Machines For Living

Essential Design Concepts: Ergon

Design as a discipline gets so bound up with particular domains (architecture, software design, product design, industrial design, urban planning, ergonomics, quality management, etc) that fundamental concepts of design can sometimes get obscured.  One of the most fundamental design concepts is ergon, which is a Greek term meaning work or activity.  You probably guessed that the word ergonomics is rooted in this term.  But ergon is not limited to workplaces, as is ergonomics.

An ergon is an activity or function essential to any person or thing.  It is a concept as old as Aristotle, who wrote that just as a knife has an ergon of cutting, so a flute-player or sculptor each have a distinctive ergon.  

Good design always requires first analyzing activities to find the essential ergon, and then designing artifacts (e.g. buildings, software, processes, etc) that don't inhibit or distract from this ergon, but  that get out of the way and enable one's ergon to be done well.  The key concept in ethics since Aristotle, virtue, is defined in his Ethics as "excellence in performing one's ergon".  So, whereas a virtuous, quality knife is one the cuts well (it performs its ergon well), so the virtue of a flute-player or a sculptor is to perform their distinctive ergon well.  The designer is thus in the business of enabling people to flourish by performing well the activities and functions essential to them, and sustainable businesses are built on products based on such designs.

What's the Difference Between Advertising and Information Filtering? Personalization

The New York Times reports today that Atlantic Records is the first old school content publisher to receive the majority of its revenues from online sales, and it has bucked industry trends by doing so without a major decline in overall revenues.  How did it Atlantic perform this feat?

“I think we’ve figured it out,” said Julie Greenwald, president of Atlantic Records. “It used to be that you could connect five dots and sell a million records. Now there are 20 dots you can connect to sell a million records.” 

The 5 dots you used to connect are advertising dots.  The 20 dots you now connect are the 20 network-based services that can be enabled based on your content.  The NYT continues, "Replacing compact disc sales are small bits of revenue from many sources: Atlantic Records’ digital sales include ring tones, ringbacks, satellite radio, iTunes sales and subscription services. At the same time, record labels — Atlantic included — are spending less money to market artists."  So Atlantic is making the same amount of money, but investing in network-based content services instead of advertising.

Agile & Design/Build - What Software Designers and Architects Can Learn From Each Other

The best practices for design and creation of software - Agile - and Architecture - Design/Build - have so much in common, one wonders if the design wheel is simply being reinvented in different domains.  The previous approaches to software design and architecture (still very much the dominant approaches unfortunately) have been to create a comprehensive (read: large) design based on requirements gathering, and then throw the design over the proverbial wall to the engineers for development or construction of the final product.  This legacy approach - called Waterfall in software and Design-Bid-Build or Design-Tender in architecture - creates the same problems in each domain:

• Miscommunication between designers and engineers is inevitable when 20-lb design documents are triumphantly delivered to engineers.
• Lack of accountability for designers/architects is the result of this miscommunication.  Ever heard the following?  "I'm sorry Mr Client, you signed off on the design/blueprint.  If you had more requirements you should have provided them during requirements gathering."
• All these problems stem from a more fundamental problem - treating the design or blueprint as real progress.  One of the 12 principles of the Agile Manifesto, in contrast, is "Working software is the primary measure of progress. "  I can hear the voice of Shigeo Shingo, a guru of lean manufacturing, who observed that it's only the last turn of a bolt that tightens the nut - the rest is just movement.