Design Thinking sits squarely in a Cartesian world of divided minds and bodies in spite of the fact that recent advances in evolutionary theory and cognitive science point to the inseparability of what is called the "hand-brain complex."
Anne Burdick, Design Without Designers
I grow more bothered by the week with the phrase "design thinking." I know full well that I am fighting a losing battle, but I think it is an unfortunate term for describing what designers have to offer to other disciplines, which seems the most common reason for using the term. As is a way of talking about what designers can contribute to areas beyond the domains in which they have traditionally worked, about how they can improve the tasks of structuring interactions, organizations, strategies and societies, it is a weak term.
The phrase has gained currency in part because it suggests that there are multiple kinds of thinking. Design thinking serves as a complement to analytic thinking, critical thinking, conceptual thinking, and other forms or modes of thought. Most often it is the first of these "analytic thinking" that is the target concern of design thinking's advocates. They argue that analysis does not provide everything that is needed to cope with the complexities that face us. Deduction (the logic of necessity) and induction (the logic of probability) need to be supported by abduction (the logic of possibilities). The former two logics are in wide use by analysts, but the latter one has been the province of designers. And there are other aspects to the designer's way of thinking that would benefit organizations and society as well.
I am in agreement with these observations. But they stop short of the real contribution that could be made. For it is not in the modes of thought that designers most distinguish themselves, but in their actions. Designers act differently than analysts or decision-makers. Design is an extreme activity. It tends to call on all of the faculties of those engaged in it. It is contextual. It is embodied. It uses the whole person's mind and body, left brain and right, hand and heart, analysis and taste. And it never gets enough of any of them.
I think that the reason we find ourselves here is because so many who have created and nurtured the design thinking notion have as a principal point of departure Rittel's ideas of design as a means for attacking wicked problems. In Rittel's view design is essentially a planning process. It is understandable that much design is best conceived in this way, since the costs associated with making changes can often be exceedingly great once the execution of a project gets underway. It is probably no accident that the original use of the phrase design thinking was as the title for a book written by an architect (Peter Rowe). But there are other theories of design, and many design domains, where the separation between the designing phase and the implementation phase is not so extreme. In those types of design there is less distinction between thinking and acting. Many of the problems being explored by those interested in moving design into other arenas are of this variety.
Another unfortunate problem with the phrase design thinking is linguistic. By making design into an adjective we relegate it to the role of a moderator. One of the things that Dick Boland and I enthusiastically commented on in our early writing about design was the vitality of the very word itself, given its noun and verb forms. I think it is so much more powerful, demanding, and relevant to invite lawyers, doctors, politicians and business people to design rather than to engage in design thinking. I think that the product of the former is more likely to be perceived as — and to be — an actual design, rather than a plan, a report, an idea, or some other conceptual or intellectual byproduct.
The relationship of action and thought, of hand and brain, is captured nicely by Maya Lin in her book Boundaries where she declares: "I think with my hands." And in Sketching User Experiences Bill Buxton puts the act of sketching at the very center of design. For him, design "gets down and dirty" and its archetypal activity is sketching. "I am not asserting that the activity of sketching is design. Rather, I am just making the point that any place that I have seen design, in the sense that I want to discuss it in this book, it has been accompanied by sketching."
So if thinking is at the center of the activity that we want to encourage, it is not the kind of thinking that doctors and lawyers, professors and business people already do. It is not a feet up, data spread across the desk to be absorbed kind of thinking. It is a pencil in hand, scribbling on the board sort of thinking. And while that may be obvious to those close to the process already, I am afraid it is not what folks conjure up when they first hear the phrase design thinking.
Language matters. I cannot help thinking that we are selling our ideas short given the momentum behind the current choice of language. And I wonder, how much designing and/or thinking has actually gone into "design thinking."
Marshall and Eric McLuhan argued that an emerging medium is best understood by considering four questions or probes. They called these four questions the Laws of Media. Every new medium extends some capability, turns into its opposite if it grows too much, pushes aside other media, and retrieves some long lost activity from humanity's past. Exploring these four probes creates a kind of cognitive anti-environment, wherein the background become more evident and the medium can be better understood.
I think this might serve as a useful framework for thinking about twitter. Here is my cut at it.
What does the medium extend, enhance, intensify, accelerate or enable?
Conversation with neighbors and casual acquaintances
Announcements to a 'local' community
Times Square
When pushed beyond the limits of its potential what does the new medium reverse into?
Television when it was at its most mind-numbing
Time's Square on LSD
Stalking
What is pushed aside by the new medium?
Postcards announcing programs and events
Bulletin boards and posters
Diaries and journals
Gathering around a coffee pot at work
What does the new medium retrieve from the past that had been formerly obsolesced?
Chatting over the back fence or rocking on the front porch
Town criers
The commons with its soapboxes and spontaneous retorts
Times Square in the 1980s
Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988.
"You never learn by doing something right ‘cause you already know how to do it. You only learn from making mistakes and correcting them."
Russell Ackoff
Design and "design thinking" is gaining recognition as an important integrative concept in management practice and education. But it will fail to have a lasting impact, unless we learn from the mistakes of earlier, related ideas. For instance, "system thinking", which shares many of the conceptual foundations of "design thinking", promised to be a powerful guide to management practice, but it has never achieved the success its proponents hoped for.If systems thinking had been successful in gaining a foothold in management education over the last half of the 20th century, there would be no manage by designing movement, or calls for integrative or design thinking.
Systems thinking, as written about and practiced by Russell Ackoff, C. West Churchman, Peter Checkland and others, contained within it many of the impulses that motivate the application of design ideas to strategy, organization, society, and management. Ideas such as engaging a broad set of stakeholders, moving beyond simple metrics and calculations, considering idealized options and using scenarios to explore them, shifting boundaries to reframe problems, iteration, the liberal use of diagrams and rich pictures, and tirelessly searching for a better set of alternatives were all there. If the business and management community had bought it, we would not be having the many discussions about design, design thinking, and expanding management education to engage the intuitive, to embrace values, to look beyond available choices. We would already be doing all of that and more. But systems thinking, despite its wartime successes never really captured the imagination of business leaders. And we must learn from its mistakes.
I have been an enthusiastic student and teacher of systems thinking for almost three decades. I was a student of Russ Ackoff''s and I did my PhD in decision theory largely because of the work of pioneers in cybernetics and systems theory. I have taught systems thinking to undergraduates, MBAs, and executives. I have heard their objections to the arbitrariness of any particular system’s boundaries, to the impossibility of balancing the incommensurable objectives of a system's many stakeholders, and to the difficulty in identifying clear measures of a system's performance. Still, many of my students over the years have found much to take away. And I receive email messages years after those courses have been completed that suggest that the ideas and techniques are useful and important to some students.
Systems thinking started with an impulse that insights from Gestalt psychology and biology might be useful in understanding and affecting complex organizational and social problems. It developed into a large, highly interconnected theory that is itself a complex system. Systems thinkers remain convinced that if managers saw things through the lens of that theory, the world would become better. But the number and sequence of things that must be done has become so arcane that to master it seems all but impossible to the managers in question.
I recently spent two days at a workshop with around a dozen architects and managers. The facilitator was one of Russ Ackoff's former colleagues at the Wharton School. It is a reflection of what has become of systems thinking that it took most of the two days for the facilitator to explicate all that he thought we needed to know before we could begin either critiquing or applying the ideas In addition to obvious material on the nature of systems, we learned about chaos theory, living systems theory, Santiago theories, the four foundations of systems methodology (holistic thinking, operational thinking, interactive design, and socio-cultural models), five systems principles (openness, emergent properties, multi-dimensionality, counter-intuitiveness, and purposefulness), the five interactive dimensions of social systems (wealth, beauty, power, value and knowledge) and the related five dimensions of an organization (throughput processes, membership, decision, conflict management, and measurement), the elements of a throughput system (time, cost flexibility, quality, measurement, diagnostic, improvement and redesign), the nature of holistic thinking and iteration, the laws of complexity, loops and feedback, and more.
All of this was presented as foundational knowledge that was necessary before we could get to what it was that brought most of us (or at least me) to this particular workshop — designing for human interaction. In addition to the number of frameworks and ideas, and the density of the interconnections among them, there was a strong normative quality to the material and its presentation. "If one hopes to make any progress at all," we were told, "you need to both understand and accept these related ideas."
This particular version of systems thinking is not unusual in this respect. Peter Senge's 1990 edition of The Fifth Discipline describes one manager's reaction to a five-day introductory workshop on his approach, which among other things, requires growing comfortable with eight archetypes: "It reminds me of when I first studied calculus (p. x)." Systems dynamics, the Soft Systems Method and other approaches face similar concerns.
Each of systems thinking’s various manifestations demands some degree of subscription to an orthodoxy (a particular view of just what systems thinking is). And each requires that the user master a large number of related ideas and techniques, most of which are not particularly useful on their own.
These requirements are at odds with how we tend to acquire new knowledge. Rather than accepting a new idea because we must, we like to try it out. A new skill is most likely to interest us if it contributes to both short-term and long-term learning objectives. And the easier it is to try out parts of a theory, the more likely we are to jump in.
The drive to nail "design thinking" down has the same normative flavor that has restricted the spread of systems thinking. The urge to create a framework that specifies what and how a design thinker proceeds seems not just futile but dangerous to the survival of a movement aimed at expanding the kinds of thinking that managers, policy makers and citizens engage in.
What is the alternative? I would suggest that we should focus instead on building and describing an arsenal of methods and techniques, many of them drawn from various extant design practices, that are applicable to the domains and problems in questions. Describing these techniques as well as the conditions under which each is of value would constitute an invaluable program of research.
You might think of the various pieces of knowledge that we produce as a component in a kind of intellectual scaffolding that can be used to support the efforts of others. Rather than having each flavor of "design thinking" rushing off to build its own comprehensive model of what "real design thinkers" do, we might better spend our energy on identifying what is useful in what we have tried or seen done, the conditions under which it seems to break down, and so on.
In addition to engaging a much larger community in knowledge-sharing, such an approach will provide the users of design thinking with "trial-size" access to a growing body of knowledge. One wouldn't have to buy the whole of "design thinking", for example, to accept that there are places in management where sketching could help out, or that for a large class of problems spending more time on problem framing and reframing will pay dividends down the line. In time, each manager will do what we have learned designers do, adopt those methods, techniques and ideas that best suit their own personal style and the nature of the problems that they typically encounter. In the end then, rather than learning and subscribing to a theory or system of thought that is based on ideas from design, managers and policy makers will become designers of a sort particularly suited to their circumstances.
I have found it is useful to think of definitions of design, designing, design thinking as "stepping stones" that help us move the conversation along, rather than straight jackets defining what is in and what is out. In that sense, they are perhaps not really definitions at all. But then language is like that, always begging to be more than it is at the moment.
At the Weatherhead School our faculty has made a commitment to incorporating design throughout our curricula. As you might guess, this is a rare thing for a management school to attempt, so there has been a good deal of discussion about just what it means.
There are those who have argued that it means nothing at all, because “design is everything.” For them, I quote the design historian and theorist Ralph Caplan. “Design is not everything, but it somehow gets into almost everything.” Others argue that it is “next to nothing; it’s not innovation (coming up with the ideas), it’s not implementation (working out the logistics), it’s not entrepreneurship (coming up with the money). So, it’s next to nothing; styling perhaps.”
Still, as a faculty they have agreed to go on the journey. And things have, in the two years since we set this course, progressed in amazing ways. The outcome of one conversation was that we agreed to accept the stepping stone theory of defining. We cooked up three workable definitions that taken together have satisfied an amazing variety of professors (not an easy group to satisfy as a rule).
Design is the process of finding and solving non-routine (wicked) problems, often with a focus on bringing new products or services to market.
Design is the intentional assembly of systems with interacting parts to achieve some objective.
Design is a collection of methods and techniques, often drawn from the fine arts, to creatively solve problems.
I wrote this as a provocation for a workshop that will take place this week-end at the Weatherhead School.
To what extent do fourth order design, design thinking, integrative thinking, and similar extensions of the notion of designing represent conceptual mechanisms for managers, management educators, and business consultants to co-opt the design community’s unique position as an innovative force, perhaps the innovative force in businesses?
This is a question of some importance. Many who attempt toaddress the question assert that designers have a unique set of skills that enable (and entitle) them to do the designing. Others assert that management, having reached the limits of its reliance upon analytic thinking and a worldview that takes decision-making as the highest form of value creation, is grasping for a new value proposition. One they find in the notions of innovation and design. These and similar observations produce an understandable skepticism about what we are up to.
If we are to move beyond this we must address several matters head on. The first has to do with the centrality of values to any honest design activity. Design is an activity of individuals. A design is inevitably a reflection of the designers who produced it. And that means that in some significant measure it is the product of those designers’ values. Some transparency about how those values are learned, articulated, challenged andappreciated will be required if institutions that have “created a generation of monsters” (as one participant on a discussion list recently put it) are to find a respected place in design discussions.
A second matter that will require some attention is the role of power in these expanded design processes. Who do managers/designers serve? By one view that has had broad currency in management education for at least a generation managers are the servants of the stockholders. A similarly focused view, which has a prominent place in discussions of industrial and graphic design, is that designers serve the customers. A somewhat more embracing view would see us all as serving an expanded community of stakeholders. But there have been few discussions, at least in management classrooms, about how broadly stakeholders might reasonably reach. To humanity? The earth? Seven generations? And then some?
Another, more micro, issue of power will arise as the design world responds to the invitation to teach the rest of us how they do what they do. Will designers thereby hand over the keys to their kingdom, enabling managers to do the whole innovation thing on their own? Or perhaps even worse,will the newly educated and trained mangers use the ‘real’ designers as mere functionaries? And what is the quid proquo to be?
The great designer Karl Gerstner has said: “Design must not be understood as an activity reserved to artists. It is the privilege of all people everywhere.”
There is considerable interest in design thinking and its application to management. A google search on “design thinking” and “management” produced 146,000 items. When “business” is substituted for management the number goes to 180,000. Many of the highest ranked of these include blog entries in which designers struggle to make sense of this phenomenon and attempt to characterize design thinking. Similar searches on google scholar produced 1,330 items and 1,050 items respectively. Some common features permeate the discussion. In what follows, I will attempt to relate their ideas to how managers are usually viewed and to identify what seems to distinguish the design thinking view.
Design thinking deals with wicked problems. Because no single objective can be identified in advance, design thinking is aimed at drawing on and synthesizing a wide range of knowledge and influences rather than at optimizing (Huang; Saffer; Owen). For the same reason, it is viewed as interpretive (Lombardi), holistic and integrative (Lombardi; Owen). Both how the problem is framed and how to evaluate possible solutions must be devised as part of the designing process.
Given the unstructured nature of the situations on which design thinking bears, it will come as no surprise to business researchers and educators that it constitutes a fertile ground for the application of heuristics. The design literature expands, though, on the sense in which business research has explored and categorized “rules of thumb” for solving problems too complex for algorithmic computation.
In addition to having a rich set of heuristic analogies, metaphors, and topologies to draw upon “design thinking is supported by a rich set of tools, processes, roles and environments” so that “Designers work like craftsmen. They know when to use the right tool at the right time (Tim Brown on Wroblewski).”
A good deal of attention is given to the fact that design thinking is “human centered”. Placing “A focus on customers/users” at the top of his list of features, one blogger wrote “It’s not about the company and how your business is structured. The customer doesn’t care about that” (Saffer). Another asserts “Being human-centered is unique to design. Designers think about people first then the business second. The opposite is true for most companies” (Wroblewski). Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO observed that design thinking is a human centered process that comes into problems “through the route of people” (Brown). Owen notes that unlike art and science which proceed where discovery takes them, design must be client-centered (Owen 2006).
The people-centeredness of design can be seen from the provider’s side as well as the recipient’s. Because each designer is unique, so is that which she creates. Design thinking is personal in the sense that problems will be considered differently by different designers and in different contexts (Lombardi). Frank Gehry noted that designing a building with Edwin Chan is different from designing one with Craig Webb.
Related to the personal nature of design thinking are the ideas that design thinking is inherently collaborative (Saffer) and that these collaborations are often ad hoc. Designers live in the world of projects. They function as members of teams often for only the duration of a project, then are off to work with others on something else. Managers have traditionally assumed permanent positions with an ongoing set of responsibilities (Martin 2005). Also related is the idea that design is emotion embracing (Saffer).
The process that supports design thinking is generally described in terms of phases, such as inspiration, ideation and implementation (Brown), or moving between ideation and prototyping (Saffer), or moving iteratively from building prototypes through posing hypotheses to testing them (Lombardi).
Descriptions sometimes make allusion to the environment-centered concerns of design. “Present-day thinking puts environmental interests at a level with human interests as primary constraints on the design process (Owen 2006).” This suggests that sustainability is an important consideration in a program aimed at developing design-thinkers.
In 2002 Michael Lewis wrote a New York Times Magazine article In Defense of the Boom. In it he observed that a rational stock market “channels less than the socially optimal amounts of capital into innovation.” I came across the article (it’s republished in his new book Panic) while flying back from the 6th European Conference on Design Innovation in Paris yesterday.
The conference, sponsored by the French Agency for the Promotion of Creative Industries, brought together designers and design policy directors mainly from the EU. A variety of issues related to effectively managing design were discussed. There was particular interest in how design would be affected by, and how it might help address, the many issues brought on by the current global financial and economic crises. There was some worry that design might be seen as nice, but not necessary in a time of diminishing budgets.
One pervasive theme was that design is moving beyond its focus on products into other areas of business. Growing numbers of European companies are curious about the factors that contribute to fully exploiting design’s potential. Gert Kootstra described a study of companies in the Netherlands in which they learned that the companies that attain the highest levels of value from design do so based on the presence of design expertise, design processes, design resources, and design awareness (in that order). Planning had no relationship to the attainment of design excellence in their study.
Dori Tunstall, a Design Anthropologist at the University of Illinois, Chicago, described Redesigning America’s Future, an initiative centered around ten policy proposals that were recently crafted by representatives of the American Institute of Architects, The Industrial Designers Society of America, AIGA, and a dozen other design industry, education, and government representatives. Details of the proposals are on the U.S. National Design Policy Initiative website (http://www.designpolicy.org/).
It seems clear that there is going to be a good deal of economic stimulus over the next several years. We must hope that the many new projects that are enabled by it will be approached with a design attitude, that seeks to come up with ever better ways of doing things. In his assessment of the 1990s boom, Lewis went on to speak about the role of government in innovation.
"Good new technologies are a bit like good new roads; their social benefits far exceed what any one person or company can get paid for creating them. Even the laissez-faire wing of the economics profession has long agreed that government might profitably subsidize innovation by, for instance, financing university engineering departments. Government has obviously done this, albeit in a haphazard fashion. Still, there remains a huge gap between the optimum investment in technical progress and the amount we usually invest to achieve it. In this respect, the late 1990s were an exception.
"This suggests another interesting question. Not: Were the late 1990s a great disaster for the U.S. economy? But : As a social policy, might we try to re-create the last 1990s (Lewis, Panic, p. 254)?"
If we want to realize the oft-stated goal that the infusion of funds into the economy be used to create long-term improvements, it will require that some of it stimulates innovation. Supporting initiatives like the National Design Policy Initiative, paying more attention to how European countries successfully support design and innovation, and teaching design in leading business schools may help us get there.
In Sunday's NY Times Magazine, Joe Nocera wrote about Value at Risk (VaR) and the role it might have played in the current financial crisis. Was that tool an aid to dealing with the situations facing its users or did it contribute to their problems? How should we understand its impact? Several important questions are raised by the Nocera interviews. How should responsibility be apportioned between human behavior and measures like VaR? What do measures like VaR mean? And, what dangers must be addressed in the design of such measures?
Many of those Nocera spoke with saw the problem as rooted in human behavior, rather than financial measures or tools. Consider this assertion made by Greg Berman, one of the founding partners of RiskMetrics. "But I do think that this was much more a failure of management than of risk management."
What does Mr. Berman take the "management" part of "risk management" to mean? We get a clue as we read on. "I think that blaming models for this would be very unfortunate because you are placing blame on a mathematical equation. You can't blame math." He seems to think of risk management as the application of mathematical tools to assessing risk, rather than the actual activity of managing it.
But of course you can blame math, just as you can blame the design of a clock that does not show the proper time or an automobile that performs poorly. Financial instruments, including VaR, are designs. They are human artifacts intended to servea purpose. If you need convincing that mathematics is, like clocks and automobiles, the product of human design, I recommend George Lackoff and Rafael Nunez’s Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being.
Others subscribed to similar dichotomies between models (or specifically VaR) and the people who use them. In speaking about the failure of Long Term Capital Management, Nocera noted "…firms took to rationalizing away the fall of L.T.C.M.; they viewed it as a human failure rather than a failure of risk modeling." This is a common strategy for diverting blame. Rather than question the design of the instrument or system its advocates assert "the user is at fault." But part of the activity of designing something involves insuring that it is not likely to be widely misused. Power tools have safety guards.
Assumptions play a critical role in thinking about models and many of those using VaR overlooked them. "Indeed, so sure were the firm’s partners that the market would revert to "normal"—which is what their model insisted would happen— that they continued to take on exposures that would destroy the firm as the crisis worsened." Pay particular attention to that phrase between the hyphens "what their model insisted would happen." This suggests that a return to normal was considered an output from the model. But the model did not say that things would return to normal; rather it assumed that they do.
An important, indeed the defining, characteristic of VaR is that it is a scaler; that is, a single measure, a number. As the article points out it is a number that got a lot of legitimacy by being marketed, standardized, and regulated. It came to have "meaning."
Every semester, I ask MBA students to consider why we might want to beware of single measures. What kinds of problems do they bring with them? And every semester, bright students propose that measures are often incomplete, that any particular one might not capture all that we really want to know, that each will have particular assumptions embedded within it. And usually after they have been thinking about it for oh, ten minutes or so, one of them says something like "people will game any simple number." So, listen now to this, from Nocera’s narrative:
"Guildimann, the great VaR proselytizer, sounded almost mournful when he talked about what he saw as another of VaR's shortcomings. To him, the big problem was that it turned out that VaR could be gamed. That is what happened when banks began reporting their VaRs. To motivate managers, the banks began to compensate them not just for making big profits but also for making profits with low risks. That sounds good in principle, but managers began to manipulate the VaR by loading up on what Guildimann calls 'asymmetric risk positions.' These are products or contracts that, in general, generate small gains and very rarely have losses. But when they do have losses, they are huge. The positions made a manager’s VaR look good because VaR ignored the slim likelihood of giant losses, which could only come about in the event of a true catastrophe. A good example was a credit-default swap, which is essentially insurance that a company won’t default. The gains made from selling credit-default swaps are small and steady—and the chance of ever having to pay off that insurance are assumed to be miniscule."
Create a single measure of anything, and clever people will find ways to work it. When I was a student, Professor Jim Emery told us about a time when he and his colleagues at Proctor & Gamble created a measure to reward workers for factory floor safety. The measure "days since an accident" was displayed over the door. And when a man cut his thumb one day he was encouraged by his co-workers to have it treated on his way home from work, since bonuses were linked to the measure and a visit to the in-house clinic would reset the counter. As Jim pointed out, no one wanted to induce that behavior, but they did nonetheless. Single measures will be gamed. Keep that in mind all you financial instrument and incentives designers.
I don't expect that advice to be widely followed, though. Commenting on the widespread use of VaR, Christopher Donohue, who manages research at the Global Association of Risk Professionals, said that because it relates so directly to money people "attach a meaning to it." And a former risk manager that Nocera spoke with considers it part of the human condition that "People like to have one number they can believe in."
With all of this there was a heroic story in Nocera's narrative. It came relatively early in the financial crisis when people at Goldman Sachs began to notice irregularities in the VaR. David Viniar, Goldman’s chief financial officer brought together about 15 people who met for three hours during which they "poured over everything. They examined their VaR numbers, and their other risk models. They talked about how the mortgage-backed securities market ‘felt’ [italics added]." This heroic episode is the story of people using irregularities in one measure as a clue guiding them to look at others, of using feeling to complement thinking, of using talking to make meaning within a complex situation they had never faced before. It is the story of a leader calling on his people to stop and think ("But who has time to stop in the middle of a crisis?" I hear many of the executives I have taught over the years crying out.). And it is the story of tragedy averted, at least for a bit. Goldman Sachs acted on what they learned in those three hours and avoided much of the pain suffered by Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and others.
There are several lessons for the design of financial instruments that follow from the stories Nocera has collected together. First, our financial systems involve humans and as such are complicated. No single measure can address all of the complexities that will be encountered in such complex systems. Second, meaning in complex social systems is not a matter of universal laws (as it is in physics, say); rather meanings are socially negotiated. And finally, because tools such as VaRs are the product of design, the extent to which design methods and attitudes are understood and employed will impact their utility and resilience.
I just received a holiday greeting from Bruce Mau Design. It is sufficiently stimulating and inspiring that I'd like to share it with all of you. Please consider this the e-quivalent of recycling a nicely done greeting card and accept Mau's wishes as my own for you this holiday season.
In the April 19, 1965 issue of Electronics Magazine, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel made an observation about the development of integrated circuits, which are at the heart of the modern computer's ever improving price-performance.
"The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year … Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years."
Around 1970, Caltech professor Carver Mead christened this observation Moore's law, and in 1975 Moore modified it to predict a doubling every two years.
This observation has proven remarkably prescient and is among the most frequently referred to "predictions" of the 20th century. But Moore’s law is less a prediction than an assertion. It represents a good case of what systems scientists call feed-forward and lawyers refer to as conscious parallelism.
Feed-forward is a systems concept in which signals from outside a system are in some way predicted and fed in to control the system of interest. Sometimes these are psychological predictions, as when people anticipate a shortage of gas, buy ahead, and thereby induce gas shortages.
Conscious parallelism is usually used to describe a kind of price-fixing among competitors that happens without actual written or spoken agreements among the parties. Rather, being sensitive to the environment and the various signals that are available there, each party adjusts its behavior to achieve a desired outcome. But conscious parallelism can apply to terms other than price.
It is hard to overstate the contribution that human expectations make to the functioning of our systems. What American who was living at the time doesn’t recall how in 1962 President Kennedy motivated us to reach for the moon?
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
As for the incredible price reductions in computing, they did not happen for any essential technical reason. Nor were they the result of a simple set of scientific, engineering, production, marketing, or financial forces. Indeed the forces at work have been changing over the four decades in question.
Carver Meade said it clearly when he pointed out that Moore's law is "not a law of physics, it's about human belief, and when people believe in something, they'll put energy behind it to make it come to pass." And Gordon Moore himself eventually assessed the many developments that had contributed to his observation's persistent relevance this way. "Every company knows that unless they keep moving at that pace, they are going to fall behind. … It has become the driver of what happens."
So, is there a Moore's law of the automotive industry?
One good candidate is Alfred P. Sloan's "a car for every purse and purpose." This objective led designers at General Motors to focus on styling for many years. GM’s unique strength in the 1920s and beyond was that it found a way to reconcile providing variety with mass manufacturing. Many of the same large parts and systems were used in a Chevy Coup and an Oldsmobile convertible; yet the two could be sold to different markets and at different prices. A proliferation of distinguishing features, or "options" led to ever more complex products, logistics, sales, and management systems. When it came time to simplify, it was often by combining all of the features so that cars became, like the most elaborate Swiss army knives, loaded with features most of which any particular driver might ignore.
Another candidate for Moore’s law status might be performance. By this I don't mean the kind of performance that matters to those of us using our cars to get to and from work everyday, but the kind that wins races and dazzles the critics who pour over spec sheets. I would not be surprised to learn, for example, that acceleration has improved along much the same line as price-performance in computing has.
But how might the automobile industry develop if someone with the veracity of a Gordon Moore or the clout of an Alfred Sloan declared that fuel efficiency was going to double every decade for the foreseeable future? What if everyone in the transportation industry's research, design, and manufacturing communities took as a given that such improvements were part of what is required to compete? To repeat Carver Meade "when people believe in something, they'll put energy behind it to make it come to pass." Or, quoting Picasso "He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't. This is an inexorable, indisputable law."
