Penned by John Christopher Jones, an Industrial Designer and Educator, “Design Methods” is a design-related book that I remain enamored of—especially curious about its never rising in awareness throughout the community of designers. Here, one of its top admirers, Adam Kallish, reasons how this proved to be the result.
When, how, where did you discover the book “Design Methods” (1970) by John Christopher Jones?
It was in 1986. I was a Bauhaus-trained designer and in graduate school at Rhode Island School of Design where my cohort was exposed to visual semiotics. This first year was disorienting, and at times, I felt punch-drunk on concepts that bordered on metacognition.
In the RISD library (back then, libraries were different than they are today), I was doing research for my thesis and came across a curious book called “Designing Designing,” written by John Chistopher Jones in 1973—three years after his book “Design Methods.” In “Designing Designing,” there were chapters called “A Thought Resolved,” “The World Without Imagination,” etc. Very esoteric, bordering on the poetic. In one of the chapters, he discussed “How my thoughts about design methods have changed over the years” and it was here I learned about his book “Design Methods.”
I learned later that the original title for the 1970 edition was “Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures.” The methods he outlined in his book are the seeds that come together to propose better human futures.
Sounds like you don’t regret reading “Designing Designing” before “Design Methods” since the latter was published first?
No. After three years, Jones reflected on that three-year gap from when he wrote “Design Methods” until when he wrote “Designing Designing.” When I read John Christopher’s second book [“Designing Designing”], it opened up a world that was somewhat disorienting. But when I first read “Design Methods,” I was like: Okay, here's some structure I can grab on to. “Design Methods” is a cookbook, compared to “Designing Designing”—a reflection.
Do you recall your impressions after reading “Design Methods”—What were some immediate ones?
It was very difficult to read and understand, because his writing style is not easy to take in, as he was referencing many trends and movements from crafts to the age of the computer. There were diagrams and charts to show connections between frameworks and methods. After I read it once, I was terrified, because I was grappling with unfamiliar concepts. I decided to read it again, and then it started to make sense to me.
What’s memorable about this book and why?
This book started me on a journey to learn about using design as a framework for change—not just designing two and three-dimensional products which is how I and many designers were trained, but one where design could be used to facilitate observation, analysis and synthesis. Design as creating cognitive systems and processes.
Methods have techniques which Jones felt “enable people to design something, to go beyond their first ideas, to test their designs in use or simulated use, to collaborate in creative activity, to lead design groups and to teach and to learn designing.”
The book has two sections:
“The Developing Design Process” explores: what design is, traditional craft methods, the need for new methods through four key questions, the new methods reviewed, the design process disintegrated into divergence and convergence, choosing strategies and methods.
The second section consists of design methods in action through convergent methods, strategy control, divergent methods, searching for ideas, exploring problem structures and methods of evaluation.
Very logical on the face of it, but very difficult because much of what he was proposing had little precedent, and it also felt very scientific. It wasn't science he was proposing but rigor.
Table of methods from “Design Methods” (1970)—page 80 plus front and back inside covers). Adam added both the gray zones and the notations along the bottom that grouped methods according to themes.
At first, this was very scary, because how could that be considered design? Then I let go and realized that while learning the craft and practice of design that grew from a value chain of historical events—the Arts and Crafts movement, through the Bauhaus, then post-war institutions like Ulm, I recognized that design could be used to address social, political and economic issues, not just products.
Because I came from the sciences—to me, this was similar to a form of the scientific method where you have speculation which then becomes a hypothesis which then is tested by others to become a theory and then an accepted fact. Jay Doblin, the American Product Designer, was also in search of a higher meaning of design and came up with the idea of design as a state (products) and as a process (methodology).
Diagram of Design—leveraging Design Methods as a framework (Adam Kallish, Nate Burgos).
Why do you think John Christopher Jones put out this book?
“Design Methods” was the culmination of a few decades of lived experience for John Christopher Jones. He was trained as an industrial designer, but had odd ideas for practicing it. For instance, he wanted users to be involved with product development, which today sounds very common sense. But in the 1950s, this was viewed as very odd and counterculture.
Regarding the ramp-up toward John Christopher Jones conceiving, writing “Design Methods,” what external circumstances/factors do you sense motivated, even provoked, him to realize this book?
John Christopher Jones recognized the relationship between the craftsperson and the designer by commenting that much of the content in the crafts was based on the transformation of raw materials into finished form through tried and true knowledge of incremental improvements.
With the industrial age and mass production launching modern living standards, design needed to focus on increasingly complex problems before anything was created, for architecture, urban planning, engineering and product design were liable to create unimaginative and impersonal forms from unimaginative problem definitions.
Jones wondered why and probably realized that design was relegated to expression toward production and had a small zone of control to really influence and impact product-based decisions that were being made by business executives, marketing and engineering. He wanted to address this power imbalance and embrace new methods from other fields and new forms of collaboration to challenge assumptions and reframe what people thought problems were.
In the early 1960s, London, there were several individuals, including John Christopher Jones, who attended the The Conference on Systematic and Intuitive Methods in Engineering, Industrial Design, Architecture and Communication Studies (1962). This event was organized by John Christopher Jones and Peter Slann who, with conference invitees, were bound by concerns with the way their modern industrialized world was being created. Designers, engineers, academics and artists attended—even Gordon Pask, Director of System Research, who came up with cybernetics, attended this event.
At the end of the conference, J. K. Page, Professor at Sheffield University and Chairman of the conference, stated that the “only area of agreement seems to be systematic design is a three-step process—analysis, synthesis and evaluation.” He also rightly stated that “the bigger the scale (of the problem), the more difficult it becomes to make analysis cheaply.” Lastly, he speculated on the role of “design as a strategic framework (like planning) cannot control detailed design, all it can do is provide the framework for others to operate within to get to the detail.”
The participants recognized that the lone designer producing design products did not work with the complexity of a post-industrial society. Designers must work in cross-disciplinary teams where each participant brings their specific skills, language, experiences and biases to define and solve problems. In 2022, this sounds mainstream, but in 1962, this bordered on science fiction.
The proceedings were published, which I also read from a very dusty copy found in the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, library.
Similar to his contemporary, the architect Christopher Alexander who co-wrote “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction” (1977), would you say that John Christopher Jones, in his book “Design Methods” (1970), that he was also interested in patterns?
Yes. You cannot divorce them from the larger social, political and economic contexts at the time: England was recovering from WWII, there was still rationing and the capital was being rebuilt.
The 1950s and 1960s were also the rise of science and technology, and modern government that was going to make the world better—or the hope anyway. Both Christopher Alexander and John Christopher Jones were part of that whole generation who viewed logic in science and technology as a way to counteract the effects of World War II—the destruction.
There were growing concerns at the [1962] Conference on Design Methods, that relying too much on science and technology—in logic—might also not be a good thing, and that we cannot lose our humanity because of the benefits that we gain from science and technology. From an interview with GK VanPatter, Co-Founder of Humantific and Author of “Innovation Methods Mapping” (2016), John Christopher Jones asserted, “I deplored the move (soon after the 1962 Conference on Design Methods) towards treating designing as if it were a science, putting rationality before intuition, and largely forgetting that the purpose of design methods was to change design practice and to improve life.”
What do you surmise was John Christopher Jones’ desired outcomes from getting this book published?
It is said that every person has a book in them that is waiting to be birthed. It is also said people write books first to address their own curiosities and drive to create, before specific markets are identified to purchase a book. So my speculation is that John wrote the book to aggregate all the ideas he was exposed to and to put it into a book.
It would be easy to reduce the book to a jumble of ideas and diagrams that seem to obsess over methodology. Jones viewed methodology as “mere symbolic contrivances” and “would lose its value” if it did not reflect “the personal issues which matter most to the people who will take decisions.”
So Jones felt that people had to choose methods that were most meaningful for people to gain greater agency and control over any outcome. But any outcome would benefit from using groupings of methods to align on an agreeable and humanistic outcome. He stated that “Methodology should not be a fixed track to a fixed destination, but a conversation about everything that could be made to happen.”
Unfortunately, the book was not accepted and he even recognized that “we sought to be open-minded, to make design processes that would be more sensitive to life than the professional practices of the time. But the result was rigidity, a fixing of aims and methods to product designs that everyone now feels to be insensitive to human needs. Another result was that design methods became more theoretical, turning it into academic study of methods instead of trying to design things better.”
How would you describe John Christopher Jones’ writing style?
Difficult and poetic at first. He was communicating in the way that was comfortable to him. Once your brain acclimates to his writing style, it becomes clearer.
How does “Design Methods” fare currently as part of the design-related library?
Very well. It sits on my shelf with a plethora of other books on methods.
Strategyzer is one of the most prominent current generators of thematic books and has popularized many methods that have been around for a number of years. The LUMA Institute, which came out of MAYA Design in Pittsburgh and was just bought by Mural, has their System of Innovation of Looking, Understanding and Making.
IDEO popularized design thinking and generated their method cards. All of these examples, to some extent, are emulating what the book “Design Methods” was trying to do in 1970, but there has been fifty years of iterating and a widening of design as a facilitator of change using human-centered methods.
When “Design Methods” was released in 1970, in a world where design was viewed as corporate identity and product design, it was still focused on styling and commercialization as it was defined back then. When you and I started to collaborate about design methods over a decade ago, I went back using the internet and wanted to understand who was using the book “Design Methods.” What I found out was that designers were not using it because I found little reference to “design methods.” Surprisingly, where I did find references to “Design Methods,” it was being used by computer science and schools of engineering academic programs as a way to think about systems design.
The design community ignored the book “Design Methods” because it was a book way ahead of its time. I also think John Christopher Jones was a flawed messenger and did not think about the marketing of the book.
This is no different than Chuck Owen at the Institute of Design at IIT who labored in the 1960s and 1970s to articulate structured planning which used mathematics and logic to map how design could affect how organizations approached a problem.
What’s the place of “Design Methods” as both attitude and document in the current community and practice of design?
“Design Methods” initially was focused on how design could be integrated into engineering and grew to recognize the multidisciplinary nature of solving contemporary complexity in all its forms. John Christopher Jones recognized the role of business, as one stakeholder among many, but did not view design methods as a business management tool. Design management focuses on how to define design as a business function and provides a language and method of how to effectively manage it. Does this sound familiar in 2022? Yes!
To me, “Design Methods” is a seminal book that is almost invisible but created the foundation spanning 50 years of experiments and movements that codified much of what is in the book “Design Methods.” Any first iteration of anything is flawed from the start because it is a prototype. Only through socializing ideas and having people use them and build upon them through trial-and-error can something grow and influence others.
Unfortunately, the book “Design Methods,” even today, is not known hardly at all. Yet, without the work of William Gosling, Christopher Alexander, Peter Slann, Nigel Holmes, D. G. Thornley and many others that followed, we would not view design today as a discipline and community of practice that can define business models, transform markets and affect society using the design methods that were first aggregated in 1970.
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📷 Title page photographed by Nate Burgos. Bookshelf-image from Adam Kallish.
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📹 Watch this video-short [2:42]—part of the Design Feast series Rare Book Feast—in homage to “Design Methods” (1970) by John Christopher Jones.
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