I have added another of Brian’s Libertarian Alliance pamphlets to the archive: Design As Outcome.

In it, Brian discusses the nature of design and knowledge. From his experience doing graphic design for the Libertarian Alliance pamphlets, he discovers that design is iterative. As a software developer, I notice that in fact his description of the process is remarkably similar to processes discovered by software developers: we iterate because the nature of the problem becomes more clear with successive attempts.

The designer does not know everything about the job he faces. He does not, to revert to the crossword analogy, have all the clues in front of him. Nor can he ever be sure that he has got any particular clue right, the way you usually can with crosswords. He merely makes a succession of design decisions, each on the basis of very different and very incomplete knowledge, and he hopes that these decisions will later turn out okay and that he won’t have to retrace too many of his steps.

Brian argues that, while Hayek said spontaneous order is, “the result of human actions, not of human design”, the process of design as discovery of how to achieve outcomes has more in common with spontaneous order than Hayek perhaps imagined.