ALD4106H
Instructor: Theodora Vardouli

How should designers design? In the first postwar decades, this question animated several academic researchers across disciplines that set out, as the famous motto went, to design designing. Even though short-lived, the avid preoccupation with “design methods”—efforts to render design processes “systematic”, “rational”, and “communicable”—left a sizeable conceptual and technical legacy while forging knowledge infrastructures that survive until today.

Proponents of design methods sought to overhaul the familiar caricature of design as a medley of precedent, convention, rules of thumb, and subjective judgments. They displaced “creativity” from nebulous ideas about inspired intuition to a techno-rational definition tied to achieving far-reaching goals through a structured process. In the context of such efforts, design was recast as a stepwise, goal-seeking process amenable to mathematical analysis and articulable as an explicit method. This produced a new disciplinary focus for design, from the physical form of the final artifact (be it an object, a building, or a city) to the steps and decisions that led to it, ultimately preparing the ground for algorithmic and computational approaches to design.

This seminar explores cultural, operational, and political dimensions of design methods in postwar Europe and North America through three parts: Contexts, Models, and (Loose) Ends.

• Contexts connects design methods with wider intellectual and socio-cultural imperatives of rationality, prediction, and universality.
• Models looks at efforts to abstract and systematize process, form, space, bodies, and environment, along with their historical predecessors.
• Finally, (Loose) Ends critically contemplates contemporary legacies of design methods in data-driven design and engages literature on design justice and decolonial design.

Because of their ecumenical aspirations and heterogeneous foci and approaches, design methods can serve as a launching pad for examining a diverse gamut of topics that expand beyond the seminar’s inquiry into the (pre)history of computational design. Through the reading list and seminar discussions seminar participants will gain knowledge of design methods as an historic phenomenon while making thematic connections with their own topics of research and scholarly interest.