frogblog / The problem with design It's just a quote and it's a quote worth re-quoting in entirety:
“The fundamental problem is that designers are obliged to use current information to predict a future state that will not come about unless their predictions are correct. The final outcome of designing has to be assumed before the means of achieving it can be explored: the designers have to work backwards in time from an assumed effect upon the world to the beginning of a chain of events that will bring the effect about. If, as is likely, the act of tracing out the intermediate steps exposes unforeseen difficulties or suggests better objectives, the patttern of the original problem may change so drastically that the designers are thrown back to square one… The instability of the problem is what makes designing so much more difficult and more fascinating than it may appear to someone who has not tried it.”
-From Design Methods, by John Chris Jones, page 10 (in the second edition)
Posted by William Blaze at December 4, 2006 06:11 PM