Design is Not Art, Redux

I coulnd’t agree more. I think you explained yourself very well. I’m not sure how any one could argue with it, although I’m sure someone can.

Of course, you can be an artist AND a designer. It’s not necessarily an either/or proposition.

But when you are working as a designer, the designer part of your brain needs to be in charge.

Just another thought…

Perhaps the confusion is that some “art” does have specific goals. For instance an artist may have a political viewpoint they wish to publicize, and thus they produce a piece of “art” with the goal of moving people to support their viewpoint. It could be said the artist is “using” the art to further the cause they support.

That kind of blurs the lines a bit.

“Design” is clearly not equivalent or interchangeable as a word with “art”. Might we say design is a specific sub-category within the larger generalized umbrella of art?

Regardless of the terminology, it is clear that when we approach a design problem we need to have a different objective and mindset than an artist sitting down to paint a portrait.

I wish I could go back and edit. Dang it.

Anyways, if we were to take the design as a sub-set of art approach we would come up with these 2 rules:

1) All design is art.
2) Not all art is necessarily design.

On track, or totally off base? What do you think?

I think Leeann means “design is art” in the sense that “programming is art” or “creating a business is art”.

e.g. They are acts of creativity and execution based on that inspiration.

Hi Josh,

I have 2 problems w/ this brought statement:

So I’m sticking to my guns here. Designers create something to use. Artists create something to appreciate.

1. What do engineers do? Don’t they create for use? What separates engineering from design?

I would contend that designers share a lot more with artists than they do with engineers and to make this distinction between designers and artists is a false one. Self expression exists in design, and designers (if they are worth their salt) care about aesthetics as wall as utility.

What I would say that is more important is distinguishing design from engineering than design from art. And what distinguishes them is not product, but rather process. “design thinking” and “design practice” is the secret sauce here and many artists use similar processes.

One of my most inspired entres into design thinking/process was when they had hte 20th Anniversary Pixar Restrospective at MoMA. I learned so much about creative thinking and leading to solutions as explored in a fine art.

Further (but before I was a designer) seeing how many different ways Degas used iterative non-linear prototyping as a key method for arriving at his works of art.

This I noticed is much different from engineering methods which are based on scientific methods of build & test, Build and test.

Further, engineering is not concerned with delight. While engineering made the iPhone happen (Yea! we don’t have to say iPod anymore), it was a collection of designers who gave us all that feeling of “Man!!!! that’s amazing” … Shit the first ads made me cry!

Now Artists are not always concerned with delight. Sometimes they just want to make you feel icky inside and out. But they are concerned with emotion.

Basically, in the scheme of things as a designer I share a lot more with artists than I do with engineers. But of course, that is changing as we are re-entering the necessary 8th level of technological renaissance as designers have to know engineering all over again. But that’s a different topic.

Let’s face it most semantic debates suck! so the real question is what are you trying to communicate? and are you making anything clearer or are you making it muddied in a different way?

Dave…you’re right about create being a tough word.

The difference is that if you ask 20 different designers to come up with a solution, you get 20 different answers (some will work, some won’t). If you ask 20 different engineers to build you something, the results should be basically the same.

I really enjoy this conversation since I’m a humble Web Professional who comes from a fine arts background. IMHO…Is design art? Depends on who you ask.

Is design an art? Most definitely.

I think the conversation boils down to that design and art are totally judged by two different measurements of value. The purposes are different. Is the purpose of design to ‘touch the soul’ as most art aspires to do?

Some confusion about what art is, here. Art is some guy using a medium to change how you see the world.

Whereas design is changing how we live in it.

So yeah design is not an art, even if it can be.

David, great response. Josh just keeps pushin’ my buttons.

DM: I would contend that designers share a lot more with artists than they do with engineers and to make this distinction between designers and artists is a false one.

Design is a subset of art. Period.
Engineers can create art. Look at Maker Faire. And I don’t think engineers would all create the same solutions to the same problem. At least I would hope not. Just look at all the competing standards in any technology around the world. Heck there’s three standards of the diameter of mountain bike rims, for cryin’ out loud. That ignores their widths, spoke count, braking system, materials, and air system (tube or tubeless)!

JP: But when art is good…there is no use at the end of it.

Can you see me pulling my hair out? History is full of instances where art changed real life.

Art can be about solving problems (let’s say, pointing out the wrongness of slavery through a mural or a novel) or it can be about creating problems (Say Andres Serrano’s “piss christ”. Do you feel happy after viewing that?)

Design could be defined as a subset of that, just solving problems.

JP: [Measurement] With Art we can’t do that…other than some subjective “Do you like it?”.

Don’t tell these scholars.

Or, Art Therapy an entire profession based around helping people through the physical/emotional effect of art.

It’s because art has such a profound effect on humans that design is even possible.

While I appreciate your argument, ~bc, I have one quibble with it. It leaves absolutely every human activity open to be defined as art. Is that OK with you?

Now you’re starting to see my point: your definition of art is much too narrow. I think just about anything can be done artfully.

Now, sit down, because I’m about the blow your mind. There’s actually art designed to ask just this same question. Example: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain.

I see it like this. Art is a rectangle. Design is a square. For all that a square is, it also a rectangle.

Art is about creating things to communicate while design is about creating things to solve problems. The two are similar but they are different. Sometimes design might use communication to solve a problem (a logo), sometimes it won’t (a door handle).

Accordingly, designers should only care about aesthetics if it helps them solve a problem. Since the iPhone has been raised already I’ll use it as an example. The iPhone looks good so that Apple will sell more phones. It is a solution to a problem (how do we sell more phones?) and not an end in itself. Steve Jobs will tell you otherwise, of course. The fact is that people are often attracted to aesthetically attractive objects and so it is in keeping with their problem solving role in a commercial marketplace that designers create attractive objects. This doesn’t mean what they’re making is art.

David, the distinction between engineers and designers is drawn because engineers do more than create products. They also need to be able to repair and maintain those same products, something designers don’t do. If all they did was create products then we wouldn’t call them engineers; we’d call them product designers.

I have a final question for those that say design is art. Can a designer intentionally make their design unusable in order to communicate something to the user? An artist can and that’s the difference.

Design and art are not parallel. They are two different disciplines that happen to intersect sometimes.

Think of this: Joshua appreciates the *design* of his car’s door handles because they are perfect solutions to his need to open the doors. Neighbor #1 might appreciate the *art* of the door handles because he finds the curved shaped to be aesthetically pleasing. Neighbor #2 might hate the them in both shape and color. But both neighbors may also think that the door handles work very, very well (thus are successful designs).

@bc on comment #11: Please let’s not confuse the word “art” with “skilled.” Anyone who is particularly skilled - whether they are a designer, engineer, window washer, bus driver, or bank teller - may call their skills “an art.” Thus anything can be done “artfully.” Design can be “an art,” but not “art.” Get it?

@bc on comment #9: Pulling art therapy into the conversation is like …well, it’s not even part of this conversation, either. It’s called “art” therapy because you’re drawing pictures or doing something that would otherwise be labeled “artistic,” but the main purpose there is therapy. To get all English-major on you, “art” modifies the word “therapy,” not the other way around. Just like an “art director” is first a director, and the thing he directs is art. Again, way off topic…

So. Design and Art are not parallel, even though they may intersect and a thing can be both at the same time. I agree with capa on #8:
“Art is some guy using a medium to change how you see the world.” (And thus art can have all the effects and consequences ~bc is talking about, like the sociological impact.) “Whereas design is changing how we live in it.”

Perhaps people think art and design are interchangeable because they use the same types of tools? (Color, paint, shapes, etc.)

>> So I’m sticking to my guns here. Designers create something to use. Artists create something to appreciate.

Sure, it can be argued that design has only to address utility. Take logos for example, which are sometimes remarkable and witty. Don’t we “appreciate” these as well? Should we consider a logo that:

a) uses one or two colors,
b) has a good “recall,”
c) can be reduced while remaining legible, and
d) reproduces well in various medium

to be “good enough” as a design? Or is it that we expect designers to find a solution that goes above and beyond these basic practical requirements?

I would hope that “art” has a large part in the stuff we design. Indeed, “design” does not *have* to be “art,” just as fiction literature does not *have* to be engaging, worthy of appreciation, profound. But good design does need that special element.

>> Art, of course, is subjective
Is it? Beatles’ “Let It Be” vs. “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”. Are both songs equally good, that is valuable and satisfying? A small child may think that the latter is, but as we grow older, start paying attention to music, as our taste grows and develops - at some point we know better!

why?

I still want to know why we need to make these distinctions between art and design?

whoever brought up the distinction above between engineers and designers … nice!

– dave

Michael Camilleri has it. Art is a rectangle. Design is a parallelogram. It’s important that web designers recognize that design can seek any performance target, not just communicating something. When I use a list box instead of a dropdown list, I’m not trying to communicate anything. I’m trying to save the user a click so s/he can do that task faster. Speed is the goal of the design. If we limit design to just trying to communicate we’ll get stuck designing old-style web sites that just seek to push a message on the user. With the advent of RIAs, web sites may have many other performance goals.

“Designers create something to use. Artists create something to appreciate.”

I would modify these two statement into one and go even further:
Artists and Designers create something to appreciate and something useful OR something not to appreciate and not useful.

For example, an art piece can be shocking, not beautiful with the use of transmitting a political message, as mentioned in one of the above comments. A design work can look aesthetically beautiful and useless in transmitting the message.

I think there is so many different art forms and design form out there that it doesn’t make sense to generalize Art and Design and to rather approach it with a hybrid point of view.

I may counter with my own recent post: Art hides, design reveals, and the rest’s decoration. Almost.

And there’s also the problem of two words meaning the same thing. If we continually say that designers are artists, or conflate design as art in all cases, as Leeann seems to be suggesting, what does that do to our language?

No curmudgeon calling here. This is a very important question.

I consider myself an artist and a designer, but rarely at the same time.

I have a hard time with all those who say that design is a subset of art. I think it would be more accurate to say that design intersects with art, just as it intersects with engineering.

Design definitely has some artistic aspects to it, but I think it is safe to say that design is not strictly art.

I once heard someone say:

Design is about solving problems
Art is about creating them

I am an artist and a designer, both types of work fulfill very different creative needs.

When I am working in the studio, art is about trying to realize a vision or thought pattern that is usually pretty abstract. It usually changes in the process and can become something very different then what I initially intended to make. Once the thing is made it takes on a life of its own. Someone who sees “the thing” and is engaged, develops a relationship to “the thing” itself. The relationship usually doesn’t have a definitive meaning and can be something completely different then what I set out to communicate. Hence, the work creates new problems that I engage with when setting out to make new work.

Desing is about employer, designer, audience.
Its about communicating clearly. The relationship between the designer, the work, and the audience is reliant upon the goal, how its communicated and how its received.

Although there is a lot of stylistic, aesthetic, and creative work that is done to communicate in design, in the end its about a very structured professional relationship, with very structured rules.

I do not position one above the other, they are just very, very different types of work.

Design is different from art just as engineering is different from science. I see design/engineering as being (at least partly) applications of ideas from art/science, respectively and ways to create usable things from ideas/theories/etc.

– hs

Its easy to differentiate things while looking from one on another like through the prism. The same thing isn’t deforms its essences. Basically looking on the art through the point on design you’ll find lot of art principles lost, looking on the design through the art you’ll find mail usability lost.

corrected:
… find main usability lost.

Damn, Hal, you beat me to it.

I like the comment:

“Design is different from art just as engineering is different from science.”

As an engineer who loved his art classes, that’s kinda how I see it. Art and Science are the pure forms. Design and Engineering are the practical application of the principals of Art and Science.

To me, Design and Engineering parallel and overlap. The goal of both is to solve a problem. Both start with (or should, anyway) some sort of requirements document. Both have a planning phase where you work out methods of implementation. Then there’s the part where the craftsmen (engineers, designers, programmers, draftsmen…) do the actual work.

Is the usability engineer that far removed from the interface designer? Isn’t the graphic designer an information architect of sorts? Don’t art directors and software architects do pretty much the same thing for their respective fields?

As an engineer turned web developer, I’m constantly searching for that place of elegance where the best of both worlds meet and synthesize into a larger Gestalt.

You can read more of my thoughts at Postmodern Pastiche.

Design is not Art but AN art.

hi

i’ve read every post and love how much people are wrangling with this topic. i used to think the differentiating factors were use/appreciation too (not my words exactly but close enough), but i think even those fall short. both share a lot in common, but i think the distinction is really about the framework of “rules” within which the designer/artist operates. the designer’s rules are most certainly external to themselves (client problem sets) and the artist, well, they make up their own rules (their own problem sets). both can utilize any kind of formal, intellectual, material, etc strategy to “produce” something of value, and sometimes artifacts from either discipline can and do resemble one another, but their origins have very separate and disctinct motivations. designers try to solve problems for others, artists solve problems they themselves invent.

two books on the subject of ambiguities and overlap between art and design are designart and design and art by alex coles. both can be found at amazon. one is a collection of essays by various thinkers on the subject, the other is a survey with lots of good visual examples.

it should be noted that my assertion for the distinction came from neither coles nor myself. i am kicking myself that i can’t remember the source. my bad.

Your mood doesn’t really matter. Some of the best creative work gets done on the days when you feel that everything you’re doing is just plain junk. — Julia Cameron urself …

I think most of the concepts you bring in this post are pretty well adressed by the plethoric bunch of comments following it.

It also shows there’s some kind of a discussion to be set worldwide about what design or a designer eventually is or happens to be.

Anyway, may it be stated very simply:
DESIGN’S NOT ART, IS NOT ART, IS NOT ART.

So, I want to thank you all, first for this very exciting follow up of post and replies.

Then I felt like posting you Erik Spiekermann’s text to let you feel how practitioners mostly think it out:

Design’s not art

Design is first and foremost an intellectual process. Contrary to popular belief, designers are not artists. They employ artistic methods to visualize thinking and process, but, unlike artists, they work to solve a client’s problem, not present their own view of the world. If a design project, however, is to be considered successful – and that would be the true measure of quality – it will not only solve the problem at hand, but also add an aesthetic dimension beyond the pragmatic issues. I consider design not to be a series of “creative” one-offs, but an integrated process, from planning the appropriate communications strategy to designing functional and beautiful objects as well as – for example – implementing electronic stationery on clients’ systems. What clients say and what designers hear are too often very different things. Design is a powerful tool to help clarify the problem. It is only when a common understanding has been established between client and designer that effective results can be achieved. Design quality needs an integrated approach: look more closely than expected, ask many questions, think laterally, get involved in things you shouldn’t, do more than you are supposed to and have fun doing it. Problem solving is one thing, aesthetic pleasure another. Combine the two, make the engineer sketch like an artist and make the artist analyze like an engineer, and you are half-way there.

Erik Spiekermann Berlin, March 2005

There are many definitions of Art. It’s an ambiguous word, like love.
According to Dictionary.com, one of the definitions is:
“skilled workmanship, execution, or agency, as distinguished from nature”. Certainly, by this definition, some design can also be considered art.

Joshua,

I am stunned. Not once did anyone mention Frank Lloyd Wright. This man is arguably one of the best examples of someone who is a designer and an artist. What he has designed in his illustrious career was and is the epitome of art meeting function.

From a more current aspect I’d also point at Vern Yip (of Trading Spaces Fame) who is very much a interior designer, and architect and a designer.

Now of course we’re talking about the Web in most of the discussion above but I think architectural procedures and design brought to the Web have been responded to very, very well. It seems to me it does a disservice to our craft to say what we do as designers has no relation to art. That art by itself has no function. I guess I just can’t accept that.

You say:
“That’s a big difference between design and art. We can measure the results of design because it’s meant to solve a problem. We can see if the problem has been resolved or lessened in some way. With Art we can’t do that…other than some subjective “Do you like it?”.”

Joshua,
If you really feel you must quantify art, to measure it — other than an outright beauty that is appreciated by others — I would argue that it is not necessary that art has a use. I would argue that useful things can be art. I would argue that something can be designed without art in mind and still become a surprising expression of art. “One person’s junk is another man’s art.”

I would also argue that is possible to be artistic, not have a function in mind, but yet that art is functional. In that at least I do see a possible point in your favor there: If you begin to “design” art at all, you find yourself fulfilling a function and designing for that function. Regardless of the medium. These are my off-the-cuff thoughts on the subject and I believe this is worth additional contemplation.

Pretty good article there Joshua, you’ve gotten us all talking

Art can be seen to be ‘functional’ in that in most peoples’ lives in performs the function of decoration…part of pleasant home decorating. But at the other end of the ‘meaning’ spectrum, art can be seen as the most esoteric kind of research, akin to the search for why we do…are…anything…like religion or particle physics. Art looks for Meta-knowledge and profundity. Beauty is a by-product. Design uses many tools. It uses a toolset that art created, but also one that engineering created. I have degrees in art and design and 3/4 of one in enginnering. I am blessed/cursed.

Entering a discussion such as this, at such a late stage, means I’m invariably repeating what other people have already said. But here goes…

I think the main problem is the misunderstanding of what design means. Popular culture pretty much defines it merely by the aesthetic, hence leading people to equate it with art and hence this debate.

I’m definitely with those who say design is not art, but rather the two can intersect. And as some people have alluded to, perhaps the best way to make the distinction is to say that art follows the objectives of the artist, whereas design should follow the objectives of the user.

Art is selfish, despite any altruistic motivations the artist might have. They do what they want, and it involves personal expression.

True design serves the needs of the user. But realistically the designer may introduce art into the process of design for whatever reason, and that’s not necessarily to the detriment of the design.

What does make things worse, and what annoys me no end, is when ‘designers’ use the title illegitimately because all they aim to do is satisfy their own desires, ignoring their responsibility as a designer to solve a problem and meet user needs. In this case they are practicing art.

So art and design can - and dare I say typically do - live in harmony, but that’s not always the case. The exceptions are what cause debates such as this.

Lastly, I am a trained engineer and I work as a designer of sorts. They’re both about problem solving, and I would say they are the same thing (engineering may involve more technical aspects but conceptually they are the same).

I’m reading this incredibly late in the game, but it’s something I have to get off my chest.

In this sort of discussion, it’s necessary to stick to basic ideas and leave our preconceived notions of those words out of the picture. Where certain (stickier) words are necessary, we should narrowly define them. In that spirit, here are my starting points:

Art has, as we know, many definitions. The Oxford American Dictionaries define it as “the expression or application of human creative skill or imagination.” Another definition is “a skill at doing a specified thing, typically through practice.” For my purposes I’m going to use the more specific term fine art, meaning products which “are to be “appreciated primarily or solely for their imaginative, aesthetic, or intellectual content.”

Fine doesn’t refer to beauty or quality, but is more directly related to the word “finished” or “completed,” derived from the Latin finis meaning end. The idea comes from Aristotelian philosophy, and is succinctly defined in Wikipedia’s article on fine art: “The final cause of fine art is the art object itself; it is not a means to another end except perhaps to please those who behold it.”

With that out of the way, let us find a narrow definition for design. One definition is “a plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of [an object].” Another is the “purpose, planning, or intention that exists or is thought to exist behind an action, fact, or material object.” I’ll stick with the second definition.

Design is from the Latin designare, related to the word designate. The root signum means “a mark [or] sign” (source). The idea is that “something” is designed, or designated as a symbol for particular function or purpose.

Note: When I talk about art and design, I am referring to both the product of art and design, and the processes.

So let’s recap: Fine art is something whose purpose is itself. Design is something is whose purpose is some outside function.

With that basic axiom (something that is accepted to be true) we can answer a few questions.

First: “Fine art, design, science, engineering. How do these relate?” Briefly, and in less detail, here are two definitions of science and engineering:

Science: Studied alone, for itself.
Engineering: Done for pragmatic purposes other than itself.

Following from these definitions, design and engineering are equivalent. Give 20 engineers or designers a problem, you’ll get 20 different solutions (not one as was suggested here). That problem can be how to design a web-based navigational system. Or it could be, to use a prior example, to design a car door handle. The solutions will vary in their benefits and their drawbacks. One type of car handle might be appropriate for smaller doors, but may not posess enough mechanical advantage to open larger doors. A tabbed-based navigation scheme may work for a site with 8 or less links, but it breaks down as a site expands.

Similarly, art and science are equivalent. Scientists study the phenomena of the physical world. They chart the effects of gravity, or record the motion of the stars. They test theoretical boundaries. They engage in tests. They do things we might consider useless. Artists study the representation of either of the physical world or the imagination. They sketch, they paint. They do things we might consider useless. The driving theme is that they are done for themselves.

(Sidetrack: The word useless is an interesting one, especially as it is applied to abstract art. It fits with my definitions perfectly, in that art and science can be considered useless, or without use, in that they don’t have any immediate purpose. That is the job of design and engineering.)

“OK, but still, how do art and design relate, and science and engineering?” It’s easy enough to make these distinctions between fine purpose and pragmatic purpose. The confusion, or blurriness comes from the general pattern of pragmatic concerns driving fine pursuits. The quest for wealth and riches led to the study of alchemy, a “science.” The quest towards usable, effective interfaces led to specialized studies in psychology. But even with this connection, art is not design, and science is not engineering.

“Not so fast! These aren’t my definitions. In fact you’re cherry-picking certain aspects of the terms art and design, and science and engineering for that matter.” Yes, I am. It’s also irrelevant. As I first stated, the purpose of communication and discussion is the transmission of ideas. I could have just as easily said that “Logdag is something whose purpose is itself. Trunkling is something is whose purpose is some outside function” and my argument would have stood. The terms themselves are irrelevant. I stated basic ideas and then followed those through to their natural conclusions.

“OK then, so what’s the bloody point of all this discussion if terms are pointless?!” That’s the problem isn’t it? Let’s look at one definition for art, from Dictionary.com: “the craft or trade using these principles or methods.” Well that sounds awfully like my definition for design. The point here is that basic terms and definitions serve to simplify and facilitate conversation. In general this works. When I used the word “general,” there was no confusion as to whether I meant “roughly” or was referring to an army commander. In other situations, like this very topic, the identifiers are loosely bound to the identified. Could it be concluded, contrary to my arguments, that “design” is nothing like “engineering,” as was stated earlier? Sure, but not using my definitions. You can apply any number of ideas to one word.

That’s the problem, I think, with this discussion in general and any discussion dealing with semantic meaning. If you don’t make it clear what your preconceived definitions are, the argument is, in more senses than one (see side track above), useless. In this case, I have chosen definitions that I think are the most relevant and useful. I think that when most of us are talking about art in this context, we are referring to fine art, and when most of us are talking about design in this context, we are talking about pragmatic design. Is this the correct decision? Correctness has nothing to do with it. Like an axiom, it is plucked out of thin air, something that is at best self-evident, and otherwise the result of pure whim. With my two axioms (art is self-fulfilling, design is “outside-fulfilling”), the answer is no. Design is not art.

Conclusion: Deal with ideas not definitions. Only then will you have anything useful to guide you or can meaningful conversation flourish.

– Vernon

It seems your idea of art sounds much like what I was fed in every art history class I’ve ever taken. It’s all afterthought… someone looked back at every visual artifact and created this story that links the earliest ones to the most recent ones. I have yet to find anyone who can declare “art!” as it occurs or even better predict art before it happens. It feels a bit of a straw man in your article.

john b:

We have two criteria for design here:

1) Does it serve to solve a problem?

2) Does it succeed in solving it?

The criteria for Art, as you mention, is harder. It would have something to do with how well it satisfies the purpose of the Artist as well as if it is appreciated or not.

Do you have an alternative?

Design is not art.

Art asks questions.

Design gives answers.

I think that most of the need to insist that design is not art stems from the related need to make non-visual people understand that design is not 100% subjective, which many, many business people still believe - even today.

I have a short presentation that I’ve given with a number of simple everyone-can-get-it facets that clearly demonstrate the difference. Here’s one of the slides:

In art, red is never ‘wrong’.

In design, red can be wrong, and the wrongness can be described in both technical and conceptual terms, and sometimes even measured.

Very interesting read. Some of my views How much of design is art?

Regards,
Sandeep.

Often, I have pondered as to how much of the designing process can be qualified as ‘Art’? But then, this question is kind of fuzzy without qualifying the intended definition of art. Art can mean many things.
The product of human creativity
The creation of beautiful or significant things
A superior skill that you learn by study and practice and observation
Visual representations in a printed publication
It brings a smile to my face thinking that this is turning into a recursive game. I had intended to choose the first definition, i.e. art is the product of human creativity but then creativity is a very broad term. In this context, I look at creativity as the stroke of ingenuity (power of creative imagination).
I would decompose the process of design into the following ingredients: ingenuity, domain knowledge, technology knowledge, design patterns, heuristics, hands on development experience, analytical reasoning and prior design experience. I would further qualify these attributes into two broad categories, ingenuity and elaboration techniques. The nucleus is the art, the stroke of genius, while the rest of the process is intelligent elaboration. Post zygotic stages are well understood and predictable but it’s the nucleus which takes that rare stroke of lightening in the primeval broth for life to emerge. Although elaboration techniques form the bulk of the design process, it’s the art which infuses the soul in the design.

In almost all the cases, design processes turn out to be elaboration exercises. Structured elaboration forms the key to any iterative endeavor, may it be design, building a clay sculpture or cooking dinner. If we introspect on the elaboration techniques, we will quickly realize that everything rolls up under ‘heuristics’. “A commonsense rule (or set of rules) harvested from prior experiences which are intended to increase the probability of solving some problem”, is how heuristics is defined :). Experience or heuristics is of two types, collective experience and individual experience. For example, design patterns is a collective knowledge base while hands on development experience is individualistic. You can assimilate design patterns, but you have to strive to aggregate prior design experience.

Having made all the above profound statements, let me try to supplement philosophy with tangible data points. Let me give you an example. Once upon a time, I was faced with a unique problem. I had to design an offline batch system with high throughput requirements. It was a porting project with emphasis on staged migration of functionality, design catering to functional scalability (resilient to business logic changes), high reliability etc.

After a few days of brooding and listening to Nirvana, I came across the following diagram (to the left top). Looking back, this was possibly the most demanding effort in terms of creativity in designing the solution. The conceptual solution formed the nucleus of the design, which was iteratively elaborated to form the final design (shown below).

Each of the iterative elaboration phases were quite easy in themselves, essentially turning out to be optimization problems. For example, in one of the iterations we dealt with the problem of sweeping the processors before reaching the terminator to ensure that no workers were left operative before the terminator was invoked. The solution (second from top) flowed quite logically in terms of the need to wait on each processor for it’s workers to finish. The waiting in turn was controlled by a count-up-count-down latch which was incremented/decremented during the pre-processing and post-processing stages of the workers. So on and so forth.

For many weeks, I thought that the initial pen sketch design was the bolt of lightning, the art, which could not be arrived at by deductive analysis of the problem. But then, I realized that even the pen sketch was heavily influenced by the constraints I was dealing with and my previous experiences. For example, you can clearly see influences of ’service bus’ (mediator), ‘chain of responsibility’, ‘activator’ and ‘executor’ patterns. I had worked with each of them individually in the past but possibly never in this permutation.

It was quite disheartening to see my feeling of ingenuity dissolve away. I have observed that in most of the cases, ingenuity is expressed in assembling prior knowledge in a suitable permutation to solve the problem at hand. It is the art of assembly and the swiftness with which one is able to evaluate multiple alternatives against the constraints and choose the optimal one, that makes the difference between a good design and a not so good design.

The success of a design, I have realized, lies on three pillars.

a) It is very important to realize all the constraints that the design needs to satisfy. Constraints include documented requirements (functional and non functional), implementation platform limitations, team strengths etc. The cost of missing out on constraints goes progressively high as you elaborate through the design.

b) Knowledge of patterns, tools, techniques and reusable components. It is said that design should be tools/technology agnostic. I find this statement to be grossly misinterpreted. It’s only the conceptual design that has minimal influence from the platform of implementation, rest all start getting progressively influenced by implementation tools and techniques. For example, the knowledge of the Executor pattern was quite fundamental is coming up with the specification level design. If I have had no clue of the executor pattern, the design most probably would have been radically different.

c) Solutioning and their evaluation. Each of the design constraints can be solved in a multitude of ways. However only fixed combinations of solutions cater to all the constraints put together. It is important to understand that a design is never right, wrong, good or bad on an absolute scale. A design is good or bad in reference to the constraints it tries to solve.

Well, so what’s new? These three points form the basis of any solution irrespective of domain or kind of work. Understanding constraints, having the required knowledge to solve the constraints and evaluating possible solutions are things we do even when shopping for vegetables or shoes. What’s so special about designing a software solution? Is it just that the tools, knowledge and evaluation criteria are different than that for vegetable shopping? And what about the philosophy of ‘art’ being a part of design ?

I had started off this blog trying to project designing as a by product of a superior thought process, but then it is not true. Software design is just like solving anything else, it’s just the knowledge of technology, understanding of constraints and ability to evaluate solutions that makes the difference. And none of them is rocket science. All it requires is knowledge, practice and logical thinking.

Oh btw, forgot to mention, to acquire these three qualities it takes time, devotion and practice, lots and lots of it.