The Nature and Aesthetics of Design

The other reviewers are certainly missing Pye's main point: that "design" and "aesthetics" are soft sciences. In this well written treatise he is applying a critical logician eye to attempt to derive and verbalize some universal truths about the made world. Essential reading for design professionals and thinkers alike.

very philosophical

A really very wise and perceptive view of the design process

The first part of this book starts with a reasoned crtique of the Bauhaus mantra, form follows function. Start with the word "function" - he effectively takes it apart. Think of a car and its function for example. It can, at different times, demand attention from every girl on the block, it can open its back seat on lover's lane, rush a woman to the maternity ward, or carry kids to the soccer game. What is its 'real' function?It took me a while to catch the sense that Pye meant to convey. He uses a Zen-like approach of creating new meaning by undermining the old. Beauty, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, but people don't share eyes with each other. It's in each eye uniquely, and has to be defined again by each beholder.Beauty is also, he argues, a necessity of life and of society. Very often, beauty costs nothing. Any function can be met by an infinite family of forms, even within a rigid framework of requirements. Choosing an agreeable form is not just an option, it's a deep-set human imperative.This is a philosophical book. It's real point, I think, is that good design must be a personal act - the technical skills can be taught, but the craft must be learned. There is no advice here that you could follow, for example, in making a better chair.The advice is about how to make yourself a better designer.

A Provencal view of international design. Interestingly English authoritarian, but irrelevant text.

While David Pye is often pigeonholed as a theorist of craft, in this book he constructs his own unique theory that encompasses aesthetics, design and making. With a simple and cogent critique of the modernist tenet of 'form follows function', Pye clearly and precisely points out fundamental flaws in what is often taken to be an inviolable axiom of utilitarian design.It may come as a surprise to some readers of this book to see Pye base his theory of design on concepts from systems theory and thermodynamics. Written in 1978, this book is recent enough to take into account the impacts of computers, digital fabrication, and material science on design and manufacturing. However, this book is old enough that, unlike contemporary authors such as Mario Carpo, Benjamin Bratton, or Manuel DeLanda, Pye refreshingly does not assume the use of these technologies in design to be some kind of technodeterministic inevitability.By the standards of contemporary scholarship one could argue against Pye's use of male pronouns, his odd and inconsistent punctuation, his paucity of citations, and poor indexing, but that would be missing the forest for the trees.

Pye's 'Art of Workmanship' was, somewhat like his definition of workmanship, precise and free, and while it might be unfair to compare this book on design with that book on workmanship (the 'Art of Workmanship' written after, I think, Pye's first book on design but prior to this revised edition), I think that this treatsie on design is somewhat imprecise and constrained -- perhaps compare that sentence I just wrote to Pye's 'Art of Workmanship', and that's my general impression.Pye gives us some good stuff on 'what is design', creativity, originality, taste and perception, he's a very fine thinker and writer, and also fairly unique in his field. I would buy this book.

I found this book not worth paying for, the standard of presentation was the worst aspect, and the example images very ordinary.