一生教学

一生教学只求二识
晰 与 湛。

On Form

Form is a way of confronting reality.
-- Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, p.171.

On Urbanism

"Cities are nothing new; the problems of cities are nothing new; but an urban civilization is very new indeed, and the problems of an urban civilization are without precedent in human history."
-- Irving Kristol, 'Urban Civilization and its Discontents', (1970).

On design lessons from the City I

I attended Tay Kheng Soon's lecture at the National Library today. The lecture venue was on the first floor of the library adjacent to a busy pedestrian walkway. Just as Kheng Soon was about to start lecturing, it dawned on me that there were three separate design elements (or should I say opportunities?) in this room that are associated but were however, likely missed in their unison during the design process.

The first is the choice of presentation, or pedagogical device, or lecturing vehicle. From the photo, we can see that the designer has selected to make the projector the main lecturing technology and the screen the visual medium. However with this choice must come a second design element: a set of opaque screens that lined the glass fenestration which not only cuts out the glare from outside but by their sheer blackness, renders the lighting conditions in the room more conducive for projector-based presentations.

But the paramount design opportunity comes with the third design element, which is the deliberate intent to position a lecture room at the public edge of the National Library. However, this intent has been fully nullified by the decisive force of the former two design elements!

Granted, members of the public were informed to attend this public lecture. But informed attendance is not the same as chanced attendance, which is what makes city life more serendipitous and yes, more public, than rural life. Because the lecture room is strategically positioned along a busy urban edge right in the middle of the city, surely the design intention must be to draw the inner lives of a public library closer to the civic lives of the city! However during the lecture, countless silhouettes walked past, oblivious to an important lecture held within concerning the future publics in Singapore. In other words, in making this room an optimal environment internally for public discourse, this room has to be severed from the larger discourse that can only occur through a spontaneous interaction with the external room of the city.

Three innocently made design decisions, apparently independent on the surface, however congealed structurally to form a final and perhaps permanent design condition which not only nullifies the potential of the public through design, but ultimately, also contradicted the public mission of the National Library because of design.

On the Design of Simple Things

The Design of Simple Things

by Jeffrey Chan

On simple things

In the pursuit of complex design, we have neglected the much harder problem of designing ‘simple things’.  

By ‘simple things’ I am not invoking Don Norman’s concept of “everyday things”--practical things that we interact on a practical, everyday basis. Many of our ‘everyday things’--plasma TVs, iPhones, and even mechanical watches--are hardly simple things. And by ‘simple things’, I also do not refer to ‘minimalistic things’. ‘Minimalistic thing’ expresses a deliberate art of irreducibility, but a ‘simple thing’ is the art of straightforwardness. An iPhone is minimal but not simple. In contrast, a man’s wallet is straightforward but hardly irreducible: there can be multiple variations in materiality and configuration based on the same design. Finally by ‘simple things’, I am not implying ‘simple-mindedness in designing things’, since it is possible to be straightforward without being simple-minded. 

What then are ‘simple things’? Is ‘simple things’ a category for things or is it a quality or attribute of things? By ‘simple things’, I refer first to a category of design artifacts that do not entail compound or complex operations for the user. Yet at the same time, ‘simple things’ also tend to embody the design ideal of a final and stable design solution: it cannot be made ‘simpler’. For this reason, I also contend that any design of ‘simple things’ can reveal to us clearly some of the most fundamental challenges of design, since there is very little room for extraneousness or irrelevancies. For example, it has been said that a pair of scissors is one of the successfully resolved ‘simple things’: its basic morphology is final and its design configuration stable because it is the clearest design statement--up to now--for accomplishing single-handed shearing. 

Seeking final and stable design solutions in every category of design is therefore a very attractive proposition. Final and stable design solutions possess the threefold virtues of clarity, predictability and stability. Because of this, they tend to minimize any undesired and unanticipated consequences, barring human error or willfulness, that usually accompany untested and evolving design solutions. To suggest that final and stable design solution is the teleology of design is therefore not an exaggeration. In design, we usually begin from a stage of disarrayed complexities to a stage of synthesized simplicity, where every single element is ordered to everything else; and which inadvertently is always an arduous process of winnowing by accretion. Whether such final and stable design solutions once attained might lead us to a arrested state of permanent and existential design boredom is debatable; but the dividends that can come with these final and stable design solutions are however indisputable. 

But designers today tend to avoid discussing and the making of ‘simple things’. In place of ‘simple things’, we have a plethora of overly complicated designs reflective of our seemingly overly complicated lifestyles. As suggested, ‘simple things’ are not ‘minimalistic things’. Yet today designers prefer to take the minimal for the simple, preferring an appearance of simplicity rather than the quality of simplicity. It is plain to see why ‘simple things’ are not popular in contemporary design: they neither present complex features that invite our curiosity nor do they seduce with alluring forms. They are, in short, icons of banality. After all, what is left, except for infinite styling and mannerism, when final and stable solutions embodied by ‘simple things’ have been discovered? Moreover, the interest-triangle between the industrious designer, the industry and the cultural society continues to demand for more exciting variety rather than successive depths of sustained profundity in design, resulting in the moral hazard of producing ever more superficialities masquerading as the novel and the experimental, something Susan George rightly calls things that make the status quo look brand new.  

* * *

Christopher Alexander’s example on the design of a simple thing

Christopher Alexander may not be the greatest architect and designer alive today, but I suppose he may just be the greatest designer capable of feats of design introspection alive today. We may be willing to fault Alexander for his metaphorical and sometimes mystical language; but we should be unwilling to dismiss the substantive content that he tries to convey through this language. And like the philosophers Heidegger and Wittgenstein who each cycled through polemical phases in their career--for Heidegger from early mysticism to later rationality and for Wittgenstein precisely in the opposite direction--Alexander began his career as a design rationalist but who later disavowed the rational approach for a more mystical (i.e., read ‘inexplicable) turn towards design and design thinking. But unlike philosophers who could make a clean break with their prior philosophical frames because they transact mainly in fluid ideas, for an architect or a designer, this break is much harder to achieve, since the medium of design--its processes, ideas, materialities and outcomes--must invariably be located in the empirical world and therefore a constant despite ideational transformation. For this reason, Alexander’s contemporary work still offers a wealth of design insights accreted from the best of his past experience as a rigorous design rationalist on top of his ongoing explorations as a design Platonist. 

In one of his more recent writings, Alexander asks us to contemplate on the design of a simple Japanese chisel. Here, it is worthwhile to cite his passage almost in full:

“Consider a simple Japanese chisel. It has a handle, shaft, blade, tip, and so on. It works because of its centers. Each kind of working that exists in the chisel inheres in one of the centers which we see in the chisel. The tip of the blade is the cutting edge--this is a center that does the cutting...

The tip of the handle is bound with a steel ring, so that if you hit it with a hammer it doesn’t split. The steel binding at the lower end is another center, which stops the wood from splitting. The shaft of the blade, where the blade meets the handle, allows a handle to be out on the piece of steel, and makes a firm connection. This shaft is another center, and it does the work of making a firm connection between handle and blade...In a well-made chisel, the geometric centers correspond exactly to the centers of action (i.e., the way the chisel interacts with the world when we use it, how it cuts the wood, holds in the hand, gets hit by the mallet, and so on. 

The functional life of the chisel, the excellence of a good chisel, does not come merely from the fact that these centers exist. It also comes, as in the case of the little stars on the tiled wall in the Alhambra, from the way these centers help each other. For example, the shaft is tapered one way and the wood alongside the shaft is tapered the other way. The shaft makes the wood more of a center: the wood alongside makes the shaft more of a center. The binding strengthens the existence of the blade by being at the other end of the blade. The blade strengthens the existence of the binding as a center.” [from Alexander, C. (2002). The Nature of Order, pp. 406]. 

While Alexander did not specifically allude to the chisel being a ‘simple thing’ or to any specific discussion on final and stable design solutions, it is however clear that the “good chisel” conforms to the twin criteria of final form and stable design configuration. In other words while it may be possible to modify or even enhance the weighting of the different parts for different users, it is however not very productive to re-form the chisel, because the design of this chisel with a series of interdependent centers has been discovered and perhaps even, finalized. But what is most valuable in Alexander’s writing is his ability to move from the material world to a level of design thinking that can be applied to just about every kind and scale of design activity. Perhaps the only caveat here is that Alexanders lessons do not, and should not, be applied to design that must result in the deliberate de-centering of different functions, for example, in Chuck Perrow’s preference for a more loosely-coupled systems for the design of a nuclear power plant, such that a small error will never concatenate into a catastrophic failure. 

* * * 

On the design dilemmas of a ‘simple thing’: designing an ideal water dispenser

The question that Alexander’s case then raised is: to what extent does his theory of interdependent centers in design apply? My answer: it does not go far enough. While the general lesson by Alexander should apply to the design of many things, it however does not apply to the design of all ‘simple things’. In my case for example, to the design of a (simple) water dispenser. Furthermore, my case will attempt to demonstrate the opposite lesson from Alexander’s: that centers can nullify each other. I contend that this latter possibility of nullifying centers may perhaps be as important for design epistemology as centers that are mutually reinforcing.

I introduce my case through two existing water dispensers available in the market today. The first one is called ‘Ovobar’ and the second is called ‘Penang’ (simply because we purchased it in Penang). I want to emphasize that these two water dispensers are perfectly workable designs for dispensing water, although one is geometrically and certainly more pleasing than the other (guess which one). 

(photos: left, Ovobar, source: aquaovo; right, Penang, source: author’s own)

As a quick overview, both do not work very well for reasons to be explicated. After all, for most of our recorded history, we have been accustomed to drawing water upwards (from a well). In contrast, dispensing water downwards (from a dispenser) is an activity that we are apparently still grappling with in design. And as a matter of due diligence, I have interacted with the Ovobar (rather extensively I must add) in Venice, California, and Penang is an everyday fixture in my kitchen. My aim here is to extract a set of issues from these two designs that can represent my case of nullifying centers in designing ‘simple things’. 

So what are the design parameters and goals for an ideal water dispenser? I will answer this question based on my own experience. 

First, a water dispenser collects water from either the faucet or a water filtration system. Instead of either turning on the faucet or the filtration system whenever one needs a drink--and in tropical Singapore that is quite often--the water dispenser performs this role in their stead, thereby extending the longevity of the mechanical faucet and the electrical filtration system. 

Second, a water dispenser must have at least a minimal volume. By minimal volume I mean a volume capable of supplying drinking water to a family of four for at least one full day before refilling. Conversely, there must also be a limit to how large this volume is, before it becomes unwieldy such that it exceeds the normative carrying capacity of a single person who has to haul it from box to kitchen counter.  

Third, flow dynamics and other efficiency issues. By flow dynamics, a water dispenser will only dispense water if a volume of water exists above the dispensing tap. Ideally, this tap should be positioned as low as possible for the greatest amount of pressure (based on the most number of uses) and for as little water as possible to remain unused (i.e., water that remains below tap level). 

Fourth, the water dispenser must be able to dispense water to a wide variety of different vessels, for example, cups, tall glasses, water bottles, bowls, etc. The water dispenser must accommodate for all these varying geometries and sizes as much as possible. 

Fifth, the water dispenser must be stable. This seems sufficiently clear: no one wants to mop the floor or pick up the smashed pieces of a toppled water bomb weighing on the average 25-30kg in weight. 

Finally, the water dispenser should be made of a material that is easy to clean and maintain. The geometry should facilitate maintenance, and the form of the water dispenser should be pleasing and fitting in a wide variety of different kitchen designs. 

Clearly by the goals cited, the ideal water dispenser is one that meets all six design goals listed above. Conversely, the most undesirable water dispenser would be one that does not meet any of these six goals. 

Now there can be many more design parameters and goals for the ideal water dispenser. But the listed six are what I think the major and vital ones. Even so, a designer trying to meet all six major goals will inadvertently run into trouble, assuming that the designer continues to work within the frame of a prototypical water dispenser. 

For a start, the major ‘tri-lemma’ in the design of a water dispenser is between the position of the dispensing tap, the attainment of maximum water pressure (for the most number of uses) and the maximum volume of water that can be dispensed. The obvious solution is of course to position the dispensing tap as low as possible (towards the level surface). But this obvious choice, even when it maximizes water pressure and also volume of water that can be dispensed, unfortunately contradicts the fourth design goal, which is to accommodate as many vessels of different geometry and size as possible. A design compromise between all three goals would be to position the tap somewhere above the height of a normative teacup, which is what Penang has elected to do. As brilliant as this compromise was, it however always leaves a large volume of water below the tap level while forcing the users from using taller cups, water bottles or anything that exceeds the height of a teacup. To circumvent this tri-lemma, Penang has elected to prioritize two of the three design goals--for maximum pressure and maximum volume over maximal accommodation--to force a design compromise. For to position the height of the tap higher (i.e., prioritizing goal number four to maximize accommodation for different vessels) would immediately compromise the perceivably more important goals for maximum pressure and volume. On this, it is perfectly reasonable to think that design compromises and designing reinforcing centers are two viable, but distinctively opposite, modes of functional design epistemology. 

However Ovobar took a different approach. Rather than to rely on the utilitarian approach of Penang, Ovobar attempts to circumvent the tri-lemma through the introduction of a stand. What the stand does is that it effectively preserves the design goals of maximum pressure and maximum volume (i.e., positioning the tap to as low as it reasonably should) while accommodating to a wide range of drinking vessels of different geometry and sizes. For the ‘chic’ modern kitchen that the Ovobar is envisioned to operate in, it seems reasonable that it should at least accommodate tall stemware, which is precisely what the stand is for (other than for the obvious stabilization that the egg geometry requires...).

But Ovobar neglects an emergent design consideration that implicates any elevated design. The elevation of the water dispenser on a stand with limited (contact) surface area immediately increases its instability (relative to one that is positioned on a level surface). Moreover, as water is dispensed, the dispenser becomes lighter and weighs less, thereby rendering it even more unstable with a diminishing base weight. Since the overall weight of an average water dispenser is primarily attributed to the weight of its carried content, this is an important consideration that should not be overlooked. On this, Penang has elected to go for a stodgy but passively stable design; its profile flares outwards to form of a wide and solidly thick base that attempts to decouple (or at least reduces the moment) for the dispenser because of its differential weight through use. 

* * * 

Centers? Nullifying centers for Reinforcing Centers

The water dispenser is undeniably one of these ‘simple things’. Yet as depicted, the design of one is anything but ‘simple’. The position of the tap is clearly a chief center for the design. But any move to reinforce this center with other centers (e.g., design features for maximum pressure or maximum volume of water that can be used) nullifies another center, which is the accommodative design for this water dispenser. To circumvent this, a stand was introduced (which is a new center). But this new center introduced in the hope of reinforcing all other three centers create its own contradiction, which ironically makes the water dispenser with stand as a complete system increasingly less stable and more precarious with use.

But at least a few lessons are clear. First, certain centers work together with other centers; they are either pairs that are integrally tied together or pairs that can be amplified by being tied together. For example at least in the water dispenser, maximum pressure and maximum volume of water that can be used are integrally paired centers: the more one increases the more the other increases as well. Second, there are overruling or chief centers, or a center that affects all centers. The tap is one such centers, such that any move on this center preponderantly affects the rest. Finally, new centers can be introduced, though not without introducing a whole new set of issues that would then subsequently recaliberates all existing centers. 

If Alexander’s example of a chisel is startlingly simple, it is also a startling over-omission on quite a few other issues that can occur in the design of a ‘simple thing’. What my own example attempts to demonstrate is that the designer must also invent new concepts to cope with the possibility of nullifying centers. What are the pairing centers? How do we identify them? What are the chief centers? What are the strong centers and what are the weaker centers? And when do I break the existing morphology (or form) to introduce new centers that can recaliberate or circumvent the limitations of existing relationships between centers? This case of nullifying centers hardly overturns Alexander’s case for the mutually reinforcing centers; rather, it extends the cognition necessary for the design of a successful ‘simple thing’ in recognizing that mutually nullifying centers exist as well. 

On the free society

To be sure, a free society is defined by more, and by more fundamental achievements, than private autonomy.
-- Herbert Marcuse, in One Dimensional Man, (1964: 245)

DECC 2012 Transcript

1. I propose to start with the title of this conference, ‘Beyond Sustainability: Building Sustainable Communities’.

2. I would start by questioning why we need to go beyond the contemporary meaning of ‘sustainability’.

3. Are we moving beyond the green-washing, postpolitical, pro-market connotations of sustainability? That sustainability has come to mean everything and therefore also nothing today—except for more legitimacy to produce more and to consume more?

4. Or are we moving beyond the recognition that even with sustainability, we may come to a point of unsustainability. For example, in building sustainable cities to accommodate growing populations, we may collectively come to a point when even being committed to sustainability we would become unsustainable in aggregation by the absolute amount of irreplaceable resources consumed and necessary wastes produced. Or in other words, we are beginning to acknowledge that there is a paradoxical willfulness in our commitment to be sustainable, we have intentionally neglected uneasy political choices of population control over the more acceptable and pro-market choices of building sustainable cities.

5. Or perhaps this is the hardest conjecture of all: that to be truly sustainable, we have to look beyond the former two oversights at the community as the heart of sustainability. But what is a community?

6. Here, I distinguish a community from a club and a co-op.

7. A club filters its memberships through several control parameters, for example, ability to pay for access, similar preferences or competencies, or even converging ideologies. It is in other words, an enclave of like-mindedness with the discretion on who to admit and who to reject held by the elites of this enclave. But a sustainable community in our world today is likely to be made up of individuals with diverse values and interests who nonetheless want to live together in physical, intellectual or spiritual proximity without the exclusive boundary condition of an enclave. The community differs from the club precisely in the condition that there is liberty of entry or departure without invitation or coercion. The questions then that this distinction raised are, one, what could possibly sustain solidarity amid pluralism, and two, how do we inspire attractiveness and then loyalty to the communities that we build without the baggage of symbolic exclusiveness?

8. Similarly, the community is different from a co-op. A co-op is distinguished by the cooperative relationships directed towards the sustainment of a commercial enterprise. If and when the commercial mission is extinguished, then the cooperation in the co-op is also extinguished. In other words, an extrinsic objective or mission defines and sustains the co-op. However, in a sustainable community, the community is sustained intrinsically by the relationships of its members first: we must first enjoy and respect our mutual presence without extrinsic cause. The advantage that the community therefore has over the co-op is that it can define and seek out new missions or objectives without compromising its own organizational structure. In short, the community is a self-renewing structure, capable of forging new missions and objectives on one hand, and on the other hand, a self-perpetuating organization able to pass down and evolve its original mission across generations. The question then that this distinction raises are, one, how do we evolve existing models of co-op into communities if it is desirable to do so, and two, how do we prevent present communities from turning into commercially-defined, pro-market co-ops?

9. I do not want to give you the impression that I am talking about ideal or Utopian communities. Communities are the arenas of contestations and conflicts. But paradoxically, conflicts and the resolutions of conflicts are the hallmarks of sustainable communities. If we grow bitter and indifferent from our verbal squabbles, or if we go to violence or war because of conflicts, then clearly this is neither a sustainable nor ideal notion of what sustainable community means. The sustainable community must therefore have some ability to withstand assaults from the inside and from the external environment.

10. Economist Albert Hirschman once suggested that under organizational conflict, there are three possible responses, namely exit, voice or loyalty. In conflict, we can choose to avoid it and exit the community. However, we could also voice our discontent or if we are steadfast, we could choose to be loyal to our own point of view or to this community. The design specification for a sustainable community then, if we take Hirschman’s theory simply as a heuristic, is how to build a community that entails a very low desire to exit and a high preference for engagement through voice as constructive dialogues.

11. Finally, one may think that the sustainable community must therefore engender high loyalty. From the surface this seems to be true. However, I also think something additional is necessary in order for productive loyalty to exist. Adolf Eichmann was very loyal to Hitler and his genocidal cause, and that did neither the Germanic community nor the global community any good. Instead his unquestioning loyalty brought great evil. It is therefore of paramount importance to constantly question the quality of any loyalty. With a commitment for loyalty one must never forget to question the morality of the status quo—for this questioning is what distinguishes ethics from morality and is the necessary ethical duty required within any sustainable community. 

On Ethics I

Even if ethics is unrealizable in its most ideal form in this world, the question has always been if this would be a better world with unrealizable ethics compared to the world without unrealizable ethics.

On Philosophy and Philosophers II

"...as Cleanthes used to say, that what philosophers say may be contrary to expectation, but not to reason." --Epictetus.

On Philosophy and Philosophers I

"Philosophy lacks the advantage, which the other sciences enjoy, of being able to presuppose its objects as given immediately by representation. And, with regard to its beginning and advance, it cannot presuppose the method of cognition as one that is already accepted."--Hegel

"The philosopher and philosophy can do nothing by themselves, but what can we do without them?"--Henri Lefebvre, from The Urban Revolution (2003).

On the plight of the Somalians

When Satre spoke of his idea of a radical freedom to choose, he clearly did not have this in mind--the kind of absolutely stark choices between two impossibly, inhumane fates: “If they stay in Somalia, they will die of hunger,” he said bluntly. That’s what the choice comes down to for many Somalis: Do they risk starvation at home or torture and rape while fleeing?" (reported by Kristof for NYT).

This decision-tree left me cold.

On mining ores

"And it is just the same with men's best wisdom. When you come to a good book, you must ask yourself, 'Am I inclined to work as an Australian miner would? Are my pickaxes and shovels in good order, and am I in good trim myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow, and my breath good, and my temper?' And, keeping the figure a little longer, even at cost of tiresomeness, for it is a thoroughly useful one, the metal you are in search of being the author's mind or meaning, his words are as the rock which you have to crush and smelt in order to get at it. And your pickaxes are your own care, wit, and learning; your smelting furnace is your own thoughtful soul. Do not hope to get at any good author's meaning without those tools and that fire; often you will need sharpest, finest chiselling, and patientest fusing, before you can gather one grain of the metal."

-- John Ruskin, in John Ruskin on Genius (2011), p.75.

On the idea of living in the solution

"When one is living in the solution, one does not understand the problem."

--Peter Sloterdijk, Neither Sun nor Death (2011).

On a Drift to Low Performance

"Thus though man has never before been so complacent about what he has, or as confident of his ability to do whatever he sets his mind upon, it is at the same time true that he never before accepted so low an estimate of what he is. The same scientific method which enabled him to create his wealth and to unleash the power he wields has, he believes, enabled biology and psychology to explain him away--or at least to explain away whatever used to seem unique or even in any way mysterious...Truly he is, for all his wealth and power, poor in spirit."

--Joseph Krutch (1959), cited in D.H. Meadows's, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, pp.185.

On Design Ethics, Design Awareness and Design Education

This the transcript of my keynote lecture at the Design and Technology Awards 2011.

Good morning. It is a pleasure for me today to share some of my ideas on design education and ethics with all of you. As you may know I am trained as an architect, and not as a product designer. So I hope you will pardon me for my ignorance in your field. That said, I am also a design teacher, and so I hope that my own reflections on design education will still be of some use.

Preparing this lecture brought back memories of my experience as a student in a design and technology classroom. For two years in secondary one and two respectively, I remember learning how to sketch, draw orthographic projections, axonometric drawings and work on various materials from wood to acrylic. I remember that it was a class that allowed me to conceptualize, calculate, measure, make, and also take whatever I have made home. On hindsight, I thought that there was something in the task of making that made it very different from physics, history or literature.

In any case, subsequently in the next four years of my pre-tertiary education however, I drew nothing and made nothing. Even though I learned more about complex equations and formulas, and knew more about the world through the various sciences, in many ways I had come to know less about it.

This brings me to the two questions at the center of this lecture.

First, what does it mean to be ‘educated by design’? To be educated by design must be the aim of design education. However normally we don’t phrase the aim this way. Normally we tend to say that in design education, a student learns to visualize and draw; this student learns the dexterity of handling tools and hones his tactile intelligence with materials. This student also learns how to observe users’ needs and wants, and to synthesize all these ideas together through a design model or prototype with some intent in mind.

But here, I want to raise the question by asking: is that all to what it means to be educated by design?

This leads me to my second question. The second question is, ‘what is design ethics?’.

I do not intend to ask this question out of the blue. On the contrary, I think this second question is intimately connected to the first question. Unless we have something to say about design ethics, it is very hard to arrive at a sufficient answer of what it means to be educated by design.

As a prelude to what I want to share, one can say that design shapes and modulates the interests, the relationships and lives of individuals and communities. Because of this impact, design always has an ethical dimension. Hence the question is not, ‘how do we make design ethical?’—because it already presupposed some kind of ethics—but rather, ‘how do we engage and activate the various ethical values already implicit in the design process for the development of the student?’

So let me begin with the second question on ‘what is design ethics’ first. It is possible to answer this question tentatively first by saying that design ethics is mostly about ‘good design’.

Good design is always somewhat subjective and controversial. But as you will see later, I am concerned here with the other kind of good design.

As a start, to define what is good design, it is always fruitful to show what is not good design. I understand that even bad design may still be a very subjective issue. Even so, I would still like to demonstrate my position on this matter. Hopefully the examples I am going to show will speak for themselves. I apologize that most of them come from architecture.

My first slide here shows a house by the famous architect Peter Eisenman. For a time, Eisenman was designing a series of houses through the exploration of geometrical rules. I should add that these explorations in geometry came at the expense of livability and perhaps even safety concerns. It was said that upon hearing that an occupant in one of his buildings fell from the stairs and broke his ankle, Eisenman remarked that from then on, this person would cease to take a staircase for granted.

Here we see that in order to obey the geometrical rules he set up, Eisenman had to include redundant beams that serve no structural purposes, and he also separated the bedroom of a loving couple with a gap.

My second slide shows the basement levels of Fusionopolis. The pictures speak for themselves. Even where human traffic is low in a temporary set up like this, human factors of safety and ease have not been considered in the implementation of this design.

My third slide shows the carpark at Orchard Central. I don’t know if you have tried driving in this carpark. Thankfully, I have yet to experience the design here. But for those of you who have tried it, I hope your experience has been less harrowing compared to that of these policemen.

My last slide in this series shows a case of risky improvisation. While we may not call improvisation a form of design, it is however a form of designerly problem-solving behavior. The key but debatable difference between improvisation and design is that improvisation aims to solve a problem expediently with readily available materials—such as seen in this case where a sense of responsibility was lacking.

If this is the general idea of what bad design means, now lets look at a definitive example of what is known as good design.

Here are Dieter Rams’s famous 10 principles of good designs. I am sure many, if not all of you, are acquainted with Rams, for he was for the longest time, the most iconic designer working for Braun in Germany.

But what Rams missed is the other category of what it means by ‘good design’. This means good as implied in the ethical good. I am afraid that there is no easy way of expressing this so please bear with me. Good design, in the ethical category, is concerned with the following questions:

(1) Why are we designing this artifact?

(2) What are its anticipated consequences and costs?

(3) Who are we designing it for? Who benefits and who loses?

(4) Who is responsible in this design? What are the responsibilities of this design?

These questions, except for (2) and (3), are rather peculiar by standards in design today. The first question is usually bypassed because the need or want is apparent. As for the last question, lawyers are the ones who usually answer it.

In contrast, questions of ‘how’, for example, how is this or that made? How do we achieve this or that effect?, have become much more prevalent today, perhaps owing both to the wide range of technological tools at our command as well as to the immediacy of communicative networks for sharing what we know and have made. Even so, these questions of ‘how’ usually do not invoke the question of ethical making, for example, such as, ‘to what extent is the method of making sustainable?’ or ‘has the method considered fair wages?’. Instead, questions of ‘how’ tend to refer to questions of method and techniques.

In any case, Australian designer and researcher Tony Fry once remarked that design ethics is a marginalized and underdeveloped area in design. It is not hard to imagine why this is the case. Designers are practitioners of action. This does not mean that they act without thinking. Rather, to use a Donald Schon’s aphorism, designers think in action. Furthermore, designers enjoy looking ahead, not looking around—something that ethics oblige us to do. The attraction of the end product is a very seductive and an all-encompassing goal. And perhaps most of all, ethics has a stodgy aura about it: the ethical thinker is perceived as a superior personality on a high-horse reprimanding anyone deemed to be morally inferior. This common but inaccurate view does not sit in well with the pluralistic ethos practiced in design today.

And so as designers, shouldn’t we just contend with being the most skilful and talented designers we can be?

However the famous designer George Nelson once said that if designers start out by limiting their responsibility, they also limit their potential. This insight can be said to be the mother of all insights in design responsibility. Think about this for a second. What Nelson seems to say is this: design always starts out with a problem or need. And how we define this problem or need in turn depends on the formulations of our responsibilities towards this problem or need. Thus how we formulate our responsibilities then determines the kind of potential and command we enjoy as the designer.

In other words Nelson is asking to us imagine a forward kind of design responsibility—responsibility that is not associated with the backward responsibility of liability but with hopeful anticipation, obligation and virtue. To put this concretely, if designers were to embrace this forward responsibility, they would look forward to a world where their designs are proudly implemented and not just sold; and they would be willing to participate in the continuous development of a product alongside the user and not just as the client. The anecdotal tale of the architect who does not look forward to his creation, much less visiting them and asking how the user is, demonstrate the rarity of this forward kind of design responsibility.

But surely Nelson did not ask us to expand our responsibilities as designers indefinitely. To do so would be profoundly irresponsible. On this, I think Nelson is asking us to draw our boundaries in a responsible manner—both backward and forward responsibilities--and this exercise is itself an enlarging move towards ethical design.

(from The School and Society, p.37-38: ‘Take the example of the little child who wants to make a box. If he stops short with the imagination or wish, he certainly will not get discipline. But when he attempts to realize his impulse, it is a question of making his idea definite, making it into a plan, of taking the right kind of wood, measuring the parts needed, giving them necessary proportions, etc. There is involved the preparation of materials, the sawing, planing, the sandpapering, making all the edges and corners to fit.’)

The disposition in design today to focus much more on the ‘how’ over the ‘why’ can be partially traced back via Donald Schon to the Progressivist’s philosophy of John Dewey. According to Dewey’s philosophy, in order to learn something we must try it. By trying, we see the consequences of our action and by comparing that with our original intent, we learn something new. Dewey’s great faith in the experiential method must rest on his equal faith in the epistemology of the scientific method, which is experimentation.

But today, questions of ‘why’ have become just as important as questions of ‘how’. The state of environmental degradation, the novel but harmful financial derivatives and new products of every kind that ultimately end up in landfills are not categories of design action that can benefit from experimentations. As a matter of fact, countless acts of design today are irreversible actions: design actions that exact a cost in both material and human resources and sometimes have residual effects that last for many generations.

Interestingly, Dewey saw the need to expand education beyond that of learning and skills towards the broad social goal of democratic citizenship. However, in his writings replete with so many references to design education, he did not anticipate the day when design would come to threaten a sustainable way to live, for example as highlighted by problematic issues of mass consumption, mass disposability and planned obsolescence.

In light of these issues, systems thinker C.W. Churchman, who coined the phrase, ‘wicked problems’ once remarked that many ways of doing things were invented in the Twentieth Century, but we have not found any way to justify for many of them. At the same time, phenomenon that was once in the vicinity of fate or destiny have now turned into problems of design under mankind’s discretion. Here are a few at a very high level of design possibilities:

(a) genetic traits of one’s offspring

(b) procreation beyond one’s death

(c) distribution and allocation of deadly risks

(d) the natural balance of ecosystems

(e) the size of the world’s population

(f) the survival of species, including our own (Protzen & Harris 2010: 222)

Hence the focus on questions of ‘how’ over ‘why’ ultimately spells what design thinker Horst Rittel calls the ‘loss of destiny’—we no longer require a justification to exercise the power of design. In other words, the human species has arrived at a stage where we can no longer quite distinguish between what to design and what not to design. The range of design artifacts out there tell us that many design artifacts exist simply because we have the capacity to make them. And unfortunately, the logic of the market tends to reinforce this state of affairs.

Subsequently, this leads to a state today where we can no longer quite distinguish between what to design and what not to design. The tallest building? What productive role does it serve? The fastest car? Where is it going? Man-made islands in the shape of a palm tree? Is our planet running out of interesting geographical features?

Techniques, methods or even enlightened aspirations and design talents cannot answer these questions on our behalf. Only ethical reasoning, along with their corresponding dialogues and debates between individuals who will be affected by these designs, can begin to point the way.

Now let me conclude this lecture by returning to the first question on what it means to be educated by design.

To be educated by design, I suggest, is to be made more aware and conscious as a human being by design. What do I mean by this?

Let me further explicate this idea a little more through two different ways. The first way has to do with a designer being aware of what he or she is doing. The second way has to do with an individual being made aware of design as a citizen in a democratic society.

First let me start by situating design awareness from the designer’s point of view. Here, I quote Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Project as accounted by Richard Sennett as an extreme example:

“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about only after you have had your technical success.”

Oppenheimer was however in this case, referring to the atomic bomb.

I certainly hope none of our students end up designing weapons of mass destruction! It is not my intent to demonize Oppenheimer, for he was also deeply tormented by the military use of his design. Yet one thing is clear: the designer who is unaware of the ramifications of his or her private design tampers with risks and dangers that may one day become the public’s problem. To put this in another way, being aware of what we do as designers have something to say about what we should design and what we should not design. From here, we can then begin to consider how we design.

To underscore this idea better, I provide you with Tim Brown’s own account. You may know that Tim Brown is the CEO of IDEO. In Brown’s account, he talks about how IDEO was engaged by Oral-B to reframe and redesign toothbrushes for children. The project was lauded as a success. A few months later, one of the lead designers of this project was walking on a beach in Mexico when he found the very toothbrush that he has designed, except for a few barnacles and still quite new, washed ashore. In his estimation the toothbrush was disposed for quite some time, yet it looked more or less the same as the day someone had decided to dispose of it. The moral of the story is clear: Brown is highlighting the need for designers to be aware of the complex interactions between users, product life-cycles and the environment in things we design. It will not be a straightforward task to analyze these complex relationships, but Brown asked us to try.

I should add here that questions of ‘how’ are important in this context of design awareness. For how we design something shows the values we bring towards design. This lesson of craftsmanship is direct but seldom invoked. Indeed, how we design and what we design teaches the users the values and the responsibilities that designers hold on to.

The skeptic may say that this lesson has become obsolete in the age of industrial production. Yet many designs today show that the ethic of care, and hence also an act of educating by design, is still achievable despite the disappearance of the traditional craftsman.

And as my last example on this point, consider this Tsunami warning marker that became news recently. It was discovered that people who built above this marker, erected long ago by the ancestors of the villagers, got to keep their lives and houses. But everyone who built below this marker had their houses and lives swept away. We can see in this example, a case in point where individuals who lived long ago saw the responsibility to warn future generations about the tsunamis that they had experienced through an act of design. And they elected to design in a very direct way: carving a stone tablet that is anticipated to last a long time on a point on the hillside they deemed safe for their descendents. They were far-sighted in their design responsibility. To reiterate a point I made earlier, this Tsunami marker can be seen as a case of forward responsibility in design.

In any case, I do not want to give you the idea that design awareness is uncontroversial. As a matter of fact by Rams’s definition, good design is design that we are not aware of, that is, unobtrusive!

This brings me to my second way of being aware of design as a citizen in a democratic society.

If we take a look around our environment today, we quickly realize that we are surrounded by objects of all types that are opaque and mysterious. Yes, many of these objects are very attractive and some are even downright seductive. This has become the mandate of design today. However, they say beauty can sometimes be skin-deep, and this is the limit to design that I hope to explicate a little more here.

To use a Heideggerian formulation, such designs only become apparent, that is, they become visible to our consciousness when they malfunction. Heideggerians like to use the example of the malfunctioning hammer: when it works, we don’t think about it. But when the hammering head falls off, we realize it has become a hammer that does not work. To put this in design lingo, a user-friendly design has the unintentional effect of rendering us less aware and more unreflective of its design, a point made by sustainability scholar John Ehrenfeld.

This does not mean that we should design or live with designs that calls on our attention all the time. Rather, the point is that design artifacts today are hardly designed with the intentions for users’ self-maintenance, much less for training his dexterity and hence also, mental and physical awareness of these designs. Whether we acknowledge it or not, the designed artifact challenges us every moment to try and understand the reasoning and logic behind its creation: why did the designer do this? How did the designer accomplish this? How can I as the user find new ways to interpret, use or maintain it? Designs that seek to heighten our design awareness attempt to consider these questions in their conception. Designs that seek to reduce our awareness dismiss these questions as superfluous. The choice between these options is therefore also a choice of design ethics.

Thus, it is possible to say that today, we have an unprecedented range of design artifacts at our disposal, but in contrast, our design awareness has become unprecedentedly low. The bushman has to know each facet of his flint intimately but how many of us truly understand—and can repair—an induction cooker? Truth to be told, today, design can only catch our eyes initially, but cease to catch our minds and our bodies as people who try to live and work with them. And it is by understanding design both cognitively and bodily that we come to be further educated by design.

On this, should the values of user-friendliness and unobtrusiveness be the perennial guiding principle of good design? They should be if we are interested to continue this trend of low design awareness. On the other hand, they should be questioned and challenged if we are interested to find greater design awareness through designs that invite us to work and understand it, and perhaps through this, to become co-designers with the original designer.

Here, I end my lecture with a provocative question: how then do we teach design awareness, if by design awareness we refer to being educated by design, when our environment is filled with designs that are user-friendly (but not maintenance-friendly), unobtrusive, opaque and or mysterious? To put this more concretely, how are we to heighten our quotient of design awareness when design tries to be invisible in everyday life?

I suggest we first start by asking ‘why’. Why is this design made? Why is it important for us to have this design? And what is the intention of the designer? Like the proverbial example of the young child who always asks ‘why’, this is perhaps the only way when design becomes apparent and conscious to us, appearing in our mutual conversations, public dialogues and national discussions. Only by rendering visible what was once unproblematic and unobtrusive can we begin to be truly educated by design.

Thank You.

*post-script:

"Language can serve as a medium through which we create new understandings and new realities as we begin to talk about them. In fact, we don't talk about what we see; we see only what we can talk about. Our perspectives on the world depend on the interaction of our nervous system and our language..." --Fred Kofman

On Human Dignity (1)

"A life is a life; there it is; if anything is sacred, a life is. The question: Of what value is a human life? is indecent. The question: why do you want to stay alive? is a tyrant's question. It should not be asked; any answer will always be off the mark; the words will fill in poorly for the appropriate silence."

--George Kateb, Human Dignity, 2011: pp. 40.

Between Sociological Imagination and the Geographical Imagination

A most pertinent quote from Harvey,
"This distinction between the geographical imagination and the sociological imaginations is artificial when we seek to relate to the problems of the city, but it is all too real when we examine the ways we think about the city. There are plenty of those possessed with a powerful sociological imagination (C. Wright Mills among them) who nevertheless seem to live and work in a spaceless world. There are also those, possessed of a powerful geographical imagination or spatial consciousness, who fail to recognize that the way space is fashioned can have a profound effect upon social processes--hence the numerous examples of beautiful but unlivable designs in modern living."

(from David Harvey's Social Justice and the City, revised edition, 2009: pp.24)

What is utopia for?

"Utopia is on the horizon: when I walk two steps, it takes two steps back...I walk ten steps, and it is ten steps further away. What is utopia for? It is for this, for walking." (Galeano & Borges 1997)

cited from Just City on the horizon (2009), by Cuz Potter and Johannes Novy.

A Critique of the Creative Class

William Lim, architect, theorist and writer, came to class today and said something often missed in our tacit or explicit pursuit of the telos of creativity.

He said, 'creativity is the beginning and not the end.' With this declaration he devastated Florida's thesis; and with these few words, a massive intellectual edifice of platitudes--'teaching to be creative', 'creativity', 'the creative city'; you name it, its all there--was toppled.

If creativity is the beginning and not the end, then what is the end, the telos, or purpose of our practical actions? Implicit in Lim's declaration is the idea that creativity is only a means to some end: what we are actually striving for is not creativity, but creativity is merely a vehicle towards that goal. I have to wonder aloud with so much investment pouring into ventures building our creative capacities, what would we actually do once we find ourselves there?

'Palindrome' from Ed Soja

Today I heard Ed Soja lectured for the first time. It was truly a splendid experience to have finally heard the writer himself rather than through his books.

He said something that after some thinking, I thought is rather indicative of the state of affairs today.

His quote reads, 'from crisis-generated restructuring to restructuring-generated crises today'. By this, Soja was referring to the changes in the urban form as a result of the tumultuous social and political events of the 1960s and 70s--when multiple crises prompted a change in how we plan and design cities ('cities': Soja thinks the city is passe; I disagree because barring an objective definition, the city is also a psychological category that can never quite disappear at any scale of reference). These urban forms are however again changing rapidly today due to the many unanticipated volatilities in the larger environment resulting in never-seen-before crises in planning and design.

It has taken me a painful one paragraph to recapture and explain that one particular line. While we can all debate on the validity of his proposition, this proposition does encapsulate an economy of thought that warrants a record on this blog and perhaps, further review.