Talk: Design
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I've removed some things from the article.
First, I'm trying to expand the philosophical part of the article, and this definition, unfortunately, does not expand to cover all senses of design now discussed in the article:
- Design is a process of arriving at a finished work, or as finished as time or energy allows, usually based on an idea/thought/impression.
Second, I'm removing this, because I don't understand why architecture needs special treatment, above and beyond that given to, say, industrial design. Hopefully someone will restore the relevant parts.
- When applied to architecture, design is both a noun and a verb. You can design a building, and your building is a design. ... The operative notion is that design embodies the countless nights of thought, iteration and re-design, to approach a level of completeness that all parties can agree upon. In architecture this usually happens when the architect, client, building code inspector, and finally the construction industry can agree to a finished design.
Here are some thoughts that I would like to refine and somehow incorperate into the article: In the realm of the arts, design is more relevent to the applied' arts, such as graphic arts, architechture, product design, ... Design implies a concious effort to create something that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing. For example a graphic artist may design an advertisement poster. This person's job is to communicate the advertisement message (functional aspect) and to make it look good (astetically pleasing). The distinction between pure and applied arts is not completely clear, but we could take Jackson Pollock's splatter paintings as an example of pure art. Sure his art may convey some message, but there are obvious differences between the kind of concrete information in a poster and the message of a Jackson Pollock. Second, I think that a reasonable person would agree that Pollock worked more intuitively than the graphic artist's concious effort to design the poster. This is not to say that Pollock did not have some sort of a priori idea of what he was going to paint before he started (I have no idea whether he did or not). I guess my point is that on the spectrum between pure and applied art, degree of design is the the most important factor. User:Ike9898
One more comment, on a slightly different vein...one might say that anything that a person makes is designed. To an extent I guess this is true. Things can be well designed or poorly designed. But i would say that something produced with out significant conscious effort is not truely designed. At the moment I am having trouble thinking of uncontroversial examples, so he's a controversial one.... Assuming you agree with mainstream evolutionary therory (as I do) living creatures are not designed, their bodies are the way they are as the result of a natural, unconcious process (evolution). (Please, I realize that not everyone agrees with evolution, let's not discuss that here). User:Ike9898
- Many people agree with your assessment that, given the validity of evolutionary theory, living creatures are not designed. Some (e.g. Dennett) disagree, opting to employ design in a broader sense, such that something doesn't need to have had a conscious, sentient designer to be considered designed. I've tried to clarify this somewhat in the article. --Ryguasu 23:13 26 Jun 2003 (UTC)
