the voice of reason asks ten questions:

There are many but there is no accepted theoretical frame of reference that I know of, only the ability of the human mind and nervous system to react creatively, informedly and collectively in order to change things and situations (for the better, we hope). The basis is 'people' - not abstractions or reductions of what it is to be alive. To design is to trust people and the unknown, as we are, as it is. Henry Dreyfuss (1955), in his book Designing for People,was one of the first people to act on this idea.

I guess you mean the ability of people to arrive at new designs that are noticeably better (more imaginative, more inspiring, more useful, more profitable, less damaging) than what exists. A seeming magic.

It is more difficult than it looks: for instance, to compose this brief writing defeated me for several weeks - until I was rescued by the arrival of these rational questions... Then I wrote my answers straight out, between midnight and three a.m. Why was that? I cannot say. When we do the things we do we often do not know how we do them. I did not anticipate that sentence, nor this.

3. What are design methods?

Techniques which enable people to design something, to go beyond their first ideas, to test their designs in use or simulated use, to collaborate in creative activity, to lead design groups and to teach and to learn designing. A method can be anything one does while designing: sketching alternative designs 'on the back of an envelope', calculating what are assumed to be the main parameters, formal brainstorming (and classification of the result), taking a rest, issuing a questionnaire, evaluating preliminary designs in 'affirmative groups' and, most importantly, observing and experiencing for oneself the use of existing or new designs (in real life or in simulations)... A design method is any action whatever that the designers may decide is appropriate.

I'd like to correct a misconception: when in the 1970s I criticised and appeared to leave design research it was not because design methods had become rigid tools that inhibited the imaginative skills of individual designers - it was because I was angry, and still am, at the 'inhumanity' of abstract design language and theories that are not alive to all of us as people, or to actual experience - and which threaten to reduce the reality of life to something less than human.

4. How do you use them (design methods)?

It is difficult to use formal design methods, but not impossible. One danger is that of drowning in the large amount of information that most methods generate - or otherwise losing one's way and losing confidence. In any creative process, what some of us call the intuition (or the imagination) must have priority. Reason (and science) must be used to support, not to destroy, this essential confidence and vision. Otherwise, the intuition, or creativeness, which does not perform to order, will 'fly out of the window'.

One essential is to reserve part of the design time and effort to 'navigation': the choice of methods and of evaluating them both by external results and by one's spontaneous feelings as the process proceeds. And in this, a key part of designing, we have to trust our informed intuitions, and the world, and other people, and our self-awareness (which is only available when we stop designing for a moment).

5. Is scientific research useful in designing?

When it comes to finding out how people experience and use existing or new designs, objective information is helpful, even essential - provided that the rigours of the laboratory and of scientific proof are not allowed to over-ride well-informed intuitions but are used to replace ill-informed ones. Scientific methods, like all others, must be subject to an intuitive meta-method of navigation, such as I described in the previous answer. Without that they can be unproductive or destructive of insight and of life. There is no objective way to prove what is right.

6. Is it scientifically possible to discover the nature of designing?

There is a huge difficulty here. It seems that scientific research is suited only to observation, inductive theory, and experiment in relation to things that exist and that are separate from the people who are doing the research. Studying creative thought processes, such as design, is I think better done directly by introspection, by empathy and by conversation, etc.

The underlying difficulty of studying design is that it is concerned with the whole of something and 'the whole' is not an objective reality - it is a fluctuating scheme or state of the bodymind, perhaps more akin to religious inspiration than to science or to technology (William James, 1901-2). One can be totally involved. And what I am calling the bodymind includes not only the brain and body but one's conceptions of both body and of world. These are not external objects but they are surely realities.

(At last I feel that this writing is flowing well - the complexity of life is at last entering into the argument!)

7. How to design a complex system?

I've read much about complexity, and I am more than aware that complex design problems - such a urban traffic, or the provision of medical care to all who need it - are unsolved in any city or region. Adequate designs for such situations call for social changes that are presently resisted and are perhaps beyond us, as yet (Jones, 2000).

I am also aware that it is not possible to measure complexity - all entities are as complex as each other - and the definition of what is a 'thing', 'system' or an 'entity' is essentially arbitrary, as is any word. Word is a word and so is this. The words of a theory of design are also designs - there is no way to step outside of 'oneself being the world' but unfortunately the teaching of science as objective method gives the impression that one can... (Is that it?)

8. How to solve or to avoid major problems created by the culture we create and inhabit?

I suppose you are thinking of problems such as global warming (and to know how much of it is or is not the result of human activity), urban terrorism, global poverty, globalisation (is it good or is it bad for people and for the natural environment?), etc. The Encyclopedia of World Problems, 1994, lists several thousand such problems, and strategies for solving them - but in practice they are mostly unsolved.

I believe that the way to tackle these is to change (with the help of computernets) to a non-specialist culture in which computers are the specialists and all people are enabled to play creative parts in the continual redesign of the industrial culture as we live it. I call this (as yet unclarified) idea 'creative democracy' (Jones, 2000). It is intended to replace representational democracy by continual voting and by responsible action by everyone (in place of work as a specialist, paid to attend only to parts of the whole but not to it).

9. How to redesign the designed culture?

It is evident that these large design problems of the time cannot be solved without changing the culture so that everyone plays a part in re-creating it - in a continual process I call 'designing-as-living'(Jones, 1993). If this is to happen it will I think be necessary for design and design research to be unified into a single process of which they are complementary parts. That is I believe the first move, from which others could follow.

A fourth stage is to involve all the people who experience the effects of new designs in the design process. Eventually this could lead to the ending of design and research as specialised professions as everyone becomes a designer-researcher, in part, working through software in which the describeable parts of each activity are embedded in software accessible to all... But this is in itself a large and complex design that is perhaps beyond the scope of these questions and this discussion? If there is an answer I expect it to resemble the operation of the 'open source movement' in the spontaneous and collective design of the internet (Naughton, 2000)

10. How to teach this view of design - what are the principles?

I don't see this as a set of principles but I do have some suggestions arising from experience:

(Intuition thanks reason for her questions - without which this theory would not have appeared.)