Paper X — Design
40 QUESTIONS
Paper X covers design as the giving of form under constraint — to buildings, objects, interfaces, garments, instruments, and the systems of their production, use, maintenance and disposal. Architecture and the built environment are examined through form and function, ornament, the house as machine, pattern languages, the vernacular, space syntax, the unfinished building and its shearing layers, truth to materials, and the shipping container as protocol. Objects and interfaces follow: affordances and signifiers, slips against mistakes, minimalism as principle or taste, the aesthetic–usability effect, the MAYA conjecture, designed obsolescence, the average user and the range, universal design, and whether design is a science or its problems wicked. Making, repair and matter are examined through the workmanship of risk, repairability indices, tangible interfaces, responsive architecture, personal fabrication, cultivated materials, and the garment from fibre to circular fate. Ten later questions treat music as made things: the instrument, the keyboard, notation, the recording, the loudspeaker, the hall, the electric guitar, the synthesiser, the loudness standard, and the streaming interface.
Its rubric admits a question only if it can be answered from the made thing — its form, its function, its fabrication, its measurement, or its failure — and excludes moral and political content, structural analysis as such, computation as such, and the mathematics of collective behaviour, which belong to Papers VII, VIII and IX. The knowledge base is correspondingly broad and concrete: acoustics, ergonomics and anthropometry, materials and fabrication, human factors and the experimental psychology of use, standards and their measurement, and the documented history of particular artefacts. What is examined is the ability to argue from the object itself — to say what Daniels found in 4,063 airmen, what ISO 668 fixed, what a repairability index must count, what the typicality–novelty experiments established — rather than from the reputation of a designer or the rhetoric of a manifesto.
Scope
Forty 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.
Conduct of the response
A response is an argument, not a survey; where the question admits a position, one is to be taken at the outset and defended. It must be exactly as technical as the question requires, and no more, and its course must remain followable by the educated layman. It may not exceed three thousand words, exclusive of equations, figures, tables, and references; the limit is a ceiling, not a target, and of two answers of equal force the shorter is judged the better. The full statement of the response required is given on the Responses page.
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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.
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2.
Is ornament a crime? Reconstruct Loos’s actual argument — economic before aesthetic — and decide whether machine production has answered it or reversed it.
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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.
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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.
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5.
Is vernacular building design? Answer from buildings that have no architect, and say what, if anything, the architect adds.
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6.
Can architecture change behaviour? Distinguish what space syntax measures from what it explains, and locate the limit of the claim.
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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.
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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.
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9.
Is truth to materials a coherent ideal? Test it on reinforced concrete, which conceals its steel, and on veneer, which advertises its timber.
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10.
Is the shipping container a building, a vehicle, or a protocol? Say what ISO 668 fixes, and what the fixing moved.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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14.
Do attractive things work better? The claim is empirical; state the evidence, and its limits.
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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.
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16.
Is obsolescence designed? Take the thousand-hour lamp as the test case, and separate the cartel’s economics from the filament’s physics.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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31.
Is a musical instrument designed or evolved? Take the violin, whose form has been stable for three centuries, and say whether the stability is optimality, path dependence, or convention.
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32.
Is the piano keyboard a good interface? Say what it makes easy, what it makes hard, and why two centuries of proposed replacements have failed.
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33.
What does notation discard? Compare staff notation with tablature and with a piano roll, and say which of the three is a specification and which a record.
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34.
Is the recording a document or a work? Answer from the edit, the overdub, and the take, and say at what point the artefact ceases to record a performance.
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35.
Why is the loudspeaker still a cone? State the constraints the diaphragm must satisfy simultaneously, and say which of them the electrostatic and horn alternatives relax and at what cost.
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36.
Is the concert hall an instrument? Distinguish what the room adds from what it merely transmits, and locate the threshold in the measurements.
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37.
What did the electric guitar make possible that the acoustic did not? Answer from the pickup, the amplifier, and the feedback loop, and say which of the three is the design.
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38.
Is the synthesiser a keyboard instrument? Say what the interface inherited from the piano, what it inherited from the patch bay, and what the mismatch costs the player.
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39.
Are the loudness war and the dynamic-range compression that produced it a design failure or a design response? State the incentive, and say what a measurement standard such as LUFS can and cannot correct.
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40.
Is the streaming interface an instrument of listening? Say what the playlist, the skip, and the recommendation change about the object listened to, and whether the change is in the artefact or in the audience.
Paper X was added by Examination Expansion v4.0. Papers I–IX stand verbatim and unrenumbered.
Questions added by Examination Expansion v5.0, which extended the examination to music and geography. All earlier questions stand verbatim and unrenumbered.