The Design Family
As we contemplate how computers will change the design and construction of buildings and bridges, our sibling design disciplines can give us insight and inspiration for the journey.
Huge disclaimer: this topic is too big for a little blog post. In writing this post, I have uncovered too many avenues to pursue, and I am sure we will return to these themes in time.
All in the family
There seems to be an almost infinite number of design disciplines today. At the risk of offending everyone whose work is missing below, here are some of the oldest and biggest design disciplines.
Architecture, the design portion of buildings and other structures that human inhabit and move through
Industrial Design, the design portion of making furniture and things that humans handle
Fashion Design, the design portion of making clothing
Graphic Design, the design portion of making things that people see and read
Naval architecture, the design portion of making boats and ships
Aerospace engineering, the design portion of making airplanes
Deciding and Making
Each of these disciplines is unique but they all have a clear split between the process of deciding what to make and the actual making.
The distinction between industrial design and making is stark: these are the objects produced in factories, and across massive supply chains.
In the clothing industry, the division is also clear as day: once a clothing design is settled, it goes off to be reproduced by an army of seamstresses, either in places like New York (back in the day) or East Asia.
In architecture, the division between designing and making is strictly enforced by professional and trade organizations.
Learning from our siblings
To effectively learn from our sibling design fields, we need to consider what we have in common and where are fundamentally different. If we are not clear on this issue, we run the risk of either dismissing great idea because we don't think they apply to us, or chasing new ways of working that are completely unsuited to our aims.
With that said, articulating the differences and similarities between all these disciplines will take a whole other newsletter (or PhD thesis??). Let's use the question of how we resemble each other as a frame, and look at two examples from other fields: CAD software for fashion design, and automation in graphic design.
Computer-Aided fashion design
Tuka 3D and CLO3D are software packages for designing clothing. They are a great reference when considering the future of design tools in architecture. These packages include visualization, simulation, and patternmaking tools. This combination of tools gives the designers timely and comprehensive information to make good and final desicions, then to communicate them un-ambiguously to those who will make the garments.
Here are some questions to consider when browsing through those websites:
Are the stated benefits of the software aimed specifially at designers or garment makers, or do they benefit the overall process?
What would this software look like if we directly transposed it to building design?
Graphic design...is it really design?
I struggled to understand why graphic design is a design discipline for a long time. It seemed to me that graphic designers were directly creating websites, images, logos, etc... Aren't they just artists?
Eventually, I realized that this is just an artifact of my age (or youth!). My introduction to graphic design was MacPaint and an ImageWriter dot matrix printer. I was in full control from idea to printed paper, and did not sense any division between deciding and making.
When the field of graphic design developed, however, the posters, books and signs were all made at on printing presses. The designers communicated what was to be made to a printing house, and they produced the graphics.
The desktop publishing revolution really was a revolution! When the making of graphical elements is automated, the designer becomes responsible for the whole process of making, and becomes a craftswoman or craftsman once again. From there, the distinction between graphic designer and artist begins to fade to nothing...
Which way forward?
Which of these two examples points a way forward for architecture, engineering and construction?
Will construction be automated by robots, allowing architects to just press "Print"?
Will design tools emerge that allow visualization, simulation and the production of shop drawings to happen all together?
Both? Neither?
In the words of Bill Watterson "It's a magical world, Hobbes, ol' buddy ... let's go exploring!"