Making as design process

Making is the only design process.

Coop Himmelblau, the legendary avant-gard (deconstructivist if you prefer) architecture firm, used to say that they would sit in front of each other and make architecture models, without talking.

You can't design in your head.

Putting things on paper, moving objects around, seeing how things will materialize is designing. Everything you do before, is not. Designing is the design process.

The Software Industry tendency to try to create a scientific process for design and create standarized funnels is futile but also a reflection of self-justify their process, removing the idea of biases, as if design could be neutral - it was "the process", not the person.

Software and computational tools should not help people think, nor solve problems. Software and computational tools should help people make. The "hmmm" state should produce interesting, desirable, unexpected, opinionated, divergent outputs.

By definition, no model or representation technique will capture the fidelity. Jean Baudrillard cites Borges' "On rigor of science" as the "finest allegory of simulation" in his treatise Simulacra and Simulation, describing how "an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing".

Design is planning, but also it's sculpting. A difference happens in the scale of the feedback loop, it's just that time is expanded. But institutions might benefit from compressed feedback loops, more sculpting and less planning. Plans fail, but we do need a plan.