The Role of Justification in Design
If we're going to attempt a theory of design ethics, we'd better be clear about how, exactly, we know whether a design choice is a good one or a bad one.
It seems appropriate to start again where most of us learned to how to think about design: the undergraduate critique.
A design critique is a pedagogical tool, an activity meant to teach students something. Critique is a way to give young designers some new knowledge or insight into design practice. As many of you will remember (some of you no doubt from quite recent experience) this works in something like the following way.
A student presents some piece of work to other students and professors. Those peers and teachers try to explain to the presenter what about the object at hand is good and what is bad. By hearing these things, the designer learns and — hopefully — goes on to use that acquired knowledge to refine her practice, that is, to design better things.
Today, I am interested in asking where exactly the critique participants acquire the knowledge that they use to criticize a designed object. In other words, what gives them the right to make claims about the goodness or badness of a design?
The answer is of course their own knowledge about design, which — I think you will find, uniformly — is itself acquired in turn by more interpersonal justification by means of rational criticism, either in the form of previous critiques, or in books, lectures and so on. The claim I am making is that all claims about good and bad design derive from what is ostensibly a global-historical process of design critique.
The apparent circularity of the fact that rational criticism about design is enabled by more rational criticism about design might trouble some. Their worries, I imagine, might be something along the lines of “what makes any of the criticism meaningful if all that’s backing it up is more criticism?” Or, more pointedly, “what justifies our knowledge about good and bad design? What makes us right?”
I think that these worries are unfounded, and I think this is mostly because they are based on a confusion about what it is to have knowledge. Notice that the putative contradiction relies on the presupposition that in order to be meaningful or substantial, our knowledge about good and bad design needs to be grounded outside of something like the process of design critiques. It needs some foundation that would make it true in some deeper sense than does our ability to justify it in the face of rational criticism. Why should this be the case?
Indeed, I think it is not. On the contrary, I think that an ongoing process of rational, interpersonal criticism provides an entirely sufficient basis for knowledge. I suggest that we have a claim to knowledge about the goodness or badness of some design just insofar as we can justify that claim to others, when we are called to do so. Any further criteria are unnecessary.
By way of example, let’s return to our narrow sense of critique. Consider the scenario in which a design student, B, presents for critique a chair that has a spike protruding from the backrest. She and one of her peers, A have the following exchange.
- A: It seems like a bad design choice to have that spike there. The chair looks completely uncomfortable.
- B: It’s definitely a little uncomfortable, but the main motivation for the design is therapeutic - that spike improves the sitter’s posture significantly over time.
- A: How can you know that?
- B: It was created using specifications recommended by the American Physical Therapy Association.
- A: Okay then. I guess that can justify some potential discomfort.
In this exchange, A and B concede to each other various entitlements–that a spike in the back of the chair is uncomfortable and so on. You can clearly see how the chair design retains its status as “good” just insofar as the design decisions that inform it are capable of being justified in the face of rational criticism. Alternatively, consider the following exchange:
- A: It seems like a bad design choice to have that spike there. The chair looks completely uncomfortable.
- B: It’s supposed to be uncomfortable. It’s a critique of American complacency.
- A: Well, I wouldn’t buy it.
In this case, A denies that B’s reasons are good ones, and hence that her design choices is justifiable. This is a microcosm of the way that all designers come to understand good and bad design. And if that’s all right, it means that a design decision is a good one just insofar as it can be justified in the face of rational criticism.
I’ll pick up there next week.
| Tagged with: | Criticism, Critique, Design, Design Ethics, Justification, Knowledge, Reasons |
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Comments on this post
1.
Nice post, Paul. I liked your two thoughtful scenarios. However, I see them as being self-referential. They seem to be referring back to the assumptions that you started out with. They are helping you justify your arguments rather than challenge them.
–Personally, I don’t buy a Good/Bad design logic and/or criticism. One of my Prof’s used to say, a design is never good or bad. Just that some designs are more thoughtful than others. In this light, a design critique ceases to be rational (hence?) fault-finding and more about giving shape to a critical dialogue: a body-without-organs (Deleuze) if you will.
–What if you were to pen the second scenario as:
A: It seems like a bad design choice to have that spike there. The chair looks completely uncomfortable.
B: It’s supposed to be uncomfortable. It’s a critique of American complacency.
A: Well, can you explain what you mean by American complacency?
…
What the last comment does is that it gives the student some more room to explain her/his hypothesis. The final say will then depend on whether or not the critic agrees with the hypothesis. It will put the hypothesis and its crafting to test rather than the final product. And again, this might save the design choice from being branded as good or bad.
I would be eager to hear your thoughts on this and read whats to come in the next week. Thanks again for a good cup of thought.
2.
Hey Kush — good to hear from you! I’ll try to address your concern, which I imagine will be a popular one, and which certainly deserves some attention. I think that our dispute actually has two distinct aspects.
The first aspect seems to boil down to decorum. I appreciate the social and pedagogical value of cultivating dialogue about design. The fact that you seem to be indicating in your example is that it is possible - and indeed probably required by good critique manners - for (A) to allow (B) further opportunity to justify her decisions. I agree.
The second aspect, which is the more substantial, is about “goodness” and “badness”. Regardless of the length or direction of a given possible critique scenario between (A) and (B), we seem to agree that (A) is ultimately called upon to either accept or reject (B)’s reasons (”the hypothesis”) as legitimate motivation for design decisions, and ones that are powerful enough to override other important normative concerns (comfortability). In some scenarios, (A) will accept these reasons, and consensus will be reached. In others, (A) won’t.
(Actually the issue is even more complicated than that: it is at least twofold. The first thing at stake is whether American complacency qualifies as a good reason to design an uncomfortable chair - you are calling this “the hypothesis”. The second is whether this particular uncomfortable chair is adequate to the task, or whether it achieves the hypothesis - I think this you mean when you say “its crafting”. I would call the first issue the normative question, and the second issue the substantive question. Luckily, we’re both concerned here about the normative question.)
To me, a design decision that cannot be justified to a motivated, reasonable interlocutor is a bad one. I think that’s just what a bad design decision is. If (A) finds that despite her best attempts, she can still reasonably reject (B)’s justification, she is authorized to call those design decisions bad. This has partially to do with how I conceive of design practice, which I plan to write about next Monday. In short, I believe that if you fail to appreciate that design decisions are sensitive to justificatory requirements, you’re failing to understand an important aspect of design practice itself.
One more example for the road. This time, let’s take it out of the classroom and into the world. Imagine I buy nice new chair, take it home, sit down on it, and it immediately breaks into its constituent sticks. My immediate thought will be: this chair is a piece of crap. At the bare minimum, I would have the right to demand that the designer justify his use of shoddy materials, etc. that led to my bruised posterior. Under most scenarios, it doesn’t seem very likely that I will find the reasons provided acceptable. Assuming that I determine that his attempts at justification can be reasonably rejected, I consider myself authorized to say the chair is badly designed.
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