Paper X — Design

30 QUESTIONS

Scope

Thirty questions. Answer in the idiom of the college: provocations invite a disciplined essay; technical problems require correct, quantitative reasoning; interdisciplinary questions require two fields to be brought together. Design is examined as the giving of form under constraint — to buildings, objects, interfaces, garments, and the systems of their production, use, maintenance, and disposal. A question is admissible under this paper only if it can be answered from the made thing: its form, its function, its fabrication, its measurement, or its failure. No moral, political, or value-philosophical content is admissible; structural analysis as such belongs to Paper VII, computation as such to Paper VIII, and the mathematics of collective behaviour to Paper IX.

1.
Does form follow function? Take the ornamented column and the cantilever chair as test cases, and say what work “follow” does in the slogan.
2.
Is ornament a crime? Reconstruct Loos’s actual argument — economic before aesthetic — and decide whether machine production has answered it or reversed it.
3.
Is a house a machine for living in? Say which of the building’s systems the metaphor fits, which it misses, and what the energy budget of the envelope has to do with the answer.
4.
Is there a pattern language? State what Alexander claimed a pattern is, explain why the claim transplanted so cleanly into software, and decide whether the transplant vindicates or refutes the original.
5.
Is vernacular building design? Answer from buildings that have no architect, and say what, if anything, the architect adds.
6.
Can architecture change behaviour? Distinguish what space syntax measures from what it explains, and locate the limit of the claim.
7.
“A city is not a tree.” State the mathematical distinction Alexander drew — tree against semilattice — and say whether it settles whether a city can be designed.
8.
Is a building ever finished? Answer from the observed rates at which its layers change — site, structure, skin, services, space plan, stuff — and say what the answer requires of the drawing.
9.
Is truth to materials a coherent ideal? Test it on reinforced concrete, which conceals its steel, and on veneer, which advertises its timber.
10.
Is the shipping container a building, a vehicle, or a protocol? Say what ISO 668 fixes, and what the fixing moved.
11.
What is an affordance? Give Gibson’s definition and Norman’s, say where they part, and explain why Norman later ruled that a second term — the signifier — was needed.
12.
When the user errs, who has failed? Distinguish slips from mistakes, and say what each demands of the designer rather than of the user.
13.
Is good design as little design as possible? Decide whether Rams’s tenth principle is a principle or a taste, and say what evidence could tell the two apart.
14.
Do attractive things work better? The claim is empirical; state the evidence, and its limits.
15.
Is the most advanced design the most acceptable? Put Loewy’s MAYA conjecture in testable form, and report what the typicality–novelty experiments found.
16.
Is obsolescence designed? Take the thousand-hour lamp as the test case, and separate the cartel’s economics from the filament’s physics.
17.
Does the average user exist? Report what Daniels found when he set 4,063 airmen against the ten-dimensional average, and say what the finding did to the cockpit.
18.
Can design be universal? Distinguish designing for the mean, for the range, and for the extreme, and say which of these the principles of universal design actually demand.
19.
Is design a science? Simon called it a science of the artificial; Rittel called its problems wicked. Decide whether the two claims can both be true.
20.
Is the workmanship of risk obsolete? State Pye’s distinction exactly, and place the hand plane, the CNC mill, and the 3D printer on its two sides.
21.
Can repair be a design requirement? Say what a repairability index must measure to be more than a gesture, and whether disassembly can be specified as exactly as assembly.
22.
Must the interface be a screen? State what tangible bits proposed against painted bits, and what radical atoms adds; then say what the screen still does that atoms cannot.
23.
Can a machine read a face? Separate what facial expression is known to encode from what can be inferred from it, and state the consequence for affective computing.
24.
Can a building compute? Distinguish a building that contains computers from a building that is one, and decide whether responsive architecture has crossed the line.
25.
Is personal fabrication an industrial revolution? Say what a fab lab can and cannot make, and locate the bottleneck — in the machines, the materials, or the descriptions.
26.
Can living matter be a material of design? Take the silkworm-spun pavilion as the test case, and say where the design ends and the cultivation begins.
27.
Is clothing a technology? Answer from the seam, the fibre, and the circuit, and say what e-broidery added that the Jacquard loom had not already established.
28.
Why do clothes not fit? Say what a sizing system compresses, what the 1941 survey of 14,698 women established, and why mass customisation has not dissolved the problem.
29.
Can a garment be circular? Answer from the fibre: say what blending does to recyclability, and which recycling route the poly-cotton blend defeats.
30.
Is the chair a solved problem? The sitting body has been measured for a century and the chair redesigned for longer; locate the residue — in the anthropometry, in the task, or in the object.

Paper X was added by Examination Expansion v4.0. Papers I–IX stand verbatim and unrenumbered.

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