This newsletter is actually rescued from the wreckage of one I wrote in October 2023. Which means it’s been at least that long that I’ve been thinking about the problem of design(ing).

There is nothing so practical as a good theory. Theory allows us to organise what we observe in the world, which in turn allows us to understand how to organise both ourselves and the world around us. To build a bridge, a good theory of bridge-building seems vital. To play a song, a solid theory of song-playing seems crucial.

Yet we often find ourselves both starting and ending our thinking at theory. As if the problem has been solved by it, and all that remains is execution. (I don’t, of course, know a single person involved in execution who thinks either that theory solves all their problems or that they aren’t thinking while solve them, either.)

In this frame, it seems like if we know how to make a bridge, we need not concern ourselves with how the theory of the bridge fits with the world. Rather, it’s far more important to ask why the world declines to accede to the demands of the theory of the bridge. The concerns of logistics, scale, redundancy - these are not things we consider when we consider theory. These things are practice.

If a theory-free practice is bound to fail, a practice-free theory will never even get the chance. I mean this even about things that people might declare as purely abstract - about maths and physics, or philosophy and logic. The practice of these things, which is to say of thinking and puzzling out, is fundamentally tied to the theory of them. But the reverse is also true. Practice doesn’t follow theory, it is intertwined with theory.

What does this mean for design? Well, we can think of designing as the intentional use of theory to make something. It combines theory, which organises the world, with practice, which changes it, in order to make something.

So why do we talk about designing as if it doesn’t involve the latter? The laptop I’m writing this on has, etched on its bottom, the words ‘Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China’. As if the work of designing is theoretical, but not practical. As if the assembly of a machine as complex as a laptop requires no theorising by the people making the machines, only by the people imagining them.

This issue becomes much worse when we ask another question. What, exactly, is a designer?

Now, if what I just said about theory is true, we can easily theorise what a designer is. It is anyone who designs, which is to say, anyone who uses a theory of the world in order to make something. But we know that this is not, in fact, a designer.

Instead of theorising, what if we ask a different question - what kind of person is designated (see what I did there) as a designer? (I dislike the ‘gets to be called’ phrase that is often used in this kind of context, for no particular reason at all.) And the answer to this question seems to have less to do with how they use theory and practice and more to do with where and when people they do it.

If we try to understand what makes a designer by first identifying people who are designers, we can see that designer is a social category. It counts among its number people who make graphics for a living, but not people who make graphics as a hobby. It counts people whose names adorn shops, but not the people who make the clothes in it, nor the people who make their own. Does it include me? I don’t think so. But more than one stranger has walked up to me and asked me if I’m a designer. What’s that about?

I have a friend who went to design school. He hates being called a designer. He hates people who call themselves designers. It’s not because he hates designing. It’s because the social category invariably excludes the people who practice design in favour of people who theorise it, even if it’s functionally impossible to only theorise or practice design.

Next week, why translation boggles the mind.

Cheers,

mvs