| The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist
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Making Sense of Design
Effective design is at the heart of everything from software development to engineering to architecture. But what do we really know about the design process? What leads to effective, elegant designs? The Design of Design addresses these questions.
These new essays by Fred Brooks contain extraordinary insights for designers in every discipline. Brooks pinpoints constants inherent in all design projects and uncovers processes and patterns likely to lead to excellence. Drawing on conversations with dozens of exceptional designers, as well as his own experiences in several design domains, Brooks observes that bold design decisions lead to better outcomes.
The author tracks the evolution of the design process, treats collaborative and distributed design, and illuminates what makes a truly great designer. He examines the nuts and bolts of design processes, including budget constraints of many kinds, aesthetics, design empiricism, and tools, and grounds this discussion in his own real-world examples—case studies ranging from home construction to IBM's Operating System/360. Throughout, Brooks reveals keys to success that every designer, design project manager, and design researcher should know.
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- ISBN13: 9780201362985- Condition: New
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By Baljeet Sandhu (New York)
It's a well written and substantial book. Deep personal experiences and clear writing style make it a winner.
I tried to outline the essence of the book here.
[...]
If you are like me, you can use this as checklist to see areas of improvement in your project.
By Marc Magrans De Abril
First, I recommend the book. It is pretty nice to read, except for the sections about how he designed his own house :P... sorry, I am not interested about that.
I put a four instead of a five, because the book is written in purpose as a series of short self-contained stories/anecdotes. However, there is not a clear discourse path that combine them.
Is this is the first book you want to read about design and management issues in software projects, I rather recommend the following list: The mythical man-month, Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies, Peopleware, and finally the design of design
By Michael Tiemann (Chapel Hill, NC United States)
In 1989 I started a new kind of software company, and considering that I had no financial, business, nor management experience, things went fairly well. Indeed, we doubled revenue every year for the first five years and grew from 3 people to more than 60. Somewhere along the line we hit our first real management crisis, and I was given the assignment to read The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition) as a first step in understanding why our scheduling and deliverables process had become so protracted and precarious.
It was an eye opener, and it gave me my first real understanding of the fundamental limits of the industrial model. (Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals was the second, and perhaps even more profound.) Thus, when I discovered that Brooks had written a new book to treat one of my favorite new topics--Design--I decided to order it right away. Then, while it was sitting in my shopping cart, I read through some of the comments, and though several of them spread doubt about the quality or validity of this latest effort, I decided that I would risk the purchase. And I am glad I did.
I recently gave a four star review to another book on the topic of design: Roger Martin's latest book The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage. I felt bad about doing so because there is so much to like about that book and so much I appreciate about Martin's teachings. But the book did not strike me as one the best possible treatment of the subject, so I gave it only four stars. By that measure, I'm giving The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist a full five-star rating because I believe he has met that criteria. His writing is economical, elegant, accessible, and authoritative. His stance is earnest and authentic. His examples are relevant and essential. And his topic is absolutely vital to the proper construction of our 21st century economy.
This is a book I will have to buy in bulk, and to give to the many people I meet in my daily work who need the conceptual reboot that it provides. I recommend it to anyone who needs or produces creative work in these early days of the 21st century, whether in the public, private, or academic sectors.
By Reg Nordman (Vancouver, BC Canada)
The author of the Mythical Man-Month, the Father of the IBM 360 hardware and software, Brooks is a giant. He has put together a series of essays that give any designer serious insights into the process. Regardless of what you work in, architecture for homes or cathedrals,. OS for RIM, Linux modules, web pages or wooden picnic tables, there is something for everyone on these essays. From the book , "The author tracks the evolution of the design process, treats collaborative and distributed design, and illuminates what makes a truly great designer. He examines the nuts and bolts of design processes, including budget constraints of many kinds, aesthetics, design empiricism, and tools, and grounds this discussion in his own real-world examples--case studies ranging from home construction to IBM's Operating System/360. Throughout, Brooks reveals keys to success that every designer, design project manager, and design researcher should know.
He points out that you study history to find out what works and how in order to learn from others. His chapter Constraints are Friends is worth the price of the book. He is veru harsh on himself for the errors that occured on his watch. He also advocates that good design requires much more planning and research than people are giving it. If a company is always in a hurry to get to market, then it is not committed to good design. If you consider yourself a designer - you have read this book. If you love computers you will cherish this book.
By Bas Vodde (Singapore)
I, as probably many others, was looking forward reading "the design of design." I had pre-ordered it as soon as I knew I could and read it soon after it arrived. Unfortunately, the book disappointed me somewhat. It is not that it doesn't have insights... it does! It is not that it is written badly... it isn't! It is that most of the insights and examples are similar or the same as the Mythical Man-Month. Next to that, Fred Brooks doesn't seem to have any newer experiences managing software projects than the OS360 project :( The book is still worth reading, but it definitively isn't as useful as the Mythical Man Month (which with every work of Fred Brooks will be compared).
The book contains six parts and is about 400 pages thick. The first part of the book called "Models of Designing" dives (again) in the Waterfall Model and explains that it doesn't work, cannot work, and has never ever worked. He compares the Waterfall model to the Rational Model of design (from Simon) which has been criticized as being overly simplistic. Brooks still spends about 50 pages diving in Waterfall model and concludes this with: "The waterfall model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it"
The second part is about collaboration and tele-collaboration. To me, this was the weakest part of the book. In this part, Brooks argues that a good design always comes from one designer and cannot be developed by a group or a team. This is contrary to my own experiences and also, according to his notes, contrary to some of the reviewers experiences. Yet he keeps stressing this point throughout his book. The subject of tele-collaboration was covered only minimally.
The third part is probably the best part of the book and names design perspectives. Each chapter is a separate essay about one aspect of design. I especially enjoyed chapter 13 where Brooks argues we'll need more examplars of good software developers we can build on. Good design is build on good examples, but in software development... good examples are rarely studied (even though they are nowadays frequently Open Sourced)
The fourth and most of the sixth part of the book were uninteresting to me. The fourth part discusses a design that Brooks made with his team to design a dream system for architects for designing houses. It was mainly a description of the design decisions he made. Chapter six consists of case studies. Most of these case studies are Brooks amateur (physical) architecture studies where he, in he free time, extended his house and build a beach house. The cases aren't strongly linked to the design perspectives and design model he described earlier and it made them rather uninteresting to me (a software developer first). Chapter six also has cases about the IBM 360 system and operating system. I was more interested in these chapters, especially from a historical perspective. (Brooks his beach house might be beautiful, it had no impact on the world other than Family Brooks' enjoyable life at the beach).
The fifth part is short and names Great Designers. It contains two chapter "Great Designs come from Great Designers" and "Where do Great Designers Come From?". I enjoyed these chapters as a reminder of the impact of people and talent on the result of a project. And the question, which is unfortunately not a common discussion, how to actually teach great design (which he then links back to the examplars).
Overall, I enjoyed reading The Design of Design, yet I expected more. I was particularly disappointed by the old-ness (and perhaps obsoleteness) of the examples. Nearly all examples came again from the IBM 360 project. As programming language examples with a good design, Brooks doesn't talk about Ruby or Haskell... no he mentions APL. There is no example about modern design (in software that is) or any suggestion that Fred Brooks has been involved in a software development project after the IBM 360 project. This did not make his writing less entertaining, nor his insights less insightful, yet... I had expected more. Oh, and the case studies about his amateur architecture projects could probably be skipped.
Anyways, as mentioned, I still enjoyed reading it. The writing was good and the lessons were still valid. I thought of rating it 3 or 4 stars and decided to still go with a 4 star rating. However, if you are unfamiliar with Fred Brooks work, I'd recommend to read "The Mythical Man Month" instead.
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