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On Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Alexander defines design as the rationalization of the forces that define a problem. You’ll won’t find a better definition. B

On Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Alexander defines design as the rationalization of the forces that define a problem. You’ll won’t find a better definition. But people tend to think design is the synthesis and its results. This misunderstanding of the role of design and the designer is responsible for all the unfit designs we encounter on a daily basis. Anyone equipped with a synthesis tool and feeling empowered to quickly and cheaply generate forms will almost inevitably become blind to the very nature of the underlying problems they set to solve. They’ll be fitting the problem to the available forms. They’ll skip the understanding, the conversations, the conflicts and disagreements, and happily and wrongly assume a design problem can be solved hermetically, in isolation. They’ll think quality is a factor of aesthetics, when in truth, aesthetics is an effect; nevertheless these effects is all they’ll have control over, as it’s all the tool can do. The tool will hinder their ability to be rational; to see the inner structures; to find the hidden but essential semantics; to create the ontologies that’ll support not only the immediate synthesis, but that will sustain the evolution of the design over its lifetime. They’ll be denied the enlightenment that comes with gradual, slow construction; the only place and moment where innovative ideas reveal themselves. They’ll be impoverished and confuse output with agency. I feel sorry for anyone that will think using tools equals doing design, because of the truly marvelous human experiences that they’ll miss, and that could never be replaced by the shallow pride of empty achievement.

mathisfun123 6mo ago
> because of the truly marvelous human experiences that they’ll miss when people wax philosophical/poetical about what is essentially capital production already i'm always so perplexed - do you not realize that you're not doing art/you're not an artisan? your labor is always actively being transformed into a product sold on a market. there are no "marvelous human experiences", there is only production and consumption. > They’ll be impoverished and confuse output with agency ironic.
- throwfaraway4 6mo ago
  What a sad take. For the sake of human satisfaction I hope this is a minority perspective.
  - mathisfun123 6mo ago
    > What a sad take. just repeating the same mistake as op: sadness/happiness is completely outside the scope here. these are aspects of a job - "design" explicitly relates to products not art. and wondering about the sadness/happiness of a job is like wondering about the marketability of a piece of art - it's completely besides the point!
    - textadventure 6mo ago
      OP never talked about art. Design is not art, it's problem solving. And good design according to Dieter Rams: 1. Good design is innovative 2. Good design makes a product useful 3. Good design is aesthetic 4. Good design makes a product understandable 5. Good design is unobtrusive 6. Good design is honest 7. Good design is long-lasting 8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail 9. Good design is environmentally friendly 10. Good design is as little design as possible Generative AI just tries to predict based on its training data.
    - whatever1616 6mo ago
      >"design" explicitly relates to products not art a product can be a piece of art and design can and does in practice often go hand in had with art, practically most designers also other than the utilitarian role practice the artistic one, wether you would want to group art within design as one is a matter of definitions
- pjmorris 6mo ago
  Whatever the merits or demerits of 'marvelous human experiences' are from the point of view of production and consumption, the OP's conclusion leaves out the important point that Alexander's 'rationalization of forces that define a problem' produces designs that come closer to solving real-life problems (even in production and consumption) than simply putting attractive lipstick on an economic utility pig. If production isn't solving real human problems, consumers will go elsewhere.
  - mathisfun123 6mo ago
    > If production isn't solving real human problems, consumers will go elsewhere. of course but that's well within the scope of the whole paradigm (as opposed to how it is originally phrased it in relation to a loss of "marvelous human experiences"): if i use a bad tool to solve my customer's problems in an unsatisfactory way then my customers will no longer be my customers (assuming the all knowing guiding hand of the free market). so there's no new observation whatsoever in OP.
- moregrist 6mo ago
  > your labor is always actively being transformed into a product sold on a market. there are no "marvelous human experiences", there is only production and consumption. The first time I used Mac OS/X, circa 2004-2005, I was blown away by the design and how they managed to expose the power of the underlying Unix-ish kernel without making it hurt for people who didn't want that experience. My SO couldn't have cared less about Terminal.app, but loved the UI. I also loved the UI and appreciated how they took the time to integrate cli tools with it. I would say it was a marvelous human experience _for me_. Sure it was the Apple engineers' and designers' labor transformed into a product, but it was a fucking great product and something that I'm sure those teams were very proud of. The same was true with the the iPod and the iPhone. I work on niche products, so I've never done something as widely appreciated as those examples, but on the products I've worked on, I can easily say that I really enjoy making things that other people want to use, even if it's just an internal tool. I also enjoy getting paid for my labor. I've found that this is often a win-win situation. Work doesn't have to be exploitive. Products don't have to exploit their users. Viewing everything through the lens of production and consumption is like viewing the whole world as a big constraint optimization problem: (1) you end up torturing the meaning of words to fit your preconceived ideas, and (2) by doing so you miss hearing what other people are saying.
  - mathisfun123 6mo ago
    > Sure it was the Apple engineers' and designers' labor transformed into a product, but it was a fucking great product and something that I'm sure those teams were very proud of. The same was true with the the iPod and the iPhone. ... > Work doesn't have to be exploitive. Products don't have to exploit their users. bruh do people have any idea what they're writing as they write it? you're talking about "work doesn't have to be [exploitative]" in the same breath as Apple which is the third largest market cap company in the world and who's well known for exploiting child labor to produce its products. like has this comment "jumped the shark"? > Viewing everything through the lens of production and consumption i don't view everything through any lens - i view work through the lens of work (and therefore production/consumption). i very clearly delineated between this lens and at least one other lens (art).
bauerd 6mo ago
This is a really verbose way to say that using generative AI has a detrimental effect on the user because one deprives themselves of the learning experience.
- akiarie 6mo ago
  "Verbose" is the wrong adjective. Yours is a terse projection into a lower space, valid in itself, but lacking the power and precision of its archetype.
- nightski 6mo ago
  Agreed on your take on the parent, although I have to say I feel that AI has had the opposite effect for me. It has only accelerated learning quite significantly. In fact not only is learning more effective/efficient, I have more time for it because I am not spending nearly as much time tracking down stupid issues.
  - CaptWillard 6mo ago
    Big difference between gaining knowledge and building/maintaining cognitive skills.
    - monarchwadia 6mo ago
      I assure you, working with LLMs is intellectually challenging, and becomes more so as the technology matures.
      - tempest_ 6mo ago
        It really really really depends on how you are using it and what you are using it for. I can get LLMs to write most CSS I need by treating it like a slot machine and pulling the handle till it spits out what I need, this doesnt cause me to learn CSS at all.
        baq 6mo ago
eric_cc 6mo ago
> I feel sorry for anyone that will think using tools equals doing design, because of the truly marvelous human experiences that they’ll miss, and that could never be replaced by the shallow pride of empty achievement. What if you don’t give a shit about design and it’s a means to an end for a project that involves something different that you do care about?
- nekooooo 6mo ago
  how nihlistic
- skeeter2020 6mo ago
  Jobs has entered the chat and has some strong words for you...
- apsurd 6mo ago
  > what if you don't give a shit about design and it's a means to an end… the parent's point is that it doesn't work that way. The point is self reinforcing. Design is not a thing. it's the earned scars from the process. Fine to disagree but it reinforces the point.
- idle_zealot 6mo ago
  > What if you don’t give a shit about design and it’s a means to an end for a project that involves something different that you do care about? Thank you for so succinctly demonstrating the problem with using AI for everything. You used to have to either care enough to do the design yourself or find someone who cared and specialized in that to do it for you. Now you quickly and cheaply fill in the parts you don't personally care about with sawdust, and as this becomes normalized you deprive yourself and others from discovering that they care about the design part. You'll ship your thing now, and it'll be fine. The damage is delayed and externalized. I won't advocate against use of new technology to make yourself more productive, but it's important to at least understand what you're losing.
  - TeMPOraL 6mo ago
    > You used to have to either care enough to do the design yourself or find someone who cared and specialized in that to do it for you. You think most UI/UX designers, or the artists creating slop for content marketing spam factories for the past decades, cared? Some, maybe. Most probably had higher ambitions, but are doing what actually pays their bills. It's similar to software developers. Most of those being paid to code couldn't care less, they're in there for the fat paycheck; everyone else mostly complains the work is boring or dumb (or worse), but once you have those skills, it makes no economic sense to switch careers (unless, of course, you're into management, or into playing the entrepreneurship roulette).
AIorNot 6mo ago
Creativity is a very big part of design, these Gen AI tools allow for stepping through a lot of variations and creative ideas very quickly, even creating working artifacts and protoypes on the fly and iterating rapidly This speed and variation wins for me. But yes without a designers eye laziness can get lost in slop design too.. To me the value of Gen Ai is an accelerant (not slop factory) for ideation and solutions not a replacement of the human owning the process.. but laziness ususally wins
jgautsch 6mo ago
Extremely well said. This lesson has never been more urgently important than now.
MikeNotThePope 6mo ago
I see it as a great crutch until I can afford a designer.
yard2010 6mo ago
Important take. The same applies to software 1:1
alex_sf 6mo ago
Most people just want something that looks nice. I understand it’s deeper to someone really into it, but the rest of us are fine with it.
- ModernMech 6mo ago
  That's mostly a matter of aesthetics, not design.
timcarlock 6mo ago
I agree, though I'd offer a counter-point to the implied idea that tools like this stifle exploration and creativity. I'm an engineer who also loves design. I've read a lot of the books (including the one referenced), I know some concepts and terminology, and I understand the general process — but I'll never be a professional designer. My knowledge is limited, and I find most design tools so complex they actually get in the way of problem exploration and creativity. For people like me, this tools removes the friction which actually prevents me from being more focused on the valuable parts of the design process. I can more easily discover and learn new concepts, and ultimately spend more time being creative and exploring the problem space.
- pilgrim0 6mo ago
  There’s no conflict here. Using a tool to automate what you have validated to be the trivial parts of a production process is the proper use of the tool. Professional designers also use this bias. For instance, I might recognize that creating a custom font or illustration is not core to my solution, so I can employ an off the shelf font or illustration and focus, say, in the written content. Same principle. The problem is most people won’t even acknowledge or validate the essential aspects of the solution and just iterate mindlessly.
- skydhash 6mo ago
  The issue is that UI design has different constraints compared to general graphic design, just like product design is not sculplture. Most UI designers only care about the visual aspects while neglecting the interactive aspect. A whiteboard or a wireframing software would be better, because it lets you focus first on the interactive part. And once that’s solved, the visual part is easier.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
matchagaucho 6mo ago
[dead]
akiarie 6mo ago
This is such a beautiful distillation of everything I believe about the dangers of over-reliance on AI. I implore thee, good sir, to write a longer essay on this.
throwaway041207 6mo ago
Dawg, I'm just trying to keep my managers happy so I can get a paycheck and have health care and hit the trails on the weekend.
fortzi 6mo ago
I agree with all of that. However, that’s not to say that many designer jobs will be going away, simply because for many cases, cost beats quality. We’ll just have more things with a much lower quality. You can compare it with mass manufacturing. While some things are better had than not, even with low quality, we’d probably be better off with some things made to last, in lower quantity. But for 99% of the population, e.g. low quality clothing is the norm.
samrus 6mo ago
The tool just allows them to synthesize an implementation, but if its designed badly then it will fail and they will have to get better at design anyway. I dont see how that itself is the problem. The tractor didnt make farmers worse at farming even if they lost the strength to work an old school plow I think the challenge will be everything else the person will be doing. Will this person also try to coding? And financial management? And marketing? And operational planning? Just because there are tools out there for them to synthesize implementations of that. If so then they wont be able to get good at any of those. But i think the backwards pressure from failing at those things will bring it back to a stable equilibrium where you have specialists who are good at the abstract ideas of their field leveraging these things as a new abstraction layer of work, analogous to the compiler I think itll be fine
eecc 6mo ago
Well well well, that was nice read thanks! And if it’s LLM the prompt or the rework were very good because I really liked the flow and clarity. That, or you’re a really good writer ;)

mathisfun123 6mo ago

> because of the truly marvelous human experiences that they’ll miss when people wax philosophical/poetical about what is essentially capital production already i'm always so perplexed - do you not realize that you're not doing art/you're not an artisan? your labor is always actively being transformed into a product sold on a market. there are no "marvelous human experiences", there is only production and consumption. > They’ll be impoverished and confuse output with agency ironic.

throwfaraway4 6mo ago
What a sad take. For the sake of human satisfaction I hope this is a minority perspective.
- mathisfun123 6mo ago
  > What a sad take. just repeating the same mistake as op: sadness/happiness is completely outside the scope here. these are aspects of a job - "design" explicitly relates to products not art. and wondering about the sadness/happiness of a job is like wondering about the marketability of a piece of art - it's completely besides the point!
  - textadventure 6mo ago
    OP never talked about art. Design is not art, it's problem solving. And good design according to Dieter Rams: 1. Good design is innovative 2. Good design makes a product useful 3. Good design is aesthetic 4. Good design makes a product understandable 5. Good design is unobtrusive 6. Good design is honest 7. Good design is long-lasting 8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail 9. Good design is environmentally friendly 10. Good design is as little design as possible Generative AI just tries to predict based on its training data.
  - whatever1616 6mo ago
    >"design" explicitly relates to products not art a product can be a piece of art and design can and does in practice often go hand in had with art, practically most designers also other than the utilitarian role practice the artistic one, wether you would want to group art within design as one is a matter of definitions
pjmorris 6mo ago
Whatever the merits or demerits of 'marvelous human experiences' are from the point of view of production and consumption, the OP's conclusion leaves out the important point that Alexander's 'rationalization of forces that define a problem' produces designs that come closer to solving real-life problems (even in production and consumption) than simply putting attractive lipstick on an economic utility pig. If production isn't solving real human problems, consumers will go elsewhere.
- mathisfun123 6mo ago
  > If production isn't solving real human problems, consumers will go elsewhere. of course but that's well within the scope of the whole paradigm (as opposed to how it is originally phrased it in relation to a loss of "marvelous human experiences"): if i use a bad tool to solve my customer's problems in an unsatisfactory way then my customers will no longer be my customers (assuming the all knowing guiding hand of the free market). so there's no new observation whatsoever in OP.
moregrist 6mo ago
> your labor is always actively being transformed into a product sold on a market. there are no "marvelous human experiences", there is only production and consumption. The first time I used Mac OS/X, circa 2004-2005, I was blown away by the design and how they managed to expose the power of the underlying Unix-ish kernel without making it hurt for people who didn't want that experience. My SO couldn't have cared less about Terminal.app, but loved the UI. I also loved the UI and appreciated how they took the time to integrate cli tools with it. I would say it was a marvelous human experience _for me_. Sure it was the Apple engineers' and designers' labor transformed into a product, but it was a fucking great product and something that I'm sure those teams were very proud of. The same was true with the the iPod and the iPhone. I work on niche products, so I've never done something as widely appreciated as those examples, but on the products I've worked on, I can easily say that I really enjoy making things that other people want to use, even if it's just an internal tool. I also enjoy getting paid for my labor. I've found that this is often a win-win situation. Work doesn't have to be exploitive. Products don't have to exploit their users. Viewing everything through the lens of production and consumption is like viewing the whole world as a big constraint optimization problem: (1) you end up torturing the meaning of words to fit your preconceived ideas, and (2) by doing so you miss hearing what other people are saying.
- mathisfun123 6mo ago
  > Sure it was the Apple engineers' and designers' labor transformed into a product, but it was a fucking great product and something that I'm sure those teams were very proud of. The same was true with the the iPod and the iPhone. ... > Work doesn't have to be exploitive. Products don't have to exploit their users. bruh do people have any idea what they're writing as they write it? you're talking about "work doesn't have to be [exploitative]" in the same breath as Apple which is the third largest market cap company in the world and who's well known for exploiting child labor to produce its products. like has this comment "jumped the shark"? > Viewing everything through the lens of production and consumption i don't view everything through any lens - i view work through the lens of work (and therefore production/consumption). i very clearly delineated between this lens and at least one other lens (art).

bauerd 6mo ago

This is a really verbose way to say that using generative AI has a detrimental effect on the user because one deprives themselves of the learning experience.

akiarie 6mo ago
"Verbose" is the wrong adjective. Yours is a terse projection into a lower space, valid in itself, but lacking the power and precision of its archetype.
nightski 6mo ago
Agreed on your take on the parent, although I have to say I feel that AI has had the opposite effect for me. It has only accelerated learning quite significantly. In fact not only is learning more effective/efficient, I have more time for it because I am not spending nearly as much time tracking down stupid issues.
- CaptWillard 6mo ago
  Big difference between gaining knowledge and building/maintaining cognitive skills.
  - monarchwadia 6mo ago
    I assure you, working with LLMs is intellectually challenging, and becomes more so as the technology matures.
    - tempest_ 6mo ago
      It really really really depends on how you are using it and what you are using it for. I can get LLMs to write most CSS I need by treating it like a slot machine and pulling the handle till it spits out what I need, this doesnt cause me to learn CSS at all.
      - baq 6mo ago

eric_cc 6mo ago

> I feel sorry for anyone that will think using tools equals doing design, because of the truly marvelous human experiences that they’ll miss, and that could never be replaced by the shallow pride of empty achievement. What if you don’t give a shit about design and it’s a means to an end for a project that involves something different that you do care about?

nekooooo 6mo ago
how nihlistic
skeeter2020 6mo ago
Jobs has entered the chat and has some strong words for you...
apsurd 6mo ago
> what if you don't give a shit about design and it's a means to an end… the parent's point is that it doesn't work that way. The point is self reinforcing. Design is not a thing. it's the earned scars from the process. Fine to disagree but it reinforces the point.
idle_zealot 6mo ago
> What if you don’t give a shit about design and it’s a means to an end for a project that involves something different that you do care about? Thank you for so succinctly demonstrating the problem with using AI for everything. You used to have to either care enough to do the design yourself or find someone who cared and specialized in that to do it for you. Now you quickly and cheaply fill in the parts you don't personally care about with sawdust, and as this becomes normalized you deprive yourself and others from discovering that they care about the design part. You'll ship your thing now, and it'll be fine. The damage is delayed and externalized. I won't advocate against use of new technology to make yourself more productive, but it's important to at least understand what you're losing.
- TeMPOraL 6mo ago
  > You used to have to either care enough to do the design yourself or find someone who cared and specialized in that to do it for you. You think most UI/UX designers, or the artists creating slop for content marketing spam factories for the past decades, cared? Some, maybe. Most probably had higher ambitions, but are doing what actually pays their bills. It's similar to software developers. Most of those being paid to code couldn't care less, they're in there for the fat paycheck; everyone else mostly complains the work is boring or dumb (or worse), but once you have those skills, it makes no economic sense to switch careers (unless, of course, you're into management, or into playing the entrepreneurship roulette).

AIorNot 6mo ago

Creativity is a very big part of design, these Gen AI tools allow for stepping through a lot of variations and creative ideas very quickly, even creating working artifacts and protoypes on the fly and iterating rapidly This speed and variation wins for me. But yes without a designers eye laziness can get lost in slop design too.. To me the value of Gen Ai is an accelerant (not slop factory) for ideation and solutions not a replacement of the human owning the process.. but laziness ususally wins

jgautsch 6mo ago

Extremely well said. This lesson has never been more urgently important than now.

MikeNotThePope 6mo ago

I see it as a great crutch until I can afford a designer.

yard2010 6mo ago

Important take. The same applies to software 1:1

alex_sf 6mo ago

Most people just want something that looks nice. I understand it’s deeper to someone really into it, but the rest of us are fine with it.

ModernMech 6mo ago
That's mostly a matter of aesthetics, not design.

timcarlock 6mo ago

I agree, though I'd offer a counter-point to the implied idea that tools like this stifle exploration and creativity. I'm an engineer who also loves design. I've read a lot of the books (including the one referenced), I know some concepts and terminology, and I understand the general process — but I'll never be a professional designer. My knowledge is limited, and I find most design tools so complex they actually get in the way of problem exploration and creativity. For people like me, this tools removes the friction which actually prevents me from being more focused on the valuable parts of the design process. I can more easily discover and learn new concepts, and ultimately spend more time being creative and exploring the problem space.

pilgrim0 6mo ago
There’s no conflict here. Using a tool to automate what you have validated to be the trivial parts of a production process is the proper use of the tool. Professional designers also use this bias. For instance, I might recognize that creating a custom font or illustration is not core to my solution, so I can employ an off the shelf font or illustration and focus, say, in the written content. Same principle. The problem is most people won’t even acknowledge or validate the essential aspects of the solution and just iterate mindlessly.
skydhash 6mo ago
The issue is that UI design has different constraints compared to general graphic design, just like product design is not sculplture. Most UI designers only care about the visual aspects while neglecting the interactive aspect. A whiteboard or a wireframing software would be better, because it lets you focus first on the interactive part. And once that’s solved, the visual part is easier.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

matchagaucho 6mo ago

[dead]

akiarie 6mo ago

This is such a beautiful distillation of everything I believe about the dangers of over-reliance on AI. I implore thee, good sir, to write a longer essay on this.

throwaway041207 6mo ago

Dawg, I'm just trying to keep my managers happy so I can get a paycheck and have health care and hit the trails on the weekend.

fortzi 6mo ago

I agree with all of that. However, that’s not to say that many designer jobs will be going away, simply because for many cases, cost beats quality. We’ll just have more things with a much lower quality. You can compare it with mass manufacturing. While some things are better had than not, even with low quality, we’d probably be better off with some things made to last, in lower quantity. But for 99% of the population, e.g. low quality clothing is the norm.

samrus 6mo ago

The tool just allows them to synthesize an implementation, but if its designed badly then it will fail and they will have to get better at design anyway. I dont see how that itself is the problem. The tractor didnt make farmers worse at farming even if they lost the strength to work an old school plow I think the challenge will be everything else the person will be doing. Will this person also try to coding? And financial management? And marketing? And operational planning? Just because there are tools out there for them to synthesize implementations of that. If so then they wont be able to get good at any of those. But i think the backwards pressure from failing at those things will bring it back to a stable equilibrium where you have specialists who are good at the abstract ideas of their field leveraging these things as a new abstraction layer of work, analogous to the compiler I think itll be fine

eecc 6mo ago

Well well well, that was nice read thanks! And if it’s LLM the prompt or the rework were very good because I really liked the flow and clarity. That, or you’re a really good writer ;)