Completing the Four Orders
An even deeper dive into the Four Orders through the lens of history, and an attempt to complete the matrix.
Note: This was originally shared in my Revue newsletter, “Explorations in Design.” With Twitter sunsetting the app I needed a home for some writings, so I’m putting them on Medium for now.
In my last post I talked about the Doctrine of Placements, aka The Four Orders of Design, and alluded to the potential addition of a Fifth Order. In the intervening weeks I’ve gotten more insight into The Four Orders and wanted to use this issue as an opportunity to share and refine what I think I know. To that end, there are two things I hope to do today: 1) talk about the Doctrine of Placements in a historical context and 2) complete the Four Orders matrix, which you are warmly invited to participate in as well! Talk about the Fifth Order will have to wait a bit longer.
Ultimately I’d love to be able to explain the Four Orders in a less esoteric, more straightforward way because it’s a really useful framework for understanding design. A step in that direction is to build the framework order by order and look at how design as a practice and profession developed over the course of the 20th century. While design has been around as long as humans, the 20th century marks the development of professional design as we know it today. I believe that taking a historical perspective invites a deeper understating of design thinking, different types of design specializations, and the ways in which design evolves with the changing circumstances of the world we inhabit.
Building the Four Orders
The following historical review of the Four Orders is incredibly brief. Each order has its own rich history which will be, for the most part, completely glossed over. My intention is to look at the development of each order in relation to the others, to understand the historical conditions in which each order emerged, and to gain insight into how an understanding of the orders as placements (rather than categories), can illuminate the ways in which designers work.
A quick not on placements: from my understanding Buchanan uses the word placements to denote framing that is temporary, fluid, and flexible. Contrast this to categories, which are rigid and fixed, and hopefully the use of the term in the context of the Doctrine of Placements becomes more clear.
First Order: Signs
“To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit: it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.” — Paul Rand
With the development of the high speed printing press in the mid-19th century, alongside an increase in literacy, the publishing and advertising industries found themselves serving audiences at a scale never seen before. For designers, this meant focusing on the problems and opportunities of mass communication. While the term ‘graphic design’ wasn’t coined until early in the 20th century, designers working in this space mastered the use of type, layout, and images to communicate information to readers and to persuade potential customers into buying products.
Intentionally or subconsciously, designers also encoded and reinforced the dominant belief systems of imperialist societies. Countries like England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal were colonizing the world for access to raw materials to fuel a nascent manufacturing boom catalyzed by the industrial revolution. And those manufactured products needed to find a market, both domestically and internationally. Graphic designers helped create and communicate to new customers through the use of advertisements designed to sell these new products, while simultaneously encoding common beliefs about European superiority and the dominant world order through the visual language of modernity (Victor Margolin, World History of Design Book 1, p. 481). So the First Order is not only about visual communication but also semiotics.
Second Order: Things
“A chair is the first thing you need when you don’t really need anything, and is therefore a peculiarly compelling symbol of civilization. For it is civilization, not survival, that requires design.” — Ralph Caplan
As raw materials made their way back to industrial centers to be transformed into manufactured goods, designers found new problems and opportunities in the mass production of physical objects: automobiles, clothing, domestic objects, tools, etc. Designers developed new ways of working that focused on form, function, materials, and manner of production and use. Industrial designers introduced new methods like prototyping and planning that could take advantage of the scale manufacturing processes were able to achieve.
Before the industrial revolution, design and craft were intimately connected and design happened through the process of making. When machines took over the making side of things, designers specialized by developing skills to draft and create the plans to specify how products could be made at scale. Interrupted by two world wards, industrial design developed in fits and starts across the first half of the 20th century.
Third Order: Actions
“Interaction Design is the creation of a dialogue between a person and a product, system, or service. This dialogue is both physical and emotional in nature and is manifested in the interplay between form, function, and technology as experienced over time.” — Jon Kolko
By the middle of the 20th century machines and manufacturing had taken over, and designers began to find interesting problems and opportunities around how humans interacted with machines. Over time this evolved into the question of how humans interact with computers, and eventually to how humans interact with other humans. The question of how to design for human interactions and relationships lead to the development of new methodologies and tools, as well as the integration of human psychology and ergonomics. Interaction design also grappled with time, states, modes, and additional levels of complexity. Today the practice extends even into the design of government, industrial, and information policies and strategies.
Fourth Order: Thoughts
“No design can exist in isolation. It is always related, sometimes in very complex ways, to an entire constellation of influencing situations and attitudes. What we call a good design is one which achieves integrity — that is, unity or wholeness — in balanced relation to its environment.” — George Nelson
The Fourth Order of design emerged towards the end of the 20th century, as designers began to ask, “What is the context within which human interactions take place?” Designers turned to environments, organizations, and systems as the location of problems and opportunities, tending to the complex whole through the relationship of individual action and collective accomplishment. The methodologies and tools used in Fourth Order design strip away the planning, artifacts, and objects of the previous three orders, and position the designer as a facilitator of conversations and convener of dialectical inquiry (Richard Buchanan, Surroundings and Environments in Fourth Order Design).
Design as a Response to Complexity
When we trace the development of the orders through their historical progression, it becomes easier to see the evolution of design in response to the increasing complexity of technological society.
Each order has an organizing principle that gives rise to a specific praxis and professional domain of design. But it is a mistake to see each order as a category, a static label for a set of methods, tools, problems that defines a type of design. Designers move through the orders when considering a design situation, using the ways of perceiving and understanding inherent in each order to consider potential solutions. No order is privileged above another, value does not accrue with the newer fields of design and complexity. This movement between the orders and the ability to consider design situations through various orders is the essence of Design Thinking.
A quick example to illustrate this: in recent years the design leaders have been talking a lot about design having a seat at the table. The challenge here is how to increase mutual intelligibility between business and design, and most conversations tend towards pushing designers to understand the language of business. In order to do this, designers attempt to quantify the impact of their work on the products a company sells which means design commonly makes its business case through the lens of product.
Looking at this using the Doctrine of Placements, one way to describe what is happening is that design practitioners who work primarily in the Third Order are able utilize the First and Second Orders to think through typical problems of products and services (e.g. the design of interfaces, affordances, feedback loops, etc). But for whatever reason designers aren’t moving into the Fourth Order, where the intersection of design and systems offers new perspectives and understandings.
If designers can start to utilize the placement of the Fourth Order, the perspective shifts. Design can start to ask questions about systems and complexity, about the organization and business model, finding ways of bringing value to the business outside of the more traditional role that design plays in shaping product and service offerings. Ultimately I think this is the role CDO/CXOs play at the executive level to integrate design into the business in the most impactful way possible.
Completion of the Fourth Order
In ”Surroundings and Environments in Fourth Order Design“, Richard Buchanan illustrates the ways in which orders intersect by completing the Doctrine of Placements matrix through the lens of the Fourth Order. This is the first time I have seen the intersection of orders explicated so clearly:
Fourth + First: Interior Design (communication). Communicating through an environment, using signs and symbols to create a place (placemaking). An expression of the individual or the community vision of a place, aesthetic or cultural, integrating parts into a coherent whole. Parts may include: paintings, drawing, furnishings, textiles, photographs, objects, etc.
Fourth + Second: Interior Design (construction). Construction of an environment through the consideration of form, function, materials selection, spatial dimensions, aesthetics, and task analysis. How can products that sustain our living be integrated spaces in our homes, offices, and factories? This extends into the integration of information environments into our spatial environments, most commonly practiced with the “internet of things”.
Fourth + Third: Interior & Environmental Design. The creation of environments that support qualities of meaningful interaction. The study of human interactions is fundamental to designing environments that influence how we live, play, work, and learn. This extends to virtual and hybrid environments.
Completing the Matrix
Seeing how Buchanan used the combination of placements to articulate design practices left me wondering what insight might be hidden in the rest of the blank little boxes. Here is my attempt at completing orders one through three:
My attempt at completing the matrix.
The insight for me here is an ordering or structure of how to think about the emergence of various design practices as a response to the ways in which the world is evolving. The question of, “what is design?” becomes situational and fluid rather than monolithic and codified.
And this is where the invitation to you comes in — how would you complete the matrix? What insights and/or limitations emerge? If you’d like to play, here is a link to a pdf of the matrix for you to complete.
Whew.
This has already gotten quite lengthy, so I’ll stop here for now. Hopefully this brought you some additional insight into the Doctrine of Placements. As always, thank you for listening and if you end up completing the matrix, please share your process and results! 🙏
