Constructing the brief

While commonplace within discussions of design and designing, the term ‘brief’ has been introduced here quite deliberately to signal two further and closely intertwined issues of importance in understanding how buildings get to be the way they are. The first of these relates to the generally held idea that design is a problem-solving activity and thus that the brief represents an unmediated specification of the problem. The second relates to the view that the brief somehow lies ‘outside’ the control of the designer and simply informs him/her in proceeding to a solution.

Whether design activity is merely a problem-solving activity or not is a moot point.

Recent research indicates that the ‘design = problem solving’ equation is as likely to be endorsed, whether explicitly or tacitly, by a large range of design theorists in the

disciplines of architecture, industrial design and engineering, who are taken to be experts in the field, as by new first year architecture students who are taken to be novices, as yet untrained and thus largely uninfluenced by the assumptions inherent in the literature (Harfield, 1997).

What is significant is not whether design outcomes are somehow solutions to problems, but rather the belief that design problems, albeit falling under the category of wicked or ill-structured problems rather than tame or well-structured ones, are nevertheless specified within the brief.¹

To a significant extent this is true, at least insofar as the brief might be expected to enumerate that extensive and complex list of requirements that the final design solution is meant to address. This may be identified as the problem as given – that set of data presented to, and often developed in conjunction with, the designer, and upon which the design solution is predicated. But to accept that the data provided in the brief informs, and to some extent concretizes, the problem is a far cry from asserting either that the data requisite for the solution inheres within the brief and therefore that a skilled designer can simply move from problem to solution, or, and perhaps more importantly, that the problem

‘solved’ by the designer corresponds to the problem as given.

The second point, that the perception that the brief somehow lies outside the control of the designer and simply informs him/her in proceeding to a solution, suggests that the designer is somehow neutral in respect of the problem, that the problem is simply given to the designer, who proceeds by skill and training, to ‘solve’ it. This does not, however, suggest identical solutions since such a position tacitly accepts the fact that all but the most simple or most determinate of design problems will likely fall under the category of ill-structured problems and will thus produce what are often referred to as ‘satisficing’

solutions. Unlike the solutions to those problems which can be assessed as being unequivocally right or wrong, satisficing solutions – sometimes called ‘better or worse’

solutions – can only be judged on the extent to which they satisfy some set of criteria, based presumably on those requirements and complexities contained within the brief.²

The obvious result is that different designers will produce different outcomes based on the same brief and any architectural studio or architectural competition provides ample evidence of this. This is entirely consistent with the idea of satisficing solutions.

Recast in the language of problem solving, this means that different solutions may be derived from the same problem. While this appears obvious and barely worthy of comment, it is based, in the case of design, on the tacit assumption that it is the same problem, i.e., that the same brief inevitably yields the same problem, irrespective of designer; that each designer, whether expert or novice student, has taken the problem as given and simply ‘solved’ it; that the designer is effectively neutral in respect of the problem and introduces nothing into it but skill and knowledge; that the varieties of outcome are precisely the result of differences in such skill and knowledge; and thus, pre-eminently in the student situation, that the variety of schemes, judged one against the other, is a measure of the different ways in which a control group has solved the same problem! Yet this is not necessarily how design and designers work, or how they could work, even if they were so inclined. This suggests a significant distinction between the problem as given (the brief, its requirements, etc.) and the problem as ‘taken’ or, perhaps better, the problem as design goal, i.e., the individual designer’s overlay on the brief that determines what he or she wants to do. This personal decision as to ‘what to do’ is often referred to as ‘problematizing’ since it relates not to issues of how to solve the problem

established by the requirements in the brief, but rather, in addition to those requirements, what is the architectural or design problem that I as designer choose to adopt and solve?

Such problematization – different for each designer and for each project – lies at the very heart of design and will inform and constrain both the design activity and the final outcome in ways that are not dictated by the brief itself.³

This idea of the problem as design goal is essential to an understanding of how buildings get to be the way they are – while not marginalizing the brief and the host of specific requirements that undeniably inform the solution, it does begin to reinstate the designer as the central formalizing agent in the design process and may be used to explain not only why different designers produce different designs to what is ostensibly the same problem, but how, within this range of differences, common languages and approaches are clearly evident. This leads to the question, ‘Does the designer know in advance of its production what design outcome he or she will produce?’

At one level, and as already discussed, the answer must be ‘yes’; the final outcome or goal state is necessarily pre-defined in that the designer, whether the young architectural student or the seasoned professional, knows in advance that they are to design a shopping centre, an opera house, or a private dwelling. Yet it is clear that such goal identification is almost always generic rather than detailed and specific, and irrespective of such information, the designer does not know, at the outset of the process, what the final design will be, i.e., precisely what it will look like, its ultimate formal disposition, and so on. To know such detail in advance would be to obviate the need for design; the final outcome would already have been designed before the process had even started. This is central to what is often referred to in discussions of creativity as the problem of foreknowledge.⁴

The problem is simply stated but difficult to resolve. If the designer knows the outcome at the start then the creation/design is already complete and no further designing or design process is required. If, however, they do not, then this raises a further critical question:

‘How is the creative process controlled without some foreknowledge?’.

It is evident that these questions do influence how design outcomes come to be the way they are. We cannot readily accept the affirmative to the first question: as Abel (1976) notes, ‘Does the artist know in advance what his work will be? If he did, he would already have it completely in hand!’. At the same time neither can a simple negative suffice: ‘The artist is never sure . . . he can [never] predict how his work will turn out.’ This is not to deny the accuracy of Abel’s conclusions, rather to indicate that more sophisticated analysis is required to account for processes that undeniably occur, hence also the appropriateness of Hausman’s splendid summary (Hausman, 1969, p. 2) of the same issue:

The paradox of creation can also be seen in the activity of the creative artist. The artist begins a creative process without a preconceived plan or concept of the form he will produce. If he were to start with such a plan, then creativity already would be complete in his mind. But the creator does begin with a certain talent and set of established habits of work. At first he senses that certain elements are required in the future product, but he does not yet know what these are. And as he creates, he somehow discovers what he wants to create. He makes his plan at the same time that he comes to see what that plan is – at the same time that he sees what is required to complete the process he started. Paradoxically, then, the creator must at once create and discover. He must generate a necessitated product which is not

necessitated by anything given to the creator with which he can generate it. In short, the creator must act as an agent which is a cause without a prior cause, a cause which causes itself.

Yet this does not go far enough. In architectural terms, the designer does not start only with ‘a certain talent and set of established habits of work’, although this is certainly the case, nor only with the generic instruction or intention to ‘design a house’, nor with only that highly determinate set of requirements, i.e., the specific functions and uses, budgetary constraints, site conditions, statutory and regulatory requirements, and so on which constitute the client brief and the problem as given, and all of which are expected to be known by the designer and which both affect and effect the design outcome. In addition, the designer brings to bear on the problem a viewpoint or a position – a set of formal and aesthetic and technical sensibilities based on prior experiences and preferences and prejudices which determine not only how the problem at hand will be solved, as if it is somehow neutrally presented for the most efficacious solution, but just what problem the designer will choose to solve. As Bryan Lawson (1979) notes: ‘Clearly throughout the history of architecture designers have sought to explore ideas which transcend the particular problem in hand as well as attempting to meet the immediate brief.’ Thus we return not only to the centrality of problem solving in the design process, but also to the simultaneous centrality of what might be neatly encompassed by the heading ‘ideology’.

As Lawson (1979) quite rightly observes: ‘The role of ideology in design has been sadly neglected by methodologists but it would be absurd to maintain that the designer can or should entirely divorce his thinking on a specific problem from his general more philosophical beliefs.’

Deriving from its now archaic meaning of the study of the origin and nature of ideas, ideology may be used as a generic descriptor for any system of ideas concerning specified phenomena and thus it represents ‘the manner of thinking characteristic of a class or an individual’ (OED, 1972). Class is used here not in its social sense, as a division of society according to status, but in what might be described as its mathematical sense, to represent a set, a group of persons who may be so identified by virtue of their shared belief in, commitment to and utilization of a common body of ideas on a particular subject or issue.