I wasn’t looking for a sermon, but I found one anyway. Originally I was looking for more info on my minor work-related obsession: how to design an effective academic system. Or at the very least, how to turn my unit into a productivity machine.

Naturally, an essay called “On System Design” caught my eye.

I was expecting lots of technical details (and don’t worry, they’re there). What I was not expecting was a thoughtful, insightful essay that easily applies to multiple arenas of life.

This bit, for example, reminded me immediately of theology. It comes directly after the author seeks a general rule of “good design.”

The only generally applicable rule that doesn’t have obvious counterexamples is one I first heard enunciated by Fred Brooks more than a dozen years ago. In a talk given in a Sun-internal seminar (an expanded version of which became the basis for his Turing Award lecture in 2000*), Brooks talked of the work he had been doing to try to find the underlying common feature of good design, not just in computer hardware and software but also in such endeavors as architecture, graphics, and the fine arts. The only thing that he could find that good designs had in common was that they were produced by good designers.

There is one reading of this insight on which it is true but uninteresting, a mere tautological statement that reflects giving in to the unpredictable and inscrutable mystery of design. On this reading, the only way to determine what produces a good design is to wait until you have one, and then attribute it to the designer. Good design, on this view, happens by chance. You can hope for it, but you can’t do anything to improve your chances of getting a good design.

This is not the reading that I believe Brooks intended, nor the one that I found persuasive when I first heard the talk. My reading of this principal is that those who have been able to produce a good design in the past are far more likely to be able to produce a good design in the future. There is no guarantee that the future designs will be good, but your chances are much better. There is no magic process by which  such designers produce their designs; each may go about the design problem in a different way, and a designer may approach one problem in a particular way and another in a completely different fashion.

“Good design is practiced by good designers.” This sounds awfully similar to Aristotle’s thoughts on arete, or excellence/virtue: An virtuous man is one who does virtuous acts. (Citation needed, my copy of Nichomachean Ethics is somewhere at my parent’s house and not conveniently sitting on my bookshelf.)

That’s just the warm-up, though. What really caught my eye was what happens the mental shortcut of taking the statement at face value, it “reflects giving in to the unpredictable and inscrutable mystery of design.” This, along with the characteristic of this view of design as an accident, strikes me as summing up in one package two polar opposite approaches to the design of the universe. On one hand, we have the 19th century sentimentalist idea that God’s plan is completely inscrutable and His ways are totally mysterious and unknowable; and yet, life on earth exists. On the other hand, we have the evolutionary idea that the design happens entirely by chance; and yet, life on earth exists. Chance, or magic–does it really matter?

Funnily enough for as much as I’ve thought about the Victorians (not on this blog, unfortunately, but in my past life as a graduate student) I’ve never once thought that Darwinism was the equal and opposite reaction to the overly sentimental faith of the Victorian era.

Anyway. Both views are equally wrong, and yet they can both be summed up with one way of looking at design.

So we look at the other view of design–good design is reflective of a good Designer. There is “no magic process,” but each Designer will produce design that is, shall we say, in His image.

As those living in the design, we can both reverse engineer the elements of the design and Designer from what we observe in the “code” through nature, but we can also learn many of the Designer’s methods and how to use the system through its manual: The Bible.

It’s interesting thinking about God from this point of view.

*I believe this is the current iteration of Brooks’ ideas is his book of essays: The Design of Design. The website cited in the PDF of On System Design is RIP.