[pilgrim0]

On Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Alexander defines design as the rationalization of the forces that define a problem. You’ll won’t find a better definition. But people tend to think design is the synthesis and its results. This misunderstanding of the role of design and the designer is responsible for all the unfit designs we encounter on a daily basis. Anyone equipped with a synthesis tool and feeling empowered to quickly and cheaply generate forms will almost inevitably become blind to the very nature of the underlying problems they set to solve. They’ll be fitting the problem to the available forms. They’ll skip the understanding, the conversations, the conflicts and disagreements, and happily and wrongly assume a design problem can be solved hermetically, in isolation. They’ll think quality is a factor of aesthetics, when in truth, aesthetics is an effect; nevertheless these effects is all they’ll have control over, as it’s all the tool can do. The tool will hinder their ability to be rational; to see the inner structures; to find the hidden but essential semantics; to create the ontologies that’ll support not only the immediate synthesis, but that will sustain the evolution of the design over its lifetime. They’ll be denied the enlightenment that comes with gradual, slow construction; the only place and moment where innovative ideas reveal themselves. They’ll be impoverished and confuse output with agency. I feel sorry for anyone that will think using tools equals doing design, because of the truly marvelous human experiences that they’ll miss, and that could never be replaced by the shallow pride of empty achievement.

[bauerd]

This is a really verbose way to say that using generative AI has a detrimental effect on the user because one deprives themselves of the learning experience.

[nightski]

Agreed on your take on the parent, although I have to say I feel that AI has had the opposite effect for me. It has only accelerated learning quite significantly. In fact not only is learning more effective/efficient, I have more time for it because I am not spending nearly as much time tracking down stupid issues.

[lo_zamoyski]

> I have more time for it because I am not spending nearly as much time tracking down stupid issues.

It is a truism that the majority of effort and time a software dev spends is allocated toward boilerplate, plumbing, and other tedious and intellectually uninteresting drudgery. LLMs can alleviate much of that, and if used wisely, function as a tool for aiding the understanding of principles, which is ultimately what knowledge concerns, and not absorbing the mind in ephemeral and essentially arbitrary fluff. In fact, the occupation hazard is that you'll become so absorbed in some bit of minutia, you'll forget the context you were operating in. You'll forget what the point of it all was.

Life is short. While knowing how to calculate mentally and/or with pen and paper is good for mastering principles and basic facility (the same is true of programming, btw), no one is clamoring to go back to the days before the calculator. There's a reason physicists would outsource the numerical bullshit to teams of human computers.

[nightski]

Just wanted to say you put it really well, that's exactly how I feel.

[stronglikedan]

Sounds like you're talking about research AI and not generative AI. You can't learn artistic/creative techniques when you're not practicing those techniques. You can have a vision, but the AI will execute that vision, and you only get the end result without learning the techniques used to execute it.

[LordDragonfang]

Okay, this is a pet peeve of mine, so forgive me if I come off a little curt here, but-- I disagree strongly with how this was phrased.

"Generative AI" isn't just an adjective applied to a noun, it's a specific marketing term that's used as the collective category for language models and image/video model -- things which "generate" content.

What I assume you mean is "I think <term> is misleading, and would prefer to make a distinction".

But how you actually phrased it reads as "<term> doesn't mean <accepted definition of the term>, but rather <definition I made up which contains only the subset of the original definition I dislike>. What you mean is <term made up on the spot to distinguish the 'good' subset of the accepted definition>"

I see this all the time in politics, and it muddies the discussion so much because you can't have a coherent conversation. (And AI is very much a political topic these days.) It's the illusion of nuance -- which actually just serves as an excuse to avoid engaging with the nuance that actually exists in the real category. (Research AI is generative AI; they are not cleanly separable categories which you can define without artificial/external distinctions.)

[apsurd]

That's a really useful distinction to have explicitly articulated. It's also why plan mode feels like a super power. Research vs Generative AI are different: I'm going to use this.

[nightski]

I guess I was more referring to just using generative AI when learning new subjects and exploring new ideas. It's a really efficient tutor and/or sidekick who can either explain topics in more depth, find better sources, or help me explore new theories. I was thinking beyond just generating code, which is incredibly useful but only mildly interesting.

[javier2]

Well, the research is sometimes 10x quicker with AI assistant. But not always. Building phase is maybe 20-100% quicker for me at least, depending on the complexity of the project. Green field without 15 years of legacy that is never allowed to break is many times faster, always has been.

[CaptWillard]

Big difference between gaining knowledge and building/maintaining cognitive skills.

[monarchwadia]

I assure you, working with LLMs is intellectually challenging, and becomes more so as the technology matures.

[tempest_]

It really really really depends on how you are using it and what you are using it for.

I can get LLMs to write most CSS I need by treating it like a slot machine and pulling the handle till it spits out what I need, this doesnt cause me to learn CSS at all.

[nightski]

I find it a lot more useful to dive into bugs involving multiple layers and versions of 3rd party dependencies. Deep issues where when I see the answer I completely understand what it did to find it and what the problem was (so in essence I wouldn't of learned anything diving deep into the issue), but it was able to do so in a much more efficient fashion than me referencing code across multiple commits on github, docs, etc...

This allows me to focus my attention on important learning endeavors, things I actually want to learn and are not forced to simply because a vendor was sloppy and introduced a bug in v3.4.1.3.

LLMS excel when you can give them a lot of relevant context and they behave like an intelligent search function.

[rTX5CMRXIfFG]

Yes but that’s why you ask it to teach you what it just did. And then you fact-check with external resources on the side. That’s how learning works.

[sanex]

I would consider this a benefit. I've been a professional for 10 years and have successfully avoided CSS for all of it. Now I can do even more things and still successfully avoid it.

[baq]

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I know a little css and have zero desire or motivation to know more; the things I’d like done that need css just wouldn’t have been done without LLMs.

[tevli]

This exactly. My css designs have noticeably gotten better without me,the writer getting any better at all.

[unsignedchar]

But were you trying to learn CSS in the first place?

[leptons]

I find it intellectually exhausting to describe to a machine what I want, when I could build something better in the same amount of time, and it isn't for lack of understanding how the LLM works.

It takes a lot of cajoling to get an LLM to produce a result I want to use. It takes no cajoling for me to do it myself.

The only time "AI" helps is in domains that I am unfamiliar with, and even then it's more miss than hit.

[skydhash]

> I find it intellectually exhausting to describe to a machine what I want, when I could build something better in the same amount of time, and it isn't for lack of understanding how the LLM works.

I don’t even bother. Most of my use cases have been when I’m sure I’ve done the same type of work before (tests, crud query,…). I describe the structure of the code and let it replicate the pattern.

For any fundamental alteration, I bring out my vim/emacs-fu. But after a while, you start to have good abstractions, and you spend your time more on thinking than on coding (most solutions are a few lines of codes).

[vehemenz]

My experience is mostly the opposite. Provided the right context and prompt, CC will generally produce code, even in domains I know, 10-20x faster.

Quality is a different issue, sure.

[DaiPlusPlus]

/s/intellectually/emotionally

[system2]

It is better than doomscrolling on Instagram for hours like the new generations. At least the brain is active, creating ideas or reading some text nonstop to keep itself active.

[camillomiller]

Are you sure that is not the illusion of learning? If you don't know the domains, how can you know how much you now know? Especially consider that these models are all Dunning Kruger-inducing machines.

[qingcharles]

Agree on that too. And I use these as tools. I don't think I'm missing out on anything if I use this drill press to put a hole through an inch of steel instead of trying to spend a day doing it wobbly with a hand-drill.

[jtbayly]

No. It says much more than that, because it applies to many other tools that aren't AI.

[camillomiller]

Well, you know what they say about our current attention spans. If it's not a slogan it's already too long!

[akiarie]

"Verbose" is the wrong adjective. Yours is a terse projection into a lower space, valid in itself, but lacking the power and precision of its archetype.

[eric_cc]

What if you’re a musician and use design as part of your marketing? Why should a musician deep dive design when they really only care about music?

[pilgrim0]

The argument is not that only designers can design, nor that everyone should design like a designer. It’s to not confuse shopping for or generating generic solutions with the activity of problem solving. Per Alexander, trivial problems, those that can be solved without balancing interactions between conflicting requirements, are not design problems. So, don’t worry and just pick what you need and like!

[gretch]

Presumably you care about the quality of your marketing. Otherwise why do it at all. Worst case scenario, your marketing turns people off to your music, who would have otherwise been listeners.

Actually there’s some interesting problems here because a huge part of music marketing is in a visual medium, like a poster or album cover. It is literally impossible to include a clip of your sound.

So you should be really interested in how to capture the “vibe” of your music in a visual medium.

But if you don’t care at all whether ppl actually listen to your music, then yeah you don’t have to deep dive.

[3sdfs]

"Actually there’s some interesting problems here because a huge part of music marketing is in a visual medium, like a poster or album cover. It is literally impossible to include a clip of your sound."

The term you are looking for is 'aesthetic'.

And indeed.. music is far more than just a sound or whatever simple thing one tries to boil it down to.

Im convinced many (especially here) really dislike that - they want it just be a case of typing in a few things in an LLM and bam... there you go. They have zero clue about the nature of the economy, what's really going on in various markets etc etc.

[skeeter2020]

just use clipart & templates and move on then, taking your argument to the extreme and skip the AI tooling.

[jppittma]

I think that the beauty of the human experience is that all you need to learn is to practice. You automatically improve at what you're doing. The kinds of skills that atrophy when you use AI are skills that AI can already automate. And nobody is going to pay you to do slowly what a machine can do quickly/cheaply.

When you deploy AI to build something, you wind up doing the work that the AI itself can't do. Holding large amounts of context, maintaining a vision, writing apis and defining interfaces. Alongside like, project management. How much time is spent on features vs refactoring vs testing.

[fortzi]

I don’t know.

With the core programming skills atrophying, who’s going to have the skills to audit AI’s work?

[JumpCrisscross]

> using generative AI has a detrimental effect on the user because one deprives themselves of the learning experience

Or it lets folks focus. My coding skills have gotten damn rough over the years. But I still like the math. Using AI to build visualizations while I work on the model math with paper and pen is the best of both worlds. I can rapidly model something I’m working on out algebraically and analytically.

Does that mean my R skills are deteriorating? Absolutely. But I think that’s fine. My total skillset’s power is increasing.

[lyjackal]

I think the larger part implied is the design will be crappy, because the problem was unexplored

[4b11b4]

Was thinking similarly... Without the friction, you're unable to explore the space, the space doesn't even exist at all... So it's not even clear where you're going from or where you'll arrive at.

[airstrike]

Your point is maybe 25% of the original, so no, it's not just a really verbose way to say the same thing.

In fact, there's a palpable irony in your decision to make that comment, which only reinforces the OP.

[apsurd]

your paragraph is parent's point in action.

If only all great works could just be an X post!

[CGMthrowaway]

And, anyone who reads your comment will be deprived of the experience of learning why your comment makes so much sense.

[DrewADesign]

Not really. It’s saying that most people in tech have no fucking idea what designers do, but somehow feel qualified to evaluate their output, and think tools that make things that look nice are designing things. What you reference is one effect of what the comment is about. Another effect is developers, combining this with engineer’s disease, being incredibly irritating to work with because they constantly make reductive comments that completely miss the point while other developers nod and say “yeah that sounds right.” I was a developer for ten years— I’ve seen this from both sides.

[eric_cc]

> I feel sorry for anyone that will think using tools equals doing design, because of the truly marvelous human experiences that they’ll miss, and that could never be replaced by the shallow pride of empty achievement.

What if you don’t give a shit about design and it’s a means to an end for a project that involves something different that you do care about?

[kbenson]

I think maybe how you are conceptualizing design and how the GP meant it are not in agreement, and if you came to agreement on what it meant you wouldn't really disagree about the point either.

For example, I think design, as they mean it, could be described as "how to get that thing we care about". The correct amount of design depends on how exacting the outcome and outputs needs to be across different dimensions (how fast, how accurate, how easy to interpret, how easy to utilize as an input for some other system). For generalized things where there's not exacting standards for that, AI works well. For systems with exacting standards along one or more of those aspects, the process of design allows for the needed control and accuracy as the person or people doing the work are in a constant feedback loop and can dial in to what's needed. If you give up control of the inside of that loop, you lose the fine grained control required for even knowing how far you are away from theoretical maximums for those aspects.

[pilgrim0]

Balancing requirements to achieve something you care about is doing design. I take that by “design” here you mean perhaps a particular interface or media, and you reckon that such element is not critical to your solution. If that’s the case then there’s no conflict at all. By reaching that conclusion you isolated what’s important and are correctly applying energy where it matters. This happens a lot in design, where producing or perfecting media interfaces is not necessary.

[apsurd]

> what if you don't give a shit about design and it's a means to an end…

the parent's point is that it doesn't work that way. The point is self reinforcing. Design is not a thing. it's the earned scars from the process. Fine to disagree but it reinforces the point.

[idle_zealot]

> What if you don’t give a shit about design and it’s a means to an end for a project that involves something different that you do care about?

Thank you for so succinctly demonstrating the problem with using AI for everything. You used to have to either care enough to do the design yourself or find someone who cared and specialized in that to do it for you. Now you quickly and cheaply fill in the parts you don't personally care about with sawdust, and as this becomes normalized you deprive yourself and others from discovering that they care about the design part. You'll ship your thing now, and it'll be fine. The damage is delayed and externalized.

I won't advocate against use of new technology to make yourself more productive, but it's important to at least understand what you're losing.

[eric_cc]

> You used to have to either care enough to do the design yourself or find someone who cared and specialized in that to do it for you.

Or worse, you gave up because you did not have the time to learn the skill or the money to hire somebody. In this case, your dream just died.

[SiempreViernes]

Who says the world where dreams went unrealised is the worse one?

If Grok didn't create the fake nudes users were dreaming about but couldn't create with Photoshop,

would my headstone crumble down?

As "intel" dashboards stay a dream,

the Hollywood wind's a howl

As photos are just still

The Kremlin's falling

As Einstein is not wrong

Radio 4 is static

[TeMPOraL]

> You used to have to either care enough to do the design yourself or find someone who cared and specialized in that to do it for you.

You think most UI/UX designers, or the artists creating slop for content marketing spam factories for the past decades, cared? Some, maybe. Most probably had higher ambitions, but are doing what actually pays their bills.

It's similar to software developers. Most of those being paid to code couldn't care less, they're in there for the fat paycheck; everyone else mostly complains the work is boring or dumb (or worse), but once you have those skills, it makes no economic sense to switch careers (unless, of course, you're into management, or into playing the entrepreneurship roulette).

[idle_zealot]

I think the more you industrialize a process, the more those involved become cogs (or get replaced with actual or metaphorical cogs in a machine). This is fine, even desirable, for anything we can produce en masse and apply quality control to. I do not mind that my rivets and screws are not artisanal. We figured out how to make a useful and reliable widget and can churn them out on an industrial scale no problem. I do not see the value in doing the same with software. We already get mass-production for free because the product is bytes. Why are we industrializing the process of making millions of variations of the same thing? Surely the effort would be better spent finding the "screw" of software, perfecting it, and making it trivial for users to accomplish whatever task they want without having to generate the gaps between with untested code. I want modularity and better design, not automated design.

[jimbokun]

I do think they cared.

The paychecks weren’t great. Everyone was offering to pay designers with “exposure”. If they didn’t innately care about the field they would have done something more lucrative.

[switchbak]

Man so much of this thread is full of such high minded philosophizing, it's like we're debating wine instead of talking about interfaces for doing things.

Like, maybe I just want to make an interface to configure my homemade espresso dohickey, do I have to wear a turtleneck and read Christopher Alexander now? I just wanted a couple buttons and some sliders.

We don't all have to be experts in everything, some people just need a means to an end, and that's ok. I won't like the wave of slop that's coming, but the antidote certainly isn't this.

[SiempreViernes]

Why do you want sliders when a config file would do the same just fine?

It's true that design theory writing is annoyingly verbose and intangible, but that doesn't make it wrong. Give someone a concrete language spec and they will not really know how it feels to use the language, and even once they do experience its use they will not be able to explain that feeling using the language spec. Invariably the language will tend to become intangible and likely very verbose.

But to answer your question: no, it's of course perfectly serviceable to just copy the interface others have created, and if the needs aren't exactly the same you can just put up with the inevitable discomfort from where the original doesn't translate into the copy.

[dwb]

Don’t be so anti-intellectual, there’s enough of that around. A simple problem is going to have a small set of simple design solutions; the philosophising readily admits that. Nothing’s getting in your way.

[switchbak]

I’m not being anti-intellectual, I’m being anti-elitist and anti-obfuscation.

It’s not the science and intellect I take issue with, engineering has plenty of that. It’s the art-adjacent navel gazing post modern bullshit I don’t like.

[dwb]

Well I think that art is good, thinking about design is good, that using a couple of terms that aren’t immediately clear to you isn’t “obfuscation”, and that postmodernism can be a useful analytical lens. Seeing the world only through science and engineering (as useful as they can be when applied well) is cold, dead, and sad.

[switchbak]

Well, I think that typically 90% of engineering is bullshit, that 90% of everything is almost always bullshit, and that 90% of the high minded nonsense you're talking about can be tossed with no loss whatsoever.

The other 10% of the design world? Actual useful, and can help create truly better things. And typically offered honestly because there really is something of substance being shared. To be clear: there can be tremendous value in the design world.

And nice false dichotomy there - if someone disagrees with the snooty extravagances of the design world, then they only care about science and engineering. That is not what I said, and your twisting of my statements is either a shallow read or disingenuous.

[jimbokun]

Then no design is taking place.

[skeeter2020]

Jobs has entered the chat and has some strong words for you...

[nekooooo]

how nihlistic

[timcarlock]

I agree, though I'd offer a counter-point to the implied idea that tools like this stifle exploration and creativity.

I'm an engineer who also loves design. I've read a lot of the books (including the one referenced), I know some concepts and terminology, and I understand the general process — but I'll never be a professional designer. My knowledge is limited, and I find most design tools so complex they actually get in the way of problem exploration and creativity.

For people like me, this tools removes the friction which actually prevents me from being more focused on the valuable parts of the design process. I can more easily discover and learn new concepts, and ultimately spend more time being creative and exploring the problem space.

[skydhash]

The issue is that UI design has different constraints compared to general graphic design, just like product design is not sculplture. Most UI designers only care about the visual aspects while neglecting the interactive aspect.

A whiteboard or a wireframing software would be better, because it lets you focus first on the interactive part. And once that’s solved, the visual part is easier.

[pilgrim0]

There’s no conflict here. Using a tool to automate what you have validated to be the trivial parts of a production process is the proper use of the tool. Professional designers also use this bias. For instance, I might recognize that creating a custom font or illustration is not core to my solution, so I can employ an off the shelf font or illustration and focus, say, in the written content. Same principle. The problem is most people won’t even acknowledge or validate the essential aspects of the solution and just iterate mindlessly.

[throwaway041207]

Dawg, I'm just trying to keep my managers happy so I can get a paycheck and have health care and hit the trails on the weekend.

[samrus]

The tool just allows them to synthesize an implementation, but if its designed badly then it will fail and they will have to get better at design anyway. I dont see how that itself is the problem. The tractor didnt make farmers worse at farming even if they lost the strength to work an old school plow

I think the challenge will be everything else the person will be doing. Will this person also try to coding? And financial management? And marketing? And operational planning? Just because there are tools out there for them to synthesize implementations of that. If so then they wont be able to get good at any of those. But i think the backwards pressure from failing at those things will bring it back to a stable equilibrium where you have specialists who are good at the abstract ideas of their field leveraging these things as a new abstraction layer of work, analogous to the compiler

I think itll be fine

[jgautsch]

Extremely well said. This lesson has never been more urgently important than now.

[fortzi]

I agree with all of that.

However, that’s not to say that many designer jobs will be going away, simply because for many cases, cost beats quality. We’ll just have more things with a much lower quality.

You can compare it with mass manufacturing. While some things are better had than not, even with low quality, we’d probably be better off with some things made to last, in lower quantity. But for 99% of the population, e.g. low quality clothing is the norm.

[alex_sf]

Most people just want something that looks nice. I understand it’s deeper to someone really into it, but the rest of us are fine with it.

[ModernMech]

That's mostly a matter of aesthetics, not design.

[eecc]

Well well well, that was nice read thanks!

And if it’s LLM the prompt or the rework were very good because I really liked the flow and clarity. That, or you’re a really good writer ;)

[akiarie]

This is such a beautiful distillation of everything I believe about the dangers of over-reliance on AI. I implore thee, good sir, to write a longer essay on this.

[AIorNot]

Creativity is a very big part of design, these Gen AI tools allow for stepping through a lot of variations and creative ideas very quickly, even creating working artifacts and protoypes on the fly and iterating rapidly

This speed and variation wins for me. But yes without a designers eye laziness can get lost in slop design too..

To me the value of Gen Ai is an accelerant (not slop factory) for ideation and solutions not a replacement of the human owning the process.. but laziness ususally wins

[MikeNotThePope]

I see it as a great crutch until I can afford a designer.

[yard2010]

Important take. The same applies to software 1:1

[mathisfun123]

> because of the truly marvelous human experiences that they’ll miss

when people wax philosophical/poetical about what is essentially capital production already i'm always so perplexed - do you not realize that you're not doing art/you're not an artisan? your labor is always actively being transformed into a product sold on a market. there are no "marvelous human experiences", there is only production and consumption.

> They’ll be impoverished and confuse output with agency

ironic.

[moregrist]

> your labor is always actively being transformed into a product sold on a market. there are no "marvelous human experiences", there is only production and consumption.

The first time I used Mac OS/X, circa 2004-2005, I was blown away by the design and how they managed to expose the power of the underlying Unix-ish kernel without making it hurt for people who didn't want that experience. My SO couldn't have cared less about Terminal.app, but loved the UI. I also loved the UI and appreciated how they took the time to integrate cli tools with it.

I would say it was a marvelous human experience _for me_.

Sure it was the Apple engineers' and designers' labor transformed into a product, but it was a fucking great product and something that I'm sure those teams were very proud of. The same was true with the the iPod and the iPhone.

I work on niche products, so I've never done something as widely appreciated as those examples, but on the products I've worked on, I can easily say that I really enjoy making things that other people want to use, even if it's just an internal tool. I also enjoy getting paid for my labor. I've found that this is often a win-win situation.

Work doesn't have to be exploitive. Products don't have to exploit their users.

Viewing everything through the lens of production and consumption is like viewing the whole world as a big constraint optimization problem: (1) you end up torturing the meaning of words to fit your preconceived ideas, and (2) by doing so you miss hearing what other people are saying.

[mathisfun123]

> Sure it was the Apple engineers' and designers' labor transformed into a product, but it was a fucking great product and something that I'm sure those teams were very proud of. The same was true with the the iPod and the iPhone.

...

> Work doesn't have to be exploitive. Products don't have to exploit their users.

bruh do people have any idea what they're writing as they write it? you're talking about "work doesn't have to be [exploitative]" in the same breath as Apple which is the third largest market cap company in the world and who's well known for exploiting child labor to produce its products. like has this comment "jumped the shark"?

> Viewing everything through the lens of production and consumption

i don't view everything through any lens - i view work through the lens of work (and therefore production/consumption). i very clearly delineated between this lens and at least one other lens (art).

[SiempreViernes]

The guy in Cupertino aren't the ones behind bars so they can't jump their deaths; for someone who supposedly "clearly delineated", you sure are mixing up those who are being exploited with the people who benefitted.

Ultimately the exploitative pyramid always terminates in a peak, and the guys working up there can for sure be having a hecking great time doing their jobs.

[stackbutterflow]

Maybe you'll dismiss it as another poetic waxing but what I understand they're saying is that capitalism hasn't yet captured all the inefficiencies of the human experience.

[jimbokun]

So the definition of art is work except you don’t get paid?

[throwfaraway4]

What a sad take. For the sake of human satisfaction I hope this is a minority perspective.

[mathisfun123]

> What a sad take.

just repeating the same mistake as op: sadness/happiness is completely outside the scope here. these are aspects of a job - "design" explicitly relates to products not art. and wondering about the sadness/happiness of a job is like wondering about the marketability of a piece of art - it's completely besides the point!

[textadventure]

OP never talked about art. Design is not art, it's problem solving. And good design according to Dieter Rams:

1. Good design is innovative 2. Good design makes a product useful 3. Good design is aesthetic 4. Good design makes a product understandable 5. Good design is unobtrusive 6. Good design is honest 7. Good design is long-lasting 8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail 9. Good design is environmentally friendly 10. Good design is as little design as possible

Generative AI just tries to predict based on its training data.

[whatever1616]

>"design" explicitly relates to products not art

a product can be a piece of art and design can and does in practice often go hand in had with art, practically most designers also other than the utilitarian role practice the artistic one, wether you would want to group art within design as one is a matter of definitions

[pjmorris]

Whatever the merits or demerits of 'marvelous human experiences' are from the point of view of production and consumption, the OP's conclusion leaves out the important point that Alexander's 'rationalization of forces that define a problem' produces designs that come closer to solving real-life problems (even in production and consumption) than simply putting attractive lipstick on an economic utility pig. If production isn't solving real human problems, consumers will go elsewhere.

[mathisfun123]

> If production isn't solving real human problems, consumers will go elsewhere.

of course but that's well within the scope of the whole paradigm (as opposed to how it is originally phrased it in relation to a loss of "marvelous human experiences"): if i use a bad tool to solve my customer's problems in an unsatisfactory way then my customers will no longer be my customers (assuming the all knowing guiding hand of the free market). so there's no new observation whatsoever in OP.