Intelligent Design

The emergence of a serious literature on design corresponds, as well it should, to developments within professional practice itself. Until recently, designers were concerned primarily with the fashioning of objects for industrial, graphical, or decorative purposes. The available literature, not surprisingly, tilted toward superficial aesthetics (the coffee-table annuals), monographs on and sometimes by celebrity designers, and a smattering of survey histories, most of them pretty dismal due to a methodology that did not go much beyond (with apologies to Edna St. Vincent Millay) "one damn thing after another."¹

Some years ago, inspired by the perception that this situation was beginning to change, Technology and Culture made an initial attempt to look "beyond the coffee table," as it were, for evidence of an emerging scholarly interest in the process and products of design—defined at that time as "the attempt to domesticate technology and render it serviceable for human use."² Given all that has transpired in the intervening decade, it should not be surprising that this bit of shorthand no longer seems satisfactory. The explosion and implosion of the internet economy, the post-9/11 penetration of surveillance technologies into every sector of civil society, mobile telephony and the proliferation of networked handhelds, the industrialization of biology and genetics, flexible manufacturing and the growing popularity of the open-source movement, a new corporate preoccupation with "design strategy," and reports of four hundred design programs in China churning out an estimated ten thousand hungry graduates per year—these are among the factors that have challenged many in the design community to reassess their prevailing models, and this reassessment has in turn created new challenges for the scholarly community as well.

The most notable development, perhaps, is the extension of "design" into areas of human experience once claimed by such social science disciplines as cognitive science, anthropology, and linguistics. Designers who not so long ago concerned themselves with physical problems of legibility, lateral vision, and lumbar support now address a vast and growing range of what might almost be called "meta-physical" problems: Can there be an "ergonomics" of conviviality? In what sense is "experience" a commodity to be designed? How might the use of narrative strategies be transferred from the analysis of novels to the analysis of products and their life cycles? Can designers be enlisted to engage producers and consumers in a global discussion about sustainability? Of what relevance are Western design trends to the lives of those billions who dwell more-or-less miserably at the "bottom of the pyramid"? Crusty old manufacturing companies as well as technology-driven start-ups, government agencies, and NGOs are asking designers to explore such questions, and their initial investigations have begun in turn to engender a substantial academic literature. We are, in short, beginning to see evidence of what I am inclined to call "intelligent design"—the antipode not of natural selection, of course, but of stupid design. Academic theory and professional practice are its two complementary faces.

As designers have expanded their professional practice from form-giving to an ever-broader program of cultural inquiry, the scholarly community has responded in kind. The last several years have seen new approaches to design by sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, computer scientists, and of course historians. While this is surely a promising development, it appears still to be in its infancy. Sociologist Harvey Molotch, in Where Stuff Comes From (2003), offers a provocative perspective on the world of the design professional, but one wishes he had taken his own discipline more seriously and demonstrated how sociology—as opposed to an interested observer who happens to be a sociologist—might yield theories and methods that could deepen our understanding of design practice. In Emotional Design (2004), cognitive psychologist Donald Norman reverses his earlier advocacy of functional "affordances" and now argues on behalf of "visceral, behavioral, and reflective" factors in our experience of products. Despite its anecdotal and relentlessly first-person presence, the book provides interesting perspectives on the human response to artifacts but has...