User talk:Nigel Cross

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[edit] design books

maybe you are right and my choice of books was rather arbitrary and even pointless. on the other hand - there are basic works in design practice and theory that should be mentioned. so while gedenryd's dissertation was an eye-opener for me and thus placing it on the website is highly subjective, christopher alexander might be worth mentioning somewhere. of course it might also be the case that one of your books should be listed :-)

for now, i've remove the book list.

what about starting a page on "design theory" and putting the books there? of course, you would be one of the persons able to write such an entry while i'm rather not. Martinpi 09:08, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Books and articles on design methods?

I thought you might be able to offer some much needed expertise to a discussion we're having concerning the Design methods article. I'm still trying to understand what the author (the one editor has written almost the entire article) means by design methods, but he repeatedly asserts that Jones' "Design Methods" is the only book ever written about design methods. I've provided a link to a workshop I participated in some years back [1] which includes a good reference list, including your own "Engineering Design Methods". Care to offer some perspective and a bit of your expertise by recommending good books and articles on design methods, or alternatively if I'm mistaken, backing that Jones' is the only one? --Ronz 18:43, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Books

Of course Jones is not the only one! I studied with JC Jones and have great respect for him, but his book was written in the late 1960s and has never been revised except for his adding comments as prefaces. He regarded his book as his 'farewell present' to the design methods movement, but it may still have relevance for many people.

Apart from the excellent 'Engineering Design Methods: Strategies for product design' (3rd edition, Wiley, 2001) by the Cross fellow, recent others include:

K. Krippendorf 'The Semantic Turn: A new foundation for design' (CRC Press, 2006) (includes some methods, in a wider context)

C. Nemeth 'Human Factors Methods for Design: Making systems human-centered' (CRC Press, 2004) (excellent)

K. Ulrich & S. Eppinger 'Product Design and Development' (3rd edn., McGraw Hill, 2003) (really good)

These are mostly aimed at product design, and I realise that there are other set of interests and methods centred on systems design, interaction design, etc. but unfortunately I'm not familiar with those.

I remember being alerted to the original design methods entry in wikipedia, but I thought that it had so much wrong with it that I couldn't start to revise it! I feel similar despair about the wikipedia 'design' entry! I see that there is now a huge history of discussion on the design methods article, that I wasn't aware of (It's not on my watchlist). Good luck!

Nigel Cross 18:53, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the recommendations! --Ronz 18:57, 6 February 2007 (UTC)