Pye, David. The Nature of Design. Reinhold Books Corporation: New York, 1969.

This book is an excellent little essay on design. It is a compact 100 pages of easy to read prose that clearly delineates design form the perspective of a designer who is very open about the myths and fallacies that form the basis of many ideas about design. David Pye sees design as an inescapable element of the human condition. He also sees it as a point of connection between art and science, between craft and technology. The main thread of his book centers around the idea of form follows function, which he redefines to function as a limiting factor in form. The place where falacies and myths about design arise are in the issue of function, which he points out, is not objective, nor a property of the thing designed. Rather it is a function of interaction with the thing designed. He defines function as "what someone has provisionaly decided that a device may reasonably be expected to do at present" [p. 10].

David Pye sums of most of the book in three question towards the beginning [p. 8]:

• How do you determine what the thing you are going to design "has to do," what "activity is proper to it," what "it is for," what "its purpose" is?
• Having done so, does the information you have gained govern the design and determine its form, or does it merely guide it, restricting the choice of form and setting limits within which it can be varied at will?
• What does "purely functional" mean?

David Pye proposes that we buld things to effect change. Everything occurs withing a system of changes and structures, and is not divisible from the system which it operates in. Most designed objects are, in his opinion, purely palliative, and very few object truly enable new activities and behaviors. We can walk instead of taking the car, but we cannot fly instead of taking a plane. He also points out that design is limited by economy, not technique. Technique far outstrips affordability. Because of this, all design is a trade off, and, to that extent, a failure. Where that failure is allowed to enter in is an arbitrary result of the process of designing. He points out that much of design proceeds under the assumption that tool can bring us happiness, but, in his opinion, tools can only avoid unhappiness. In thinking that tool scan equate to happiness, the tools are seen as seperating cause and effect, which are inseperable. This belief is held because design in conceived at a certain level of isolation from outside factors which does not or cannot exist in the world.

Some salient quotes:

... whenever humans design and make useful things they invariably expend a good deal of unnecessary and avoidable work on it which contributes nothing to its usefulness. [p.9]

... all useful devices have got to do useless things which no one wants them to do. [p. 10]