Sources: J. Christopher Jones

Photo: Robin Roy, Hampstead Heath, London, 2007, at Jones's 80th birthday party, via the Open University Design@Open blog. Cropped square. All rights reserved: no freely licensed photograph of Jones was found, and the only one on Wikipedia is 134 px wide.

John Christopher Jones (1927–2022) was a Welsh design theorist and one of the founders of the design methods movement. He studied engineering at Cambridge and worked as an industrial designer at Associated Electrical Industries (AEI) in Manchester, where he was among the first to bring ergonomics into engineering design. He was the lead organiser of the 1962 Conference on Design Methods in London, generally treated as the start of design methodology as a field. He set up the Design Research Laboratory at UMIST in 1965 and became the first Professor of Design at the Open University in 1970. He was a founding member of the Design Research Society (1966) and its Chair from 1971 to 1973. His book Design Methods (1970), a reasoned catalogue of 35 methods, became a standard reference for the field. In 1974 he left academia, having turned against the machine-like methods he had promoted, and spent the rest of his life writing independently about designing as a process open to everyone. Mark Parson's 2007 thesis cites the 1962 conference papers (1963) for the classic three-stage design process, and Design Methods (2nd ed., 1992). It names Jones, with Alexander, Archer and Simon, as its primary texts. This page lists his books, papers and recordings, and where each can legally be read. Citations were checked against the Library of Congress, HathiTrust, the British Library, the publisher, Crossref, the Design Research Society (DRS) archive, or the work itself. Compiled 2026-10-20.

Books

Design Methods (1970; 1980; 1992)

The thesis's main Jones source.

• Jones, J. C. (1970). Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures. London and New York: Wiley-Interscience. xvi + 407 pp.; bibliography pp. 397–403. ISBN 0-471-44790-0. LCCN 77122344.
• 1980 edition, "with a review of new topics" (imprint 1981). Chichester and New York: Wiley. xxxii + 407 pp., paperback. ISBN 0-471-27958-7. LCCN 80041757. The body is unchanged. A new front section reviews what had changed since 1970.
• 2nd edition (1992). Design Methods. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. lxiv + 407 pp. ISBN 0-442-01182-2. LCCN 92007253. The subtitle is dropped. It adds prefaces by C. Thomas Mitchell and Timothy Emlyn Jones and a set of "imaginary preludes" by Jones, and reprints the 1970 introduction and the 1980 review. The 407-page body is the same, so page references hold across all three.
• Wiley paperback of the 2nd edition, 472 pp., ISBN 978-0-471-28496-3, still sold print-on-demand: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Design+Methods%2C+2nd+Edition-p-9780471284963.

What it argues. Part One, "Design Methods in Theory", has six chapters: What is Designing? (p. 3); Traditional Methods (p. 15); The Need for New Methods (p. 27); The New Methods Reviewed (p. 45); The Design Process Disintegrated (p. 61); Choosing Strategies and Methods (p. 75).

• What designing is. Jones defines designing by its effect, not its products: its aim is "to initiate change in man-made things" (p. 4). The definition covers any change to the made world, not only the making of products.
• Traditional methods. In craft evolution, forms improve slowly over generations of making and use (pp. 15–20). Design by drawing, which separated designing from making, sped this up. Neither copes with the size and novelty of modern problems. Precedent fails exactly when a form needs to be reorganised as a whole (p. 20).
• Three views of the designer. "The New Methods Reviewed" sorts the new methods by what they assume about the designer's mind. The designer as magician is a black box whose creative leaps cannot be explained (p. 46). The designer as computer is a glass box who follows an explicit, rational procedure (p. 50). The designer as a self-organizing system splits the work between searching for designs and controlling the search (p. 55). This third view is the one Jones builds on.
• Three stages. Most theorists, he says, agree on a three-stage process: break the problem into pieces, put the pieces together in a new way, and test the result to see what happens. These are analysis, synthesis and evaluation (p. 63). He restates them as divergence, transformation and convergence (pp. 64–69). Divergence widens the search to find the problem's true limits. Transformation is the creative stage, where a pattern is imposed and the problem is restructured. Convergence narrows the options down to one design. The thesis's three-stage diagram draws on this model.
• A catalogue of methods. Part Two (from p. 89) describes 35 methods in six groups:
  1. prefabricated strategies (convergence)
  2. strategy control
  3. exploring design situations (divergence)
  4. searching for ideas (divergence and transformation)
  5. exploring problem structure (transformation)
  6. evaluation (convergence)
  
  They include stating objectives (3.1), literature searching (3.2), searching for visual inconsistencies (3.3), interviewing users (3.4), morphological charts (4.4), the interaction matrix (5.1), AIDA (5.3), and "Alexander's method of determining components" (5.7, p. 340), which is the decomposition method of Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form (see the Alexander page).

Where to read it. In copyright and still in print from Wiley as a print-on-demand paperback (above). Google Books has a limited preview of the Wiley printing of the 2nd edition: https://books.google.com/books?id=IR7KZXa1Nl8C. HathiTrust has all three editions, search-only: 1970, 1980, 1992. Internet Archive lending copies are not listed as sources.

Translations. Spanish: Métodos de diseño, trans. María Luisa López Sardá. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1976. xvi + 370 pp. (FADU-UBA catalogue); a 1978 printing has ISBN 84-252-0625-1. Japanese: デザインの手法. Tokyo: Maruzen, 1973. 409 pp. (NDL). Wiley's description also lists Romanian, Polish and Russian translations.

Reviews.

• Easterby, R. (1973). Review of Design Methods (1970). Ergonomics 16(1), 131–132. doi:10.1080/00140137308928401.
• Purcell, P. (1981). Review of the 1980 edition. Design Studies 2(3), 189–190. doi:10.1016/0142-694X(81)90099-5.
• Bamber, D. J. (1981). Review of the 1980 edition. Journal of the Operational Research Society 32(12), 1158–1159. doi:10.1057/jors.1981.229.
• Clarke, A. A. (1983). Review of the 1980 edition. Ergonomics 26(3), 299–300. doi:10.1080/00140138308963343.
• King, S. (1995). Review of Design Methods and Designing Designing. Journal of Design History 8(1), 70–75. doi:10.1093/jdh/8.1.70.

The 1962 Conference on Design Methods

• Jones, J. C., & Thornley, D. G. (Eds.) (1963). Conference on Design Methods: Papers presented at the Conference on Systematic and Intuitive Methods in Engineering, Industrial Design, Architecture and Communications, London, September 1962. Oxford and New York: Pergamon. xiii + 222 pp. LCCN 63018671.
• The conference was held on 19–21 September 1962 in the Department of Aeronautics, Imperial College London. John Page chaired the organising committee, which included Jones, Thornley, Bruce Archer and Anthony Froshaug (DRS archive).
• Nigel Cross calls it the event generally regarded as the launch of design methodology: Cross, N. (1993), "A History of Design Methodology", in de Vries, Cross & Grant (Eds.), Design Methodology and Relationships with Science (Kluwer), 15–27, doi:10.1007/978-94-015-8220-9_2. It led to the founding of the Design Research Society in 1966.
• The papers include Jones's "A Method of Systematic Design" (pp. 53–74; listed as "Method of Systematic Design" in the DRS contents) and Christopher Alexander's "The Determination of Components for an Indian Village" (p. 83), an early version of the worked example in Notes on the Synthesis of Form.
• Open full text: the whole volume (45.2 MB PDF) is on the DRS Digital Library, published with permission from Elsevier, the parent of Pergamon: https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/design_methods_conference_1962/1/. Local copies of two papers, cut from that PDF with its DRS cover and the Pergamon copyright page: jones-1963-method-of-systematic-design.pdf (pp. 53–74) and alexander-1963-components-indian-village.pdf (pp. 83–114). The full volume is too large to serve from this site. The archive also has audio recordings from the conference.
• Reviewed by H. S. Easterby, Ergonomics 7(4), 1964, 499–500, doi:10.1080/00140136408956251.

His turn away from design methods

• Jones, J. C. (1977). "How my thoughts about design methods have changed during the years". Design Methods and Theories 11(1), 50–62. Reprinted in Designing Designing (2021), 13–28, doi:10.5040/9781350070707.ch-002. Cross (1993) quotes Jones's reasons. In the 1970s he reacted against design methods: against their machine language, their behaviourism, and the effort to fit the whole of life into a logical framework. Cross's 2022 tribute adds that Jones called the 1970 book his farewell present to the field. Like Alexander in 1971, Jones stepped away from the movement he had helped start. Unlike Alexander, he kept the book in print and kept writing about designing, now as an open, shared, continuous activity.

Other books

• Jones, J. C. (1984). Essays in Design. Chichester and New York: Wiley. xiii + 335 pp. ISBN 0-471-90297-7. LCCN 83017010. His essays from after he left design methods. Cross notes that their order and section titles were chosen by chance, the titles taken from poems by Wallace Stevens.
• Jones, J. C. (1991). Designing Designing. London: Architecture Design and Technology Press. xlv + 335 pp. ISBN 1-85454-150-1. Essays in Design reissued with new material.
• Jones, J. C. (2021). Designing Designing. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts (Radical Thinkers in Design). Introduction by Clive Dilnot, foreword by C. Thomas Mitchell, afterword by John Thackara. ISBN 978-1-350-07067-7 (pbk). doi:10.5040/9781350070707 (British Library record). Paywalled. The essays argue for "designing without a product": designing as a continuous process shared with the people who use what is designed.
• Jones, J. C. (2000). the internet and everyone. London: Ellipsis. 592 pp. ISBN 1-899858-20-2. LCCN 00690876. Writing on the internet, its precursors such as the telephone, and "creative democracy", in a mix of essay, correspondence and fiction, some of it in Welsh.

Papers and essays

Further papers, listed by citation only (not read for this page):

• "A systematic design method", Design 124, 1959 (April or May; sources differ). His first published method.
• "Design methods compared 1: Strategies" and "2: Tactics", Design 212 (Aug 1966), 32–35, and 213 (Sept 1966), 46–50; "Trying to design the future", Design 225 (Sept 1967), 35–39. Page scans of all three are free to view in the VADS archive of the Design Council's Design magazine (e.g. https://vads.ac.uk/digital/collection/DIAD/id/3978). They are images only.
• "Design methods reviewed", in S. A. Gregory (Ed.), The Design Method (Butterworths, 1966), 295–309.
• "The state-of-the-art in design method", in G. Broadbent & A. Ward (Eds.), Design Methods in Architecture (Lund Humphries, 1969), 193 ff.; also in G. T. Moore (Ed.), Emerging Methods in Environmental Design and Planning (MIT Press, 1970), 3–8.
• "Small is powerful: technology is art", Futures 13(1), 1981, 51–62, doi:10.1016/0016-3287(81)90052-5.
• "depending on everyone: some thoughts on contextual design", Design Studies 11(4), 1990, 187–193, doi:10.1016/0142-694X(90)90036-C.
• "Designing as living?", Information Design Journal 7(2), 1993, 142–147, doi:10.1075/idj.7.2.06jon.
• "Creative democracy, with extended footnotes to the future", Futures 30(5), 1998, 475–479, doi:10.1016/S0016-3287(98)00049-4.

Talks and interviews

• "Double Consciousness", a written conversation with GK VanPatter, NextD Journal (2006). Archived copy: http://web.archive.org/web/20081006114528/http://www.nextd.org:80/02/09/02/index.html.
• 1962 Conference on Design Methods: the DRS Digital Library holds audio recordings from the conference (none is of Jones's own paper): https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/design_methods_conference_1962/.
• Jones wrote that two book-length interviews exist, by Chris Crickmay (about 1974) and Tom Mitchell (1989), each in only two or three copies. They are not publicly available.

Secondary sources

• Cross, N. (Ed.) (1984). Developments in Design Methodology. Chichester: Wiley. x + 357 pp. ISBN 0-471-10248-2. LCCN 84007433. An anthology of the design methods movement, which reprints work by Jones.
• Cross, N. (1993). "A History of Design Methodology" (above). It places the 1962 conference at the start of the field and quotes Jones's 1977 reasons for leaving it.
• Bayazit, N. (2004). "Investigating Design: A Review of Forty Years of Design Research". Design Issues 20(1), 16–29. doi:10.1162/074793604772933739. A history of design research that starts with the 1960s methods movement.
• Cross, N. (2007). "Forty years of design research". Design Studies 28(1), 1–4. doi:10.1016/j.destud.2006.11.004.
• Reviews of Designing Designing: Margolin, V. (1993), Information Design Journal 7(2), 148–151, doi:10.1075/idj.7.2.08mar. Overhill, H. (2021), She Ji 7(4), 638–639, doi:10.1016/j.sheji.2021.10.002 (open access). Ansari, A. (2022), Design and Culture 14(3), 361–365, doi:10.1080/17547075.2021.2016323.
• John Thackara, "john chris jones and 'designing designing'", 11 March 2021: https://thackara.com/knowing/john-chris-jones-and-designing-designing/.

About him

• His website, softopia: my public writing place, now at http://www.publicwriting.net/ (formerly www.softopia.demon.co.uk, archived in the Wayback Machine from 2000). It holds his essays, an online diary (last entry 15 June 2022), a list of his "invisible books" and a chronology of his life: http://www.publicwriting.net/2.2/chronology.html. The UK Web Archive preserves it: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/target/140073.
• His papers: J. Christopher Jones Papers, Ms-1989-023, Virginia Tech Special Collections: https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/resources/1650.
• Design Research Society: Chair 1971–73 (DRS history); first DRS Lifetime Achievement Award, 2004; Honorary Fellow (DRS fellows).
• Tributes:
  • Nigel Cross, "John Christopher Jones: In Memoriam", Open University Design@Open blog, 31 August 2022: https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/design/john-christopher-jones-in-memoriam-by-nigel-cross. The fullest account of his career.
  • Nigel Cross, "Remembering John Christopher Jones", Design Research Society, 29 August 2022: https://www.designresearchsociety.org/articles/remembering-john-christopher-jones.
  • GK VanPatter, "RIP John Chris Jones", NextD: https://www.nextd.org/post/rip-john-chris-jones.
• Encyclopedic summary (secondary): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Chris_Jones

Could not verify

• Age at death. His own chronology gives his birth as 7 October 1927, which makes him 94 when he died on 13 August 2022. Cross and the DRS say 95. The place, North London Hospice, comes only from John Thackara's public notice on LinkedIn.
• The thesis's paraphrase of Jones (1992): that designed forms are always recombinations of existing ones, with rarely any idea fundamentally novel without precedent. No passage like it was found in searches of the book's text for "precedent", "novel", "existing forms", "combinations" or "entirely new". The nearest passage, on craft evolution (pp. 15–20), partly argues the reverse: precedent fails when a form needs complete reorganisation (p. 20). The searches were of snippets, not a full reading.
• What the thesis calls 1992's new topics date from the 1980 edition; the 1992 edition reprints them.
• Page numbers across editions. All three editions have the same 407-page body, so they are assumed to share page numbers. Pages were checked only in the Wiley printing of the 2nd edition.
• Open University dates. Cross gives 1970–74; Virginia Tech's finding aid gives 1971–75.
• Translations. The Japanese edition's translator is not given. The Russian, Polish and Romanian translations were not found in catalogues.
• Designing Designing (1991) publisher. Jones's own page says Architecture Design and Technology Press, later sold by Phaidon; C. Thomas Mitchell cites Phaidon. No LCCN was found.
• "Softecnica". A first appearance in 1981 and inclusion in Essays in Design were not confirmed. Essays in Design's table of contents was not seen.
• Who maintains publicwriting.net since his death was not established. The domain is registered until 2027.
• Cross (1984) reprinting "A method of systematic design". Seen only in a pirated scan's contents page.
• The NextD issue number for "Double Consciousness" (9.2 or 26).
• "A theory of designing", sometimes listed among his writings, was not found.
• No Guardian obituary or Design Studies editorial was found.

Mirrors to avoid (found, not recommended): an archive.org upload of Designing Designing; Monoskop, pdfcoffee and Scribd copies of Design Methods; Internet Archive lending copies; the Core77 reprint of his 1981 essay (permission unclear).

Notes for the methodology

• The thesis's three-stage citation checks out. Jones's 1962 paper (published 1963) is organised as analysis, synthesis and evaluation (pp. 55 ff.). Design Methods (1970) keeps those three stages (p. 63) and renames them divergence, transformation and convergence (pp. 64–69). The 1962 version is a procedure for design teams. The 1970 version is a description of what the designer's mind does in each stage.
• "Designers are situation improvers" is not attributed in the thesis. It fits Jones's definition, "to initiate change in man-made things" (p. 4), and Herbert Simon's "changing existing situations into preferred ones" (The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969), but neither is the source of that wording.
• The precedent claim cited to Jones (1992) was not found in the book. It fits the methodology's "design is assemblage" principle, but needs another source, or a citation that points to Jones's craft-evolution chapter with its caveat.
• Jones also left the methods movement. In 1977 he rejected it, much as Alexander did in his 1971 preface. Both men's turns support the methodology's "literacy, not ceremony" stance: methods are notes to compose with, not a procedure to follow.
• His three views of the designer map onto the methodology's freedom-and-order theme. The "self-organizing system" view divides designing into a free search and a control of that search. That is close to what the Jencks page traces through Coleridge: a balance held at once (see the Jencks page).