VIP Vision in Design: A Guidebook for Innovators [Paperback]

Vision in Product Design strikes a good balance between structuring the process of design while allowing the designers to take a personal position and fully express themselves in producing a product. ViP is both a method and a design philosophy.

Foreword
By Peter Lloyd

The first edition of Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures was written in 1970. It’s author, John Chris Jones, sensing a growing complexity in technology, and concerned that designers should make their decisions demonstrable, looked at how to formalise the process of design. No longer should design be a craft process, a slow intuitive shaping of form and function, but a structured, controlled process. “We should really know what we are doing when we design,” thought Jones. In the America of the 1960s, designers like Henry Dreyfus had already begun to integrate ergonomic studies into the process of design; Jones just took the idea a bit further. Design Methods introduced systematic ways of analysing a wide range of what might be termed ‘situations’. The methods themselves had been inspired by the precision found in scientific language: investigating, selecting, classifying, ranking, and weighting. The design process itself was a process of divergence, transformation, then convergence; paradoxically inspiring something vaguely religious-sounding, like three consecutive John Coltrane albums. It turned out to be a fully realised theory of designing.
Designers could now exercise their creativity from solid theoretical ground – not the shifting sands of individual craft knowledge. And other designers could stand proudly with them. That was the theory anyway; in many ways it was laudable. After all, it was human futures that we were talking about, the seeds of a new world. History tells
it somewhat differently, of course, as history would. The book was well received, a breath of (nearly) fresh air. More power to the fist of the designer who, sllƒ)