Of course, calling VB jocks who draw pretty pictures and bolt the resulting faceplate onto a database client backend “software engineers” turns my stomach, too. They’re more akin to the guys that design the front art and button labels for a vending machine, and the people poking records into the DB to the deliverymen who stock it. The engineer is the one who designed and built the actual machine, and he’s probably working for Oracle. And he’s probably a whole team, some of them architecting, some writing the code.

Of course, now that we stretch the analogy this far, some of the coders amount to steelworkers welding the thing together. It depends on how much they’re actually anticipating, figuring out how to solve, and then solving problems and writing down the solutions in the form of algorithms, rather than just gluing stuff together.

Very thoughtful post and discussion. I’m pleased that suggesting ‘disaffordances’ has provided some food for thought.

I feel your and Vera’s pain regarding the dilution of the meaning of design. If it’s any consolation, this happened to those who call ourselves engineers a long time ago.

Jim

So how about “Orwellian engineering”? Particularly if it actually involves spyware functionality or thinks it’s RoboCop, but more generally because it invariably involves insidious, pervasive control and — even more so — manipulation by unelected, unaccountable authorities of some kind or another.

Your courses, and the reasons for your choice, sound most attractive. I really believe that we all need much more cross-disciplinary thinking everywhere: academia, business, the web, life…

I don’t find your writing overfull of jargon or pretentious in the least. In fact, I enjoy your direct and matter of fact handling of what could easily be considered (and shouldn’t be) an esoteric subject very much.

The extent to which I encounter the label design in web development topics, about visual presentation, usability, and actual functionality, is highly magnified for me because of my own initial references to the word. I come from a business background of commercial real estate development, where ‘design’ has many applications, and have also been an avid collector and afficionado of art, decorative arts (150 year evolution of industrial design), graphic design & illustration, as well as the history of costume (fashion design - which is a melding of utilitarianism & fantasy) for a few decades.

I’m wondering, as I write this, why architectures of control isn’t satisfying? Is it perhaps, that the word architecture connotes rigidity, whereas your topic is more about manipulation, and relevant as much to discussion of political and social agendas as to the meaning of structures?

Vera

I suppose that as with many bloggers, my initial priority was to get anyone reading the blog. And, nearly a year later, from what I can tell there’s a fair cross-section of readers - mechanical engineers, product designers, architects, interaction designers, information theorists, user experience people, programmers, web developers, new media people, marketing people, academics, activists, people interested in intellectual property, people interested in a wide variety of issues on a non-professional level, and so on. Certain posts - such as the one with the downloadable high-frequency sounds have had a very different visitor profile to others.

What all that means, of course, is that there isn’t really a ‘typical’ reader at whom the blog is aimed - and as you say, the mix of aims (”raising general awareness of the subject, engaging in conversation, and as part of a process toward publishing on the topic”) again makes it difficult to be definitive about what the audience ’should’ be. I know I’m guilty in many posts of making assumptions about certain jargon, mindsets (or indeed, sarcasm) being more widespread than they are; equally, I know I have a lot of catching up to do in learning about academic precedents in many of the fields I talk about, particularly the ‘philosophy of control’.

Your post on the meanings of ‘design’ is very interesting and to some extent this is a major ‘elephant in the room’ which few want to tackle. ‘Design’ has become such a catch-all term for creative endeavour, and especially now that ‘design thinking’ is becoming a new buzz-phrase in business, we do perhaps risk the term becoming meaningless, if only because it’s not longer clear what skills a ‘designer’ should/would/could have.

When I was choosing what to do at university, I deliberately chose the course which seemed to be the most inter- and multi-disciplinary thing possible, quite simply because I wanted to know about, and how to do, as much stuff as possible. Industrial Design Engineering at Brunel covered everything from [jargon alert] engineering mathematics to cognitive theory, blindfolded charcoal sketching to brand evaluation, rapid prototyping to wood veneering, marker rendering to finite element analysis, photographic aesthetics to presentation skills, Matlab to CSS, environmental chemistry to factory layout planning, Japanese quality methods to PIC programming, welding to computational fluid dynamics, complex numbers to political art. We had it all, though much of it was necessarily in fairly shallow detail.

But that’s part of the problem: I’m a ‘designer’ and have supposedly learned all of this stuff, and hence I see it all as ‘design’, even though when I look at job ads for designers they typically either mean “Adobe Illustrator user” or “Pro/Engineer user”. That’s an over-simplification, but I would think it’s going to cause a bit of difficulty among employers in the near future faced with so many ‘designers’ who may have entirely diverse, and separate skill sets, but who still operate under the ‘designer’ banner.

Although I fully subscribe to the belief that dumbing down content and underestimating one’s audience is wrong, I also believe in respecting the intelligence of a conversational partner who does not, perhaps, have extensive jargon or vocab in a given area.

A favorite blog, Mixing Memory, has a newish post about teaching. There’s a comment on the post from a teacher who says that when she(?) has sent students there, they usually find the content over their heads. Just about all the content on that blog, however, could be presented in a more easily understandable manner to any child past the age of reason, and I get the impression that there are teachers reading it who do exactly that.

My point here is that who you wish your audience to be and why is as important as an accurate title. An example of an easily grasped title might be Hidden Agendas in Design.

My understanding is that your wonderful blog is written based on a number of agendas as well, including raising general awareness of the subject, engaging in conversation, and as part of a process toward publishing on the topic. A mix of agendas such as this, imo, makes a clear definition of the audience rather tricky.

I should also mention that the myriad and subsequently fuzzy and diluted meanings of the word Design represent one of my pet peeves (which I wrote a whole meandering post on).

Vera