Is design a value system?

[Robin]

I'd really appreciate any thoughts on this.

Designers have oversight, empathy, and a creative opportunity to build
experiences, contexts, things etc.

What guides them? Are they servants or leaders?

Thanks, Robin

[Adrian Howard]

That depends on the designer. Depends on your definition of servant
and leader too :-)

Personally I'm not particularly comfortable with either label. I don't
like cutting up the world that way.

Servant Leadership maybe (http://is.gd/2aPnM).

I like to think of my self as a member of a team - working together to
build neat stuff. I'm not just telling people what to do. I'm not just
doing what people tell me.

We're working together. (On a good day :-)

Cheers,

Adrian
--
http://quietstars.com - twitter.com/adrianh - delicious.com/adrianh

[Cameron Tonkinwise]

Robin wrote:
> Designers have oversight, empathy, and a creative opportunity to build
> experiences, contexts, things etc.
>
> What guides them? Are they servants or leaders?

Adrian wrote:
> Servant Leadership maybe (http://is.gd/2aPnM)

Harold Nelson, co-author of a rich if left-field
book about design that would be relevant to your
question about designer value systems -
The Design Way ( http://www.advanceddesign.org/book.html )
- has also written a quite nice piece about
servant leadership:
http://advanceddesign.org/publications/art-4a-05-26-03.htm

Cameron

[Robert Fabricant]

dont know if the practice of design is a value system. but everything we design is an expression of values. when we interact with any product or service we are interacting with a value system.

[Drew-Primed]

I concur with Cameron regarding Harold Nelson's work. I'm a graduate
of the program he founded in Seattle that focused on whole systems
design. It was fantastic exploration of design that embraced the
interrelationships of the systems in which the design challenge
resides. In my work in human performance design this meant taking into
account the social, cultural, economic, environmental and political
attributes of the stakeholders with whom I was working. It's a rich
field that pulls together such divergent thinking as Maturana, Senge,
and Capra.

Within this framework I feel that designers are very much servants to
the design process and leaders to their stakeholders, in that they
help show the way to preferred future state (be it product, service,
process, system, ecology, etc.)

Great inquiry, Robin. Thanks for the initial trigger questions!

Regards,
Drew

On Aug 11, 12:12 am, Cameron Tonkinwise <tonki...@newschool.edu>
wrote: