Last November I described my delight at discovering that Ralph Caplan’s “By Design” had been revised and was being re-published. If anything, my excitement was even greater when a few days ago I discovered one of the original copies in the library of a College, where I do a bit of teaching.
Reading it again I was pleased to find that my recollections of the book were confirmed. If anything it is even better than I remembered. What also struck me was how much of my thinking about design had been influenced by it, even though, in a number of cases, I had forgotten where the ideas had come from.
In one of the bits I had forgotten, he talks about ‘situation design’ or has he prefers to call it, ‘the design of possibilities’. I suspect it was this chapter that made me like the book so much when I first read it, because it named something I had been doing for most of my professional life.
The problem with being a designer of possibilities is that few people, other than Caplan, recognise what you are doing – so as a profession it is a bit of a no no. For some of the time when I was designing courses it was OK, because I could talk about myself as a ‘curriculum designer’ or ‘course developer’. Other times I use other descriptors, such as ‘writer’ or even, heaven forbid, ‘consultant’. But generally speaking, being a designer of possibilities is a lonely, unnamed business, where you have to pretend to be doing something else.
Still you never know, maybe with the birth of things like ‘service design’ and designers that do it, like Live/Work or Plot, a space will develop where we can come out proud and be understood when we say, “I design possibilities”.