Design Philosophy

Wagih F. Youssef

Abstract
In the context of design, semiotics should be able to help us understand the whole complex of
physical objects, needs, desires, motivations, actions, mythical representations, frustrations, and
delights which are inextricably interrelated in the interface between the physical world and
people. If only it helped us to do without such abstract notion as users, requirements and fit, if it
helped us understand the vital importance of misfit, in a complex, conflicting, and therefore
changing society, this could be enough to amount to a revolution in design theory.
Keywords: change, representation, decision-making, design-factual, use-fit

Introduction
All man-made changes affecting our lives are by design. Design is a realizing vision of the future
and what it might become in the future especially in an increasingly complex and less certain
society. Change has always been with us. Changing environment context results in human
physiological changes which are necessary for life, and change is life. Without change there
would be no growth, no self-development. However, there are limits to human adaptability and
therefore limits to the rate of change with which a person can cope without suffering
psychological breakdown. Designers are therefore responsible for providing sufficient change to
stimulate without overloading the human system and in the meantime satisfy the society in
general and think about the long-term implications of their designs on people’s lives without
those damaging effects that we are still discovering, such as pollution, and decay in inner cities.
Some of these are more pervasive in effect than original problem which the designers set out to
solve.
Poor design occurs by default because the designer has fallen into one of three traps: 1) used a
set of inappropriate social values as the basis for actions; 2) not understood the complexity or
scale of the problem and its systemic context; 3) become so used to designing in a particular way
that the designer is not aware of alternative and more appropriate way of tackling problems.
Further problems of design occur as a result of a more fundamental mismatch between the
deeper needs of society and the institutional powers of those who take decisions in the areas of
economics and materials production. Another problem is that knowledge is not static.
Knowledge grows. Therefore, to define the change agents that affect the design will generate
other more thoughtful efforts. These efforts will interact with more helpful and more harmful
efforts to understand.

Change Agents
I should like to focus attention on crucial problems of change in architectural design, how
changes of architectural concepts come about, and how we might learn to generate more positive
forms of change from understanding the nature of the process of conceptual change itself. There
are three points to help defining change agents. The first of these is to address the question, what
change agent? The second prerequisite, or foundation concept or maybe even assumption, about
change agents is a fundamental concept of the setting and dynamics of the change in which the
agent acts. Thirdly, to set the stage, it has been helpful to view change as learning.
A factor that is considered here as a change agent is technology which changes situations,
attitudes, and abilities. There are also people involved. Furthermore, there are changes in the
behavior of an organization. This behavior is also the culture of an organization. Cultures are
maintained through the design process. Now how does the designer solve the problem of change
agents? Maybe by facilitating the learning of the change agent or let him perceive that this is for
his self-interest. Once these principles have been grasped by the change agent, all problems are
over, or at least being facilitated. This leads to the successful implementation of innovations.

Design Education
In design studios, students work on given projects devised for them and supervised by staff
members who are themselves professionally qualified designers. In this craft-like educational
situation training is focused on the students’ ability to produce icons. The student is learning
representation rather than making and is largely dependent upon the judgements of his tutor as to
whether the translation of his icon to physical form is feasible, function, and imbued with those
qualities which make it good design. The difficulties of evaluating icons in the abstracted
educational environment permit not only the student but the tutor as well to dwell
disproportionately upon intrinsic values of the image and the pleasures of the process of design
and presentation. Educational projects are evaluated largely upon esoteric imagery of past and
current examples of the genre in the real world, preferring to view them rather as expressions of
artistic and cultural values. Design education is dominated by the synthesis and presentation of
solutions in an abstract context using arbitrary and subjective opinions as the basis of judgement.
Architects have rejected the idea that buildings determine social behavior and individual
happiness but have not accepted the responsibility which must be implied by the fact that
buildings are co-producers of these. To do so would need some recognition of the complexity of
the situations to which buildings are a partial response. It is frustrating to provide better housing
and better environment if the people living in them do not feel happier or more satisfied.
Individuals vary, moreover, in their behavior by virtue of differences in age, health, physique,
expectations, attitudes, beliefs, training, and priorities and the quality of life they are used to.

Design Problems
Designing is not a problem of reduction, but of a transformation from the life-factual to the
design-factual. Limits that should be determined by a designer is the understanding that his
method is a predetermined and predetermining way of tackling a design problem. It is possible to
view complex situations as simple, to base limited actions upon that perception with success. In
such a case, the simplistic design will be confirmed. The error is to assume that the perception is
truly representative of the situation. Thus, design, too, becomes as simple, and people begin to
believe that reality itself is simple. Alternatively, the real world has changed whilst one’s
surrogate view has remained static. Actions taken based upon this will then inevitably produce

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unexpected results. If we assume the world to be simple, our actions will reveal to us its
complexity, often with disastrous consequences. To be able to distinguish at what point along a
spectrum from the simple to the complex a problem may be effectively defined seems to be a
necessary skill for designers.
Based upon the theory that design problems are complex, we must propose a list of assumptions
concerning science, ecology, social psychology, political science, organizational behavior,
decision theory, and design research. Designing requires the formulation of the problem it aims
to alleviate and taking account of known and unknown relationships in the changing systems
which generate problems to solve. The designer’s personal view of what the critical or sensitive
issues are in the project will be only one of many based on illegitimate transfer of experience,
unjustified assumptions, and partial information, all of which must be modified through the
interactive process of design.
Having problems in the design is borne out of our capability for imagining the future, and
tackling problems is a function of our ability to delay responses to current events. This delay
enables us to think and choose our responses. Thinking, in this sense, is a sort of mental rehearsal
of future actions. There are however limits to our thinking ability so the complexity of our plans
for the future is limited. The invention, manipulation, and communication to others of symbols to
our thoughts is what gives us the potential for planning and thus creating the future.
Designing is sometimes thought of in broader terms as making plans for changing a given
situation into a preferred one. Thus, we have problems because we can imagine the future, and
we can tackle problems because we can make plans for creating the future. However, in most
design activity it is not only a matter of the designer’s involvement in designing, but also
implications which the design has for others that are important. Problem-solving always involves
learning something new for the problem-solver; that is, problem-solving changes the problem-
solver. If the designer has formulated or solved a problem in a way that nobody has done before,
then the change, if communicated of course, could have far reaching implications. Of course, not
all changes in people brought about by problem-solving are innovative in the social sense. There
are many problems in life that we all meet and solve and which we are expected by others to
solve.

Design, Technology, and Society

Thus, anyone concerned with the fact that designing should change, needs to understand the
continuous change process and its origin in the problem-causing, problem-tackling interactions
of parties. It is also clear that no theory pertaining to designing can possibly ignore that
designing is done by architects and that it takes place in a human context. Design influences
society who have become too complex and reliant on experts who they are unwilling to trust.
Inconveniently, value judgements about what should be designed and the design that results
cannot be totally independent. Design requirements are formulated on the basis of past designs or
reactions against them. However, this leaves considerable room for differing views of design.

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People often need help in formulating their own responses and requirements as well as providing
such help for discussions to monitor and influence design.
Laypersons are aware that there is something known as good design. But this good design is
manifested in objects that are expensive, usually not to the laypersons’ taste, inconsistent to his
lifestyle, and imposed on them. The problem with this is that we don’t know enough about the
relationship between design, technology, and the impact on society, and whether technology
shapes society or whether society shapes its own technology. Designing, as we know, is
decision-making at the interface between technology and society. But advanced technology is
facing unprecedented set of crises and criticisms. If that technology seems unlikely to survive
much beyond the turn of the century, then design as we know it has an equally unlikely chance to
survive. Winston Churchill had indicated that “We shape our houses, and our houses shape us.”
Le Corbusier had the wit to remark that too! This observation is not limited to contrived
experiments in environmental psychology but applies to every detail and to the whole
technological context of our everyday lives.

Design Process
At the preliminary design stage, designers are finding ways of safely defining a role for the user,
by legitimating the design achievements of traditional cultures, folk design and vernacular styles,
so that we find that it is quite possible to have architecture without architects. Brainstorming,
synectics, and the numerous variants are used as means for exploring and opening the design
situation. On the other hand, they are functioning as power instruments to investigate the
thinking behavior of the designer himself. It is supported then that a comparative study between
different input signals and the corresponding outputs can give the decisive answer about the
operation of the design itself. A return to the typical “beaux-arts approach”. The design activity
is considered an art and subsequently the designer as an artist. Intuition is the only guide through
the design process. The result is an empty formalism, far from any functional use.
The strive for rationalization and for the application of scientific research to design practice
seems to bump against the rich variety of a dynamic subjectivity. By handling a pseudo-
harmonious model, based on eliminating conflicts by rational methods on one hand, and based
on a value-free concept of science on the other hand, the designer has confronted himself
willingly and knowingly with himself. The designer will go on considering himself as central.
User and client, as well as designer, often get hopelessly frustrated in this kind of process. The
changing objective within practical application of methods carry the seeds of questioning the
theoretical reference frame itself, which has remained unchanged during the whole evolution. It
seems necessary to investigate the changed reference frame and to reconsider the importance of a
design theory for design practice. Every design method can only be evaluated critically on the
level of the design theory.
Some of the main problems in design reside in the failure to go beyond the satisfaction of
quantifiable requirements and take account of maters which depend on value and subjective
judgements. Since such matters seem to be closely linked with meaning, one way to overcome

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the problem would appear to consist in providing the designer with an additional set of
techniques, which would enable him to deal with meaning as it were: to encode convenient
meanings into the final result of design, so that it may achieve a better fit within its contexts of
use. And it is here where the semiotician enters with his technical ability for the analysis of
meaning. Typically, semioticians are thought to be concerned only, or primarily, with analysis,
interpretation, or verbal description, i.e. a posteriori activity of culturally significant objects;
design theorists on the other hand work with general models for the process of design.
Design has its justification in the satisfaction of human needs throughout a teleological laddering
of goals. Any theory which seeks to develop the logical form of a conception of design without
considering its historical background is bound to fall into a number of traps and paradoxes in the
confusion between the logical form of the definition. One is tempted to grant teleology to human
behavior or to any form of life, or a pure biological basis. But Nature is not teleological itself,
not even life or human behavior when considered as determined by goals. Furthermore, human
behavior and its material products can be seen as self-reflectivity teleological, but even then, it is
possible to distinguish between the conceptual and the natural aspects of self-conscious, goal-
oriented behavior. And logical properties such as the relationship between means and goals are
properties of concepts, not of natural objects.

The Concept of Use-Fit

Any logical construct may be applied to the description of the world, and to human behavior as
part of the natural world. But then the validity of the construct must be questioned, not only as to
its formal consistency, but also as to the conditions for its semantic use, as to assumptions that
are necessary in order to translate natural properties into logical ones which the formal elements
of the construct are. By thinking in terms of goals and instruments in general, rather than in
terms of the concrete set of circumstances which determine needs, desires, interests, and the
human conduct that emerges from them, an abstract parameter – utility or fit – begins to appear,
which acts as a homogenizing category against which particular occurrences of needs, desires,
and interest may be measured and compared.
In order to understand the implications of this abstraction, it is convenient to look at historical
development. Although the utilitarian approach has older roots, we may take as the first
important step in its development, i.e. important in this context in view of the consequences it
has had on our conceptions of design. Architecture took the lead from the Modern Movement,
aiming towards a unified theory of architecture and assuming that construction-fit – as illustrated
this time by the processes rather than the products of technology – and use-fit were
interchangeable tokens of more general and universally valid principle. In doing this the tradition
of design methods has often engaged in giving concrete expression to ideas that the pioneers of
the Modern Movement had expressed in vague and metaphoric terms.
Architects involved in design methods seem indifferent to the historical development of the
concept of fit, especially to the fact that it was provided with a concrete sense in each period,
only thanks to particular historical circumstances. Those circumstances entailed contradictions,

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exceptions, and in general a symbolic rather than a literal understanding of the concept itself.
And so, taking it for granted as a self-evident basis, design theorists have attempted to build upon
it a whole systematic construction: a science of design, endowed by the principle of logical
consistency, made out of grafts and transfers from other sciences (most of them themselves
entailing assumptions rooted in the same tradition of utilitarianism), and aiming at a normative
content, ready to be imposed upon the actual practice of design. Such a science of design has two
paradoxes. One is the attempt to abstract, for the sake of generality, objectivity, and amenability
to systematic treatment, the essence of instrumental, as such, from the complexity of their
particular occurrences carries with it an increasing difficulty in contrasting the instrument with
its use. Theory thus faces the designer with it a dilemma: on the one hand it tells him that the
design object is but an instrument for the user to achieve his own private goals; on the other
hand, it asks him to conceive of the latter as external to the design process – as being, from the
point of view of the design process, pure forms of intention, indifferent as such to whatever
particular contents they may assume. It is as if the distinction between the instrument and
satisfaction, assumed for the sake of methodological efficiency, became a property of the real
world.
But then the notion of instrument becomes meaningless. Design theory tells the designer to
consider the second-step goal (the actual use of the object) as a pure datum: something external
given to the designer so that he can feed the algorithm of the design process; but since this datum
is conceived as pure form, nothing is thereby actually given. A theory of fit, which pretends to
make it into a general concept, necessarily has to consider the actual context, which is already
there for instrument to fit in, as an empty form, as a whatever it may be; and this amounts to
saying nothing about such context, which ultimately deprives the concept of fit of any meaning.
The same remark applies to the progressive prevalence of utilitarianism in the development of
design theory. It appears as if the more aware we become, in theory, of the goal-oriented nature
of our design, the less we are able to achieve real satisfaction and enjoyments.

The Core of Design

Decision as opposed to representation would constitute the essential core of design since any
representation would tend to be reduced to the condition of an extrinsic material. In the long run
then, such science tends to empty itself of cognition content. This is the unavoidable result of the
emphasis of methodology – in moving from the requirements to the solution – is achieved at the
cost of screening off the landscape along the sides. The paradoxical consequences of this abstract
concreteness become evident when one attempts to apply the theory to particular problems in
particular situations. Then the abstract notion of strict instrumental subservience has to match a
seamless fabric of interactions between needs, interests, desires, actions, preexisting conditions,
and objects; the result is usually a frustrating one; a kind of time-free, discrete list of
requirements which soon reveals its sheer practical inadequacy. As to the second paradox,
concern amongst theorists and designers is more recent and not quite as widespread. It has to do
however with the central theme: Design philosophy. In a sense, the idea of design appears to

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have been linked since its beginning to the idea of change – change to something better and
different.
In the Renaissance, the whole concept of architectural design was permeated, given sense and
glamor, by the neo-Platonic myth of the Golden Age. With the development of utilitarianism, the
Golden Age jumped from the unattainable past, through the domain of Utopia, into the future; it
became a driving force of progress. The paradox, here, appears to be that the more concrete the
image of the future becomes, the more the change seems to dissolve into the air. The more
concrete the new appears, the more it resembles the old. We have been striving towards an
increasing fit in the interaction of man with the world; and we have reached far enough to feel
that we have really got the future down to hand; but does it entail change, real change?

The notion of scientific knowledge

In order to examine these paradoxes, it may be useful to recall the development of the notion of
scientific knowledge, which seems largely parallel to that of the notion of design. The concept of
fit and the concept of truth both play similar roles in each of these developments. In both cases, it
is a limit-concept which implies the match of an artefact – a scientific theory, or the end product
of the mental activity of design. In both cases there has been a trend towards abstractions,
starting with the Renaissance, increasingly emphasizing the concern with methodology and
ending up with a straightforward avant-gardist extrapolation in the 1930s – the Modern
Movement and logical positivism, respectively.
According to Feyerabend, if we consider theories as languages to describe the world, then facts
do not properly fall outside, but inside that language. They do exist in themselves, but only with
respect to theory. Different theories thus always have different facts. The decisive point is that
scientific theories do not emerge in a virgin world of pure evidence, but always in a world where
evidence is already the result of pre-existing theories – more or less scientific beliefs and
ideologies. So, if we have to add our knowledge of the world – Feyerabend says that a strategy
based on subtraction must be fundamentally wrong - the available evidence of facts; only by
doing so will be able to discover new facts, thus enlarging the field of our experience and
knowledge. This is in a few words his principle of counter induction as to be a stimulating
parallel for design theory. Its attractiveness stems from the fact that it not only represents a
radical departure from accepted assumption as to the role of verification, it also attacks the
conception of truth as match between subjective and an objective component. Or rather, it
substitutes this static conception of truth for a dynamic one, that has avowedly, according to
Feyerabend himself, Hegelian roots. The proper object of theories according to him is not to
match available evident, neither is it to make successful predictions: all there are but side effects
of their central function, which is to enlarge our consciousness of the world. Just as Feyerabend
points out in the case of scientific theories, facts do not emerge in a virgin world of pure
requirements, but always in a world where requirements are the result of preexisting views,
beliefs, and ideologies.

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Conclusion
Particularly, in our present society, the result of ideology of utilitarianism has gained an almost
universal stronghold ever since the advent of industrial revolution. If the designer has to add to
our physical relationship with the world, he will have to address his intentions against to misfit
rather than fit, the realm of available requirements. This is not to advocate for an extravagant
doctrine of subjectivism. As with scientific knowledge (or rather more) the subjective and the
objective are not in design ultimate categories, absolutely irreconcilable spheres; they are both
the result of cultural processes within which the designer’s own subjective anticipations take
shape alongside as well as the objective satisfaction of the users. And it is not, on the other hand,
to assume that the fit occurs, anyhow, as a result of cultural determination since culture does not
constitute an integrated system but a field of varied and often conflicting positions, where
dissensus has a role to play as positive as that of consensus since there would be no cultural
change without it.
Thus, the two important things about culture that the designer should bear in mind are as follows.
First, it is always there, so it is not pure subjectivity, or pure freedom. Second, we are making it,
so it is not pure objectivity, or pure necessity. Which amounts to saying it is history. History as
necessity as well as History as freedom. The case now stands for the need for semiotics in the
theory of design. Since the very substance of culture is to be made out of symbolism or more
precisely process of signification semiosis. Semiotics, the theory of semiosis, assumes the role of
a theory of culture. This means it is an attitude aiming at the consistent critique of the knowledge
provided by other discipline (social sciences, humanities, including subject matter of design
theory).

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