Good vs. Great Design
Cameron Moll has put together an excellent presentation titled “Good vs. Great Design” (pdf) for the HOW conference in Texas at the end of June. I saw his presentation at An Event Apart in 2007 and loved his introduction. Here is a quick excerpt from the introduction on the title of “Design is Problem Finding, Not Just Problem Solving.”
“The technical problem,” related Anton Fokker (1890-1939) during World War I as he wrestled with the challenge of mounting a machine gun directly in the pilot’s line of sight, “was to shoot between the propeller blades, which passed a given point 2,400 times a minute, because the two-bladed propeller revolved 1,200 times a minute. This meant that the pilot must not pull the trigger or fire the gun as long as one of the blades was directly in front of the muzzle.”
And then the young Dutchman made this remarkable observation: “Once the problem was stated, its solution came to me in a flash.” Within three days, Fokker had invented the ‘interrupter gear’ that made it possible for a machine gun to fire directly through the aircraft’s propeller without striking the blades—the first practical solution to a problem unsuccessfully confronted by several other inventors of the day.
Fokker’s determination to discover, understand, and clearly define the problem led to the solution emerging in parallel. So it is with design. “It has often been suggested that design is as much a matter of finding problems as it is solving them,” writes Bryan Lawson in How Designers Think. “Design problems and design solutions are inexorably interdependent. It is obviously meaningless to study solutions without reference to problems and the reverse is equally fruitless.”
