“Engineers are not the only professional designers. Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artefacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state.”
Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969 (p.129 of 1981 MIT press 2nd edition)
I’m thinking about this quote in the context of JJG’s plenary talk from the IA Summit this past spring. Everybody can be a designer. Can everybody be an architect? Does what architects do constitute something different/more than devising a course of action to create or foster change? Discuss.
