JOHN CHRIS JONESDRS LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD, address by NIGEL CROSS: The recipient of this Award is known to different people by different names John Jones, or Chris Jones, J Christopher Jones, and john chris jones. The different versions of his name reflect the different roles he has played almost the different personae that he has assumed over a varied life and career. John Christopher Jones was born in 1927, in Aberystwyth, Wales. After National Service in the Army, he studied engineering at Cambridge University, and emerged into the brave new world of Britain in the 1950s. He immediately became involved in the field of design, working for the Festival of Britain in 1951. Shortly after, he worked for AEI the large electrical engineering manufacturer in Manchester, where he must have been one of the first people involved in ergonomics in this country. At the same time he was occasionally teaching in industrial design at the Manchester College of Art. Throughout the 1950s he wrote many articles for Design magazine, including a pioneering and insightful series on the implications of automation for design. At the end of the 50s he published his seminal article on 'A Systematic Design Method'. He has said that he became involved in systematic design methods only as a way of trying to get ergonomics data included in the engineering design process at the time and place where it belongs at the beginning. He has also always said that the aim of his growing involvement in studying and redesigning the design process, was to be able to include within it both rationality and intuition. In the early 1960s he was invited by the far-sighted Professor Denis Harper to establish what became the Design Research Laboratory at UMIST. There, he devised and ran an MSc course in Design Technology introducing design students to ergonomics, statistics, research methods, the history of technology, and the then new subjects of computing, operational research, systems engineering, and design methods. The Design Research Laboratory also pioneered approaches to what has become known as user-centred design; and actually originated several of the methods and techniques that are now used in leading design consultancies around the world. One of Chris's recurrent themes was that machines should be zero-learning devices, meaning that they should be usable in obvious, intuitive ways what today we call user friendly. In 1962, Chris Jones (that's the name I will always know him by) was one of the organisers of the Conference on Design Methods in London. This was the first conference on the new systematic methods, and on studying the processes of design again, both rational and intuitive processes. Out of that conference, grew the Design Research Society Chris was the Vice-Chair of the first Council of the Society and the rest is history; here we are, now, honouring one of our founding great-grandfathers. But Chris Jones makes his own history and not always in any straightforward way. At the end of the 1960s he finished his influential book on Design Methods a book that set the template for many others and effectively quit the field. The book was actually, he said in private, his farewell present to the design methods field something which people never really understood. The books subtitle is 'Seeds of Human Futures' which suggests the big moves Chris was about to make from conventional views of design to something else. Then, after being appointed the first Professor of Design in the new Open University in 1970, he found that the OU was turning out to be nothing like the democratised educational opportunity and learning facilitator that he envisaged and so he quit that, too. He turned, instead, to redesigning design in a much more radical way than before especially to the use of chance processes in designing life, the universe, and everything. When he was invited (as he often was, given his reputation in design methods) to give visiting lectures at that time, some of his audiences were clearly astonished at the transformation imagine the audience at the Architectural Association which was presented with weird snapshots from his family holiday in St Ives, taken from randomly-decided locations; or the audience of design methodologists in the USA, presented with randomly-chosen readings from a great variety of sources. He continued to write quite prolifically, often using chance methods of composition, and several new publications appeared in the 1980s. And then he discovered what I think he had always had some intuition would appear the Internet and the world-wide-web. He practically invented what has become known as the weblog (wee-blog or blog) a personal diary of everyday events and thoughts and reflections, available to everyone who cares to log on to his website at softopia.demon.co.uk. I remember Chris telling me once that whenever he was asked So, Mr Jones, what do you do?, he would reply 'Im a beginner', meaning that he saw himself as someone who initiated new things. Some of you may remember his definition of designing in his Design Methods book to initiate change in man-made things. And from my very brief, and selective summary, you can see that he did, indeed, begin many new things. I propose him as a very worthy recipient of the award of the
Design Research Society for lifetime contribution to design
research."
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