only with hindsight. Some of these experiences can be described only in general terms; others have a precise timing attached to them. The very first of these events took place a long time ago, but the exact date can still be cited: On November 17, 1964, I happened to notice a copy of Christopher Alexander’s book Notes on the Synthesis of Form in a small bookstore in my home city, Jerusalem. Attracted to the book beyond resistance, I purchased it. The sales receipt is reproduced here as figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1

Sales receipt for Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form, dated November 17, 1964.

I was a beginning architecture student at the time, and I understood only part of what Alexander wrote, but it was reassuring to get a sense that designing is a structured process that can be explained and analyzed. Years later, I returned to Notes on the Synthesis of Form and reread it in its entirety. Decades later, I can now explain precisely what I found—and still find—so attractive about the book. I cannot, however, fully account for my intuitive response to it then, nor is there an explanation for the fact that the book had reached that little bookstore, in what was then a small, isolated, and rather provincial city, so soon after its publication.

In architecture school we learned how to design by doing it. We would come to class with our ideas drawn up, and we would get feedback from our teachers before making the next step or going back to modify our drawings. Alexander’s book revealed to me that designing can be clarified—that there is a logic to it, and that it is not pure magic. Furthermore, the process of designing can be researched. I will discuss Alexander’s contribution at some length in chapter 2; here I only want to make the point that when I first came across it I had a strong intuition that it was important and that I should make an effort to understand it.

Beginnings, II

A decade later, already an architect with some experience, I began to teach design. I spent many hours in the studio, trying to help students with their design projects. In my first few years of teaching, I taught students at different levels, mostly in first-year and second-year studios. It was impossible not to notice how their rates