Beyond the critique of the amateur, he's also tackling larger trends of thinking about design methodology. The trend is from formal to informal, from abstract to concrete. From ideas without context to ideas that receive immediate feedback from their environment...
Gedenryd quotes: "The writings of design theorists imply that the traditional method of design-by-drawing is too simple for the growing complexity of the man-made world. This belief is widely held and may not require any further justification. (Jones 1970, p. 27)"
But recently we've seen a resurgence of such "simple" methods like sketching, storyboarding, model-building, etc. Here's where we see the Renaissance of Sketching.
Basically it seems to me the trend is that a bunch of theoreticians in the mid-20th century thought that abstract thought and logic could (by themselves) produce perfect designs. But in fact recent research and writing about design are suggesting that the world's best designs come about because they were designed using processes like sketching that have a direct, real-world, tangible feedback. My favorite passage is maybe "Quist's demonstration of sketching" in ch 4, which directly addresses this dichotomy of formal/abstract vs informal/specific design processes.
I think many people have realized that overly formal methods do not produce designs that are all that beautiful or engaging. Most people hate cube-farms. Most programmers can't stand the waterfall model. Most consumers hate corporate bloat-ware. Maybe it's always better to use paper prototypes, sketches, extreme programming, and so on.
In some ways this whole debate was foreshadowed by Spock's musings in Star Trek I: it is an embrace of what is most human.
Gedenryd quotes: "The writings of design theorists imply that the traditional method of design-by-drawing is too simple for the growing complexity of the man-made world. This belief is widely held and may not require any further justification. (Jones 1970, p. 27)"
But recently we've seen a resurgence of such "simple" methods like sketching, storyboarding, model-building, etc. Here's where we see the Renaissance of Sketching.
Basically it seems to me the trend is that a bunch of theoreticians in the mid-20th century thought that abstract thought and logic could (by themselves) produce perfect designs. But in fact recent research and writing about design are suggesting that the world's best designs come about because they were designed using processes like sketching that have a direct, real-world, tangible feedback. My favorite passage is maybe "Quist's demonstration of sketching" in ch 4, which directly addresses this dichotomy of formal/abstract vs informal/specific design processes.
I think many people have realized that overly formal methods do not produce designs that are all that beautiful or engaging. Most people hate cube-farms. Most programmers can't stand the waterfall model. Most consumers hate corporate bloat-ware. Maybe it's always better to use paper prototypes, sketches, extreme programming, and so on.
In some ways this whole debate was foreshadowed by Spock's musings in Star Trek I: it is an embrace of what is most human.