ViP Vision in Design: A Guidebook for Innovators - Softcover

Hekkert, Paul; Dijk Van, Matthijs

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9063693710 ISBN 13: 9789063693718

Publisher: BIS Publishers, 2014

Synopsis

The authors, design practitioners and educators, bringing together in this book 15 years of knowledge, practice and research, have produced the first book about how, as a designer, to formulate a vision for new and appropriate products.

About this title

About the Author

Paul Hekkert is Professor of Form Theory at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft University in Holland. Matthijs van Dijk is CEO of KVD design consultancy and Professor of Applied Design at TU Delft, Peter Lloyd is head of the Department of Design and Innovation at the Open University in the UK.

From the Back Cover

The authors, design practitioners and educators bringing together 15 years of knowledge in this publication have produced the first book on how designers can formulate a vision for new and appropriate products. They call this approach Vision in Product Design (ViP). The approach strikes a good balance between structuring the process of design and allowing the designers to take a personal position and fully express themselves in the process of producing a product. It is both a method and a design philosophy.

In addition to explaining what ViP is all about, this book offers a rich array of narratives, expressed through conversations, cases, literature, creative materials, illustrative models and pictures. Through these different routes, the reader will get a better understanding of ViP and will be able to interact with the book in more diverse ways, both in practice and in an educational context.

Matthijs van Dijk is the CEO of Reframing Studio and a Professor of Applied Design at Delft University of Technology. Paul Hekkert is a Professor of Form Theory at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

*A new vision and method for product design from the Faculty of Industrial Design at Delft University of Technology
*Designed by Irma Boom Office

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Foreword
By Peter Lloyd

The first edition of Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures was written in 1970. It’s author, John Chris Jones, sensing a growing complexity in technology, and concerned that designers should make their decisions demonstrable, looked at how to formalise the process of design. No longer should design be a craft process, a slow intuitive shaping of form and function, but a structured, controlled process. “We should really know what we are doing when we design,” thought Jones. In the America of the 1960s, designers like Henry Dreyfus had already begun to integrate ergonomic studies into the process of design; Jones just took the idea a bit further. Design Methods introduced systematic ways of analysing a wide range of what might be termed ‘situations’. The methods themselves had been inspired by the precision found in scientific language: investigating, selecting, classifying, ranking, and weighting. The design process itself was a process of divergence, transformation, then convergence; paradoxically inspiring something vaguely religious-sounding, like three consecutive John Coltrane albums. It turned out to be a fully realised theory of designing.
Designers could now exercise their creativity from solid theoretical ground – not the shifting sands of individual craft knowledge. And other designers could stand proudly with them. That was the theory anyway; in many ways it was laudable. After all, it was human futures that we were talking about, the seeds of a new world. History tells
it somewhat differently, of course, as history would. The book was well received, a breath of (nearly) fresh air. More power to the fist of the designer who, slowly but surely, began to thump the cover of the book in design meetings. “This is how we’ve done it” he’d say (for it was mostly a he), “we followed the method, we did the analysis,
we know this is the right decision because it was properly ranked and weighted”, he’d continue, “the solution structure perfectly fits the problem structure.” The misgivings anyone had were forced to adopt the same language and consequently were revealed as a sham. Indefinable judgement, a niggling feeling that things were not quite right, was ignored unless evidenced. The book thumping continued as text was quickly transformed into pretext.
Once the boat was floating, other people clambered aboard, desperate to be part of the journey. The “-ologist” – the not-quite scientist looking for a discipline – acquired a “method” prefix, and
a discipline was born. Bruce Archer worried about the boundaries of science, art, and design. Nigel Cross collected best practice. Stuart Pugh, perhaps after watching the Dutch football team at the 1974 world cup, came up with Total Design. Pairs of oarsmen climbed aboard: Roozenburg and Eekels, Hubka and Ernst Eder, Pahl and Beitz. All with the best intentions of course. Design problems were getting increasingly complicated, and their scope extended much further than anyone had first thought. Urban planners and architects were even fetching up in the boat. What nobody realised, however, was that Jones had already, quietly, disembarked.
Jones continued walking on foot. Maybe he was following the river; maybe he was finding his own path. Either way he worried about being misunderstood. The methods were not meant as blunt instruments to beat people with, thought Jones, they were tools to think with, to play intuition off against. If we follow a set of rules properly we arrive at a place that we couldn’t have foreseen, outside of the intuitions we had when the problem was first put in front of us. Intuition must form part of the ongoing process, thought Jones. Together, analysis and intuition balance one another out. And following rules creates new intuitions. The methods were meant to make things discussible and questionable, not definitive; to bring private thoughts out into the social world; to share responsibilities. The problem was that the most obvious question to ask after applying a method was always, “Do I like the answer?” Intuition always seemed to hold the best cards.
Somewhere on his long, still continuing walk, Jones embraced the idea of chance. “If we create a method that has elements of chance within it, we can really find out what we think”, thought Jones, “our intuitions become explicit.” This was method as revelation. If you can design a process that includes chance and live with the results, then you really know where you are going. “Method and intuition are two sides of the same coin,” thought Jones, as he carried on walking…

Edition details

• Publisher: BIS Publishers
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9063693710
• ISBN 13: 9789063693718
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208