Design Methods (Architecture)

Every designer should have a copy of this book.slightly dated now - but still the classic guide to design process.My copy keeps getting stolen - going to have to buy a new copy.

Design Methods: seeds of human futures By John Chris Jones 1970,1980,1992Architects, confronted in the 1950s and 1960s with design efforts involving many designers and many stakeholders, were forced to study their methods to make them more open to scrutiny and input at all stages. By the time "Design Methods" was published in 1970, architects, engineers, and industrial designers had begun to raise their perspective to include a much larger picture, ranging from the designer's internal processes all the way to planetary conditions. As a society, we were re-designing design. Many of the design methods which Jones presents in his "recipe book" grew from this design group work. Even today, best practice for design teams is largely developed from methods described almost thirty years ago in this book. From the Introduction:"Jones first became involved with design methods while working as an industrial designer for a manufacturer of large electrical products in Britain in the 1950s. He was frustrated with the superficiality of industrial design at the time and had become involved with ergonomics. When the results of his ergonomic studies of user behavior were not utilized by the firm's designers, Jones set about studying the design process being used by the engineers. To his surprise, and to theirs, Jones' analysis showed that the engineers had no way of incorporating rationally arrived at data early on in the design process when it was most needed. Jones then set to work redesigning the engineer's design process itself so that intuition and rationality could co-exist, rather than one excluding the other." This cooperation of multiple faculties seems to be a consistent thread throughout his work."Design Methods" is divided into two parts. Part one gives a brief history of design, argues that new methods are needed for today's more complex realities, breaks down the design process into three stages, and shows us how to choose a design method for each stage. The 1992 edition has added several prefaces which are well worth reading. They help explain how to use the book. Part two consists of descriptive outlines, or recipes, for 35 design methods. These methods include: logical, data gathering, innovative, taxonomic, and evaluative procedures. Reading part one gives you a grasp of the book. After that, the methods in part two are best read singly or a few at a time, as you would any recipe book. * * * * *Jones breaks design down into three stages: 1) Divergence, 2) Transformation, and 3) Convergence. The divergence stage is ".. extending the boundary of a design situation .. to have a large enough, and fruitful enough, search space... The objectives, and the problem boundary, are unstable and tentative. Evaluation is deferred. Every effort is made to escape old assumptions, and absorb new data." The territory of the problem is tested to discover limits, conseq