tasarımcı nasıl bilir? | how does the designer know?

[at last, we arrived at Nigel Cross, actually if i had energy, or patience left, i would rather inspect into Lawson... this will be the last for now, and maybe a few paragraphs about richard florida will end the series for this summer. i need a mind-break and different occupations are waiting.]

Designerly Ways of Knowing
Nigel Cross
Birkhäuser, Basel • Boston • Berlin, 2003

chapter 1: Designerly Ways Of Knowing *First published in Design Studies Vol 3, No 4, October 1982, pp. 221–227.
[this text suggests design education to be part of the “general education”, as a third culture, besides sciences and humanities, so i cited it exhaustively:]
17> A principal outcome of a research project at the Royal College of Art on ‘Design in General Education’ was the statement of a belief in a missing ‘third area’ of education. The two already established areas can be broadly classified as education in the sciences and education in the arts, or humanities. These ‘two cultures’ have long been recognised as dominating our social, cultural and educational systems. In the traditional English educational system, especially, children have been required to choose one or other of these two cultures to specialise in at a relatively early age. The ‘third culture’ is not so easily recognised, simply because it has been neglected, and has not been adequately named or articulated. In their report (Royal College of Art, 1979), Bruce Archer and his colleagues were prepared to call it ‘Design with a capital D’ and to articulate it as ‘the collected experience of the material culture, and the collected body of experience, skill and understanding embodied in the arts of planning, inventing, making and doing’. From the RCA report, the following conclusions can be drawn on the nature of ‘Design with a capital D’:
_The central concern of Design is ‘the conception and realisation of new things’.
_It encompasses the appreciation of ‘material culture’ and the application of ‘the arts of planning, inventing, making and doing’.
_At its core is the ‘language’ of ‘modelling’; it is possible to develop students’ aptitudes in this ‘language’, equivalent to aptitudes in the ‘language’ of the sciences (numeracy) and the ‘language’ of humanities (literacy).
_Design has its own distinct ‘things to know, ways of knowing them, and ways of finding out about them’.
Even a ‘three cultures’ view of human knowledge and ability is a simple model. However, contrasting design with the sciences and the humanities is a useful, if crude, way of beginning to be more articulate about it. Education in any of these ‘cultures’ entails the following three aspects:
_the transmission of knowledge about a phenomenon of study
_a training in the appropriate methods of enquiry
_an initiation into the belief systems and values of the culture
p21> [here’re some intrinsic values of education, in contrast to pragmatic ones, but they’re undefined (by definition?), still i might have used this idea against professionalistic education:] I have considered Peters’ three criteria for ‘education’ at some length because it is important for the proponents of design in general education to be able to meet such criteria. It entails a fundamental change of perspective from that of a vocational training for a design profession, which is the only kind of ‘design education’ we have had previously. Design in general education is not primarily a preparation for a career, nor is it primarily a training in useful productive skills for ‘doing and making’ in industry. It must be defined in terms of the intrinsic values of education.
p22> Ways of Knowing in Design: The claim from the Royal College of Art study of ‘Design in General Education’ was that ‘there are things to know, ways of knowing them, and ways of finding out about them’ that are specific to the design area.
23> The essential difference between these two strategies is that while the scientists focused their attention on discovering the rule, the architects were obsessed with achieving the desired result. The scientists adopted a generally problem-focused strategy and the architects a solution-focused strategy. Although it would be quite possible using the architect’s approach to achieve the best solution without actually discovering the complete range of acceptable solutions, in fact most architects discovered something about the rule governing the allowed combination of blocks. In other words, they learn about the nature of the problem largely as a result of trying out solutions, whereas the scientists set out specifically to study the problem. ...
This suggests that architects learn to adopt their solution-focused strategy during, and presumably as a result of, their education. Presumably, they learn, are taught, or discover, that this is the more effective way of tackling the problems they are set. ... A central feature of design activity, then, is its reliance on generating fairly quickly a satisfactory solution, rather than on any prolonged analysis of the problem. In Simon’s (1969) inelegant term, it is a process of ‘satisficing’ rather than optimising; producing any one of what might well be a large range of satisfactory solutions rather than attempting to generate the one hypothetically optimum solution. This strategy has been observed in other studies of design behaviour, including engineers (Marples, 1960), urban designers (Levin, 1966) and architects (Eastman, 1970). ... It is also now widely recognised that design problems are ill-defined, ill-structured, or ‘wicked’ (Rittel and Webber, 1973). They are not the same as the ‘puzzles’ that scientists, mathematicians and other scholars set themselves. They are not problems for which all the necessary information is, or ever can be, available to the problem-solver. They are therefore not susceptible to exhaustive analysis, and there can never be a guarantee that ‘correct’ solutions can be found for them. In this context, a solution-focused strategy is clearly preferable to a problem-focused one: it will always be possible to go on analysing ‘the problem’, but the designer’s task is to produce ‘the solution’. It is only in terms of a conjectured solution that the problem can be contained within manageable bounds (Hillier and Leaman, 1974). What designers tend to do, therefore, is to seek, or impose a ‘primary generator’ (Darke, 1979) which both defines the limits of the problem and suggests the nature of its possible solution.
24> [the self confidence, that we are so fond of:] In order to cope with ill-defined problems, designers have to learn to have the self-confidence to define, redefine and change the problem-as-given in the light of the solution that emerges from their minds and hands. People who seek the certainty of externally structured, well-defined problems will never appreciate the delight of being a designer. Jones (1970) has commented that ‘changing the problem in order to find a solution is the most challenging and difficult part of designing.’ ...
27> Intrinsic Value of Design Education:
The arguments for, and defence of, design in general education must rest on identifying the intrinsic values of design that make it justifiably a part of everyone’s education. Above, I have tried to set out the field of ‘designerly ways of knowing’, as it relates to both the processes and the products of designing, in the hope that it will lead into an understanding of what these intrinsic values might be. Essentially, we can say that designerly ways of knowing rest on the manipulation of non-verbal codes in the material culture; these codes translate ‘messages’ either way between concrete objects and abstract requirements; they facilitate the constructive, solution-focused thinking of the designer, in the same way that other (e.g. verbal and numerical) codes facilitate analytic, problem-focused thinking; they are probably the most effective means of tackling the characteristically illdefined problems of planning, designing and inventing new things. From even a sketchy analysis, such as this, of designerly ways of knowing, we can indeed begin to identify features that can be justified in education as having intrinsic value. Firstly, we can say that design develops students’ abilities in tackling a particular kind of problem. This kind of problem is characterised as illdefined, or ill-structured, and is quite distinct from the kinds of well-structured problems that lie in the educational domains of the sciences and the humanities. We might even claim that our design problems are more ‘real’ than theirs, in that they are like the problems or issues or decisions that people are more usually faced with in everyday life. There is therefore a strong educational justification for design as an introduction to, and assisting in the development of, cognitive skills and abilities in real world problem solving (Fox, 1981). We must be careful not to interpret this justification 28> in instrumental terms, as a training in problem-solving skills, but in terms that satisfy the more rigorous criteria for education. As far as problem-solving is concerned, design in general education must be justified in terms of helping to develop an ‘educated’ person, able to understand the nature of ill-defined problems, how to tackle them, and how they differ from other kinds of problems. This kind of justification has been developed by McPeck (1981) in terms of the educational value of ‘critical thinking’. A related justification is given by Harrison (1978), particularly in the context of practical design work, in terms of the radical connections between ‘making and thinking’.
This leads us into a second area of justification for design in general education, based on the kind of thinking that is peculiar to design. This characteristically ‘constructive’ thinking is distinct from the more commonly acknowledged inductive and deductive kinds of reasoning. ... In educational terms, the development of constructive thinking must be seen as a neglected aspect of cognitive development in the individual. This neglect can be traced to the dominance of the cultures of the sciences and the humanities, and the dominance of the ‘stage’ theories of cognitive development. These theories, especially Piaget’s, tend to suggest that the concrete, constructive, synthetic kinds of reasoning occur relatively early in child development, and that they are passed through to reach the higher states of abstract, analytical reasoning (i.e. the kinds of reasoning that predominate in the sciences, especially). There are other theories (for example, Bruner’s) that suggest that cognitive development is a continuous process of interaction between different modes of cognition, all of which can be developed to high levels. That is, the qualitatively different types of cognition (e.g. ‘concrete’ and ‘formal’ types in Piaget’s terms, ‘iconic’ and ‘symbolic’ in Bruner’s terms) are not simply characteristic of different ‘stages’ of development, but are different kinds of innate human cognitive abilities, all of which can be developed from lower to higher levels. The concrete/iconic modes of cognition are particularly relevant in design, whereas the formal/symbolic modes are more relevant in the sciences. If the ‘continuous’ rather than the ‘stage’ theories of cognitive development are adopted, it is clear that there is a strong justification for design education in that it provides opportunities particularly for the development of the concrete/iconic modes. From this, we can move on to a third area of justification for design in general education, based on the recognition that there are large areas of human cognitive ability that have been systematically ignored in our educational system. Because most theorists of cognitive development are themselves thoroughly immersed in the scientific-academic cultures where numeracy and literacy prevail, they have overlooked the third culture of design. This culture relies not so much on verbal, numerical and literary modes of thinking and communicating, but on nonverbal modes. This is particularly evident in the designer’s use of models and ‘codes’ that 29> French (1979) has recognised nonverbal thinking as perhaps the principal justification for design in general education: ‘It is in strengthening and uniting the entire non-verbal education of the child, and in its improvement of the range of acuity of his thinking, that the prime justification of the teaching of design in schools should be sought, not in preparing for a career or leisure, nor in training knowledgeable consumers, valuable as these aspects may be.
I identified five aspects of designerly ways of knowing:
1. Designers tackle ‘ill-defined’ problems. 2. Their mode of problem-solving is ‘solution-focused’. 3. Their mode of thinking is ‘constructive’. 4. They use ‘codes’ that translate abstract requirements into concrete objects. 5. They use these codes to both ‘read’ and ‘write’ in ‘object languages’.
30> From these ways of knowing I drew three main areas of justification for design in general education: 1. Design develops innate abilities in solving real-world, illdefined problems. 2. Design sustains cognitive development in the concrete/iconic modes of cognition. 3. Design offers opportunities for development of a wide range of abilities in nonverbal thought and communication. ...
The research path to design as a discipline has concentrated on understanding those general features of design activity that are common to all the design professions: it has been concerned with ‘design in general’ and it now allows us to generalise at least a little about the designerly ways of knowing. The education path to design as a discipline has also been concerned with ‘design in general’, and it has led us to consider what it is that can be generalised as of intrinsic value in learning to design. Both the research and the education paths, then, have been concerned with developing the general subject of design. ...
31> We need a ‘research programme’, in the sense in which Lakatos (1970) has described the research programmes of science. At its core is a ‘touch-stone theory’ or idea – in our case the view that ‘there are designerly ways of knowing’. Around this core is built a ‘defensive’ network of related theories, ideas and knowledge – and I have tried to sketch in some of these in this chapter. In this way both design research and design education can develop a common approach to design as a discipline.

[this chapter illustrates the ill-defined design problem in relation with the solution focused designer behaviour:]
chapter 2. THE NATURE AND NURTURE OF DESIGN ABILITY * First presented as inaugural lecture as Professor of Design Studies, The Open University, 1989, and first published in Design Studies Vol 11, No 3, July 1990, pp. 127–140.
34> The kind of thinking that is going on is multi-facetted and multi-levelled. The designer is thinking of the whole range of design criteria and requirements set by the client’s brief, of technical and legal issues, and of self-imposed criteria such as the aesthetic and formal attributes of the proposal. Often, the problem as set by the client’s brief will be vague, and it is only by the designer suggesting possible solutions that the client’s requirements and criteria become clear. ...
35> ... one feature of design activity that is frequently confirmed by such studies is the importance of the use of several initial, conjectured solutions by the designer. In his pioneering case studies of engineering design, Marples (1960) suggested that: The nature of the problem can only be found by examining it through proposed solutions, and it seems likely that its examination through one, and only one, proposal gives a very biased view. It seems probable that at least two radically different solutions need to be attempted in order to get, through comparisons of subproblems, a clear picture of the ‘real nature’ of the problem. ...
This view emphasises the role of the conjectured solution as a way of gaining understanding of the design problem, and the need, therefore, to generate a variety of solutions precisely as a means of problem-analysis. It has been confirmed by Darke’s (1979) interviews with architects, where she observed how they imposed a limited set of objectives or a specific solution concept as a ‘primary generator’ for an initial solution: The greatest variety reduction or narrowing down of the range of solutions occurs early on in the design process, with a conjecture or conceptualization of a possible solution. Further understanding of the problem is gained by testing this conjectured solution. ... The freedom – and necessity – of the designer to re-define the problem through the means of solution-conjecture was also observed in protocol studies of architects by Akin (1979), who commented: One of the unique aspects of design behaviour is the constant generation of new task goals and redefinition of task constraints.
36> It has been suggested that this feature of design behaviour arises from the nature of design problems: they are not the sort of problems or puzzles that provide all the necessary and sufficient information for their solution. Some of the relevant information can only be found by generating and testing solutions; some information, or ‘missing ingredient’, has to be provided by the designer himself, as noted by Levin (1966) from his observations of urban designers. Levin suggested that this extra ingredient is often an ‘ordering principle’ and hence we find the formal properties that are so often evident in designers’ work, from towns designed as simple stars to teacups designed as regular cylinders. However, designers do not always find it easy to generate a range of alternative solutions in order that they better understand the problem. Their ‘ordering principles’ or ‘primary generators’ can, of course, be found to be inappropriate, but designers often try to hang on to them, because of the difficulties of going back and starting afresh. From his case studies of architectural design, Rowe (1987) observed: A dominant influence is exerted by initial design ideas on subsequent problem-solving directions… Even when severe problems are encountered, a considerable effort is made to make the initial idea work, rather than to stand back and adopt a fresh point of departure.
This tenacity is understandable but undesirable, given the necessity of using alternative solutions as a means of understanding the ‘real nature’ of the problem. However, Waldron and Waldron (1988), from their engineering design case study, came to a more optimistic view about the ‘self-correcting’ nature of the design process: The premises that were used in initial concept generation often proved, on subsequent investigation, to be wholly or partly fallacious. Nevertheless, they provided a necessary starting point. The process can be viewed as inherently self-correcting, since later work tends to clarify and correct earlier work. It becomes clear from these studies of designing that architects, engineers, and other designers adopt a problem-solving strategy based on generating and testing potential solutions.
37> This ‘abductive’ reasoning is a concept from the philosopher Peirce, who distinguished it from the other more well-known modes of inductive and deductive reasoning. Peirce (quoted by March) suggested that ‘Deduction proves that something must be; induction shows that something actually is operative; abduction merely suggests that something may be.’ It is therefore the logic of conjecture. March prefers to use the term ‘productive’ reasoning. Others, such as Bogen (1969), have used terms such as ‘appositional’ reasoning in contra distinction to propositional reasoning.
Design ability is therefore founded on the resolution of ill-defined problems by adopting a solution-focussing strategy and productive or appositional styles of thinking. However, the design approach is not necessarily limited to ill-defined problems. Thomas and Carroll (1979) conducted a number of experiments and protocol studies of designing and concluded that a fundamental aspect is the nature of the approach taken to problems, rather than the nature of the problems themselves: Design is a type of problem solving in which the problem solver views the problem or acts as though there is some ill-definedness in the goals, initial conditions or allowable transformations.
38> Design ability ... relies fundamentally on non-verbal media of thought and communication.
... the core features of design ability as comprising abilities to: 1. resolve ill-defined problems 2. adopt solution-focussing strategies 3. employ abductive/productive/appositional thinking 4. use non-verbal, graphic/spatial modelling media.
43> [the old conception of design education, schön’s studio:] The crude, simple work of the first-year student develops into sophisticated, complex work by the final year. But the educational processes which nurture this development are poorly understood – if at all – and rely heavily on the project method. In pre-industrial society, there was really no such thing as design education. People learned to make products in learning the skills of a trade, they were apprenticed to a master craftsperson, and they learned to copy. In many respects, the old tradition of design education, derived from the Beaux Arts School, was based on apprenticeship. Students worked closely with a master; they learned set responses to set problems; products and processes were predictable.
44> Modern, industrial design education owes much to the experimental work of the Bauhaus – the German design school of the nineteen-twenties and -thirties – in particular, the radical ‘basic course’ introduced by Johannes Itten. As Anita Cross (1983) has suggested, many of the basic course’s educational principles may well have been developed from, or influenced by the work of educational innovators such as Froebel, Montessori and Dewey. The Bauhaus also integrated design education with aesthetic cultures such as dance, theatre and music, as well as cultures of technology and industry. ... Most of the Bauhaus innovations are now severely watered-down in conventional design education, usually retaining just a few vestiges of exercises in colour, form and composition. With the possible exception of the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) at Ulm in the nineteen-sixties, there have been no comparable innovations in curriculum development in design education since the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933. ...
[general education and professional education:] ... In professional education the distinctions between education and training are perhaps less clear-cut than they are in general education, where no particular profession is the goal. Professional education has instrumental or extrinsic aims, whereas general education has to pursue intrinsic aims that are somehow inherently good for the individual. I suggest that it is through understanding the nature of design ability that we can begin to construct an understanding of the intrinsic values of design education. For example, we can make a strong justification for design based on its development of personal abilities in resolving ill-defined problems – which are quite different from the well-defined problems dealt with in other areas of the curriculum. We can also justify the designer’s solution-focused strategies and appositional thinking styles as promoting a certain type of cognitive development – in educational terms, the concrete/iconic modes that are often assumed to be the ‘earlier’ or
‘minor’ modes of cognition, and less important than the formal/symbolic modes. Furthermore, there is a sound justification in the educational value of design in its development of the whole area of non-verbal thought and communication.
45> [design education as part of the general education:] Making design education accessible means making it available to everyone. In many countries, design is now a part of general education – it is taught in schools to children. This means that design education is no longer just a preparation for a profession, but is recognised as having intrinsic value in the development of everyone’s intellect. It has become a part of our individual and collective intellectual culture, just like literature, science or mathematics; it has become a part of basic educational proficiency, just like reading, writing and numeracy. [the idea of virtual design studio:] ... It is no longer necessary to be physically present in a design studio – neither in professional practice nor in education. [continuous studio:] Virtual studios and virtual universities can be open to everyone, around the world and round the clock. ... And just as education no longer stops at a certain time of day, it no longer stops at a certain age; accessibility and ubiquity also mean that education must be continuous and available throughout one’s lifetime. ...
46> ... [alleged need for tested education theories:] We need a secure foundation from which to question the relevance of conventional skills. We have moved beyond the apprenticeship system of pre-industrial design, and we must move beyond the pupilage system of industrial design education. We need to base design education on tested theories from education, psychology and cognitive science, and from design research, and we need a much stronger experimental base for educational innovation. ...
Conventional wisdom about the nature of expertise in problem-solving seems often to be contradicted by the behaviour of expert designers. But designing has many differences from conventional problem-solving, in which there is usually a single, correct solution to the problem. In design education we must therefore be very wary about importing models of behaviour from other fields. Empirical studies of design activity have frequently found ‘intuitive’ features of design ability to be the most effective and relevant to the intrinsic nature of design.

3. NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN DESIGN * First presented as the keynote speech at AI in Design, Lisbon, Portugal, 1998, and first published as ‘Natural Intelligence in Design’, Design Studies, Vol 20, No 1, January 1999, pp. 25–39.
p49> My starting point is that people are designers – and some people are very good designers. Designing is something that all people do; something that distinguishes us from other animals, and (so far) from machines. The ability to design is a part of human intelligence, and that ability is natural and widespread amongst the human population. ...
50> I collected some of the early examples of design research together in a book on Developments in Design Methodology (Cross, 1984), The kinds of methods for researching the nature of design thinking that have been used have included:
_Interviews with designers ... Examples include Lawson (1994) and Cross and Clayburn Cross (1996).
_Observations and case studies ... Examples include Candy and Edmonds (1996), Galle (1996) and Valkenburg and Dorst (1998).
_Protocol studies ... Examples include Lloyd and Scott (1994), Gero and McNeill (1998), and the Delft Protocols Workshop (Cross, et al., 1996).
_Reflection and theorising ... Leading examples are Simon (1969) and Schön (1983).
_Simulation trials ... Many examples have been included in the proceedings of the series of AI in Design conferences, starting in 1991.
54> I think we have to acknowledge that design is risky – it is not comfortable, and it is not easy.
59> ... My first postgraduate research project, at the Design Research Laboratory at UMIST, Manchester, directed by John Christopher Jones, was in ‘Simulation of Computer Aided Design’ (Cross, 1967). At its core was a novel but strange idea that we might get some insights into what CAD might be like, and what the design requirements for CAD systems might be, by attempting to simulate the use of CAD facilities which at that time were mostly hypotheses and suggestions for future systems that hardly anyone really knew how to begin to develop. The strangeness about this idea was that we would effect these simulations through getting human beings to pretend to be the computers! This was the reverse application of the ‘Turing Test’. [!!!]
62> And of course, there is something else as well. Instead of machines that do things that people enjoy doing, and are good at doing, we want machines to do things that are arduous and difficult for human beings to do. We also want machines to do things that are not merely arduous or difficult for human beings to do, but to do things that human beings simply cannot do unaided. So rather than just imitate human abilities, some of our design machines should also do things that designers cannot do. [for me, as a laborer of design automation studies, machines, that could do even less than the human designer would suffice! ‘cause, if a machine can do it, just let it do!]
[following chapter is particularly interesting, where cross identifies a specific “creative leap”, far from being a leap, as being gradually prepared:]

4. CREATIVE COGNITION IN DESIGN I: THE CREATIVE LEAP * First published as ‘Modelling the Creative Leap’ in the preprints of the international workshop Computational Models of Creative Design III, edited by J S Gero, M L Maher and F Sudweeks, Key Centre of Design Computing, University of Sydney, Australia, 1995.
65> ... in engineering and design, significant innovations or novel design concepts are often reported as arising as sudden illuminations (Maccoby, 1991). The idea of ‘the creative leap’ has for some time been regarded as central to the design process (Archer, 1965). Whilst a ‘creative leap’ may not be a required feature of routine design, it must surely be a feature of non-routine, creative design. Some would argue that all design, by its very nature, is creative. However, there are times when a designer will generate a particularly novel design proposal, and there is evidence that the level of ‘creativity’ of a design proposal can be reliably assessed, at least by peer-groups (Amabile, 1982; Christiaans, 1992). [creativity assessed by peer groups: that’s a practically important assumption for me, i need it for evaluation]
66> We shall see that the creative cognitive act in design appears to be not so much taking a leap as building a bridge between problem requirements and solution proposal.
76> ... [after a specific design process’ protocol analysis:] But in practice, as we have seen in the extracts from the design team’s protocols, and has been suggested by others (March, 1976), designers usually proceed by suggesting ‘protomodels’ of forms or structures, and evaluating these in order to amplify the requirements or desired functions. Takeda et al. (1996), in their analysis of the team protocol, showed how functions, as well as structures, develop and evolve during the course of the design process. The ‘function’ of a product to be designed is not, therefore, a static concept, a ‘given’ at the start of the design process.
78> Not Leaping but Bridging:
This study of one example of a ‘creative leap’ in design has suggested that the example creative leap could conceivably be modelled by procedures such as combination, mutation, analogy, emergence, or designing from first principles. Because there is no overt record of the designers’ cognitive processes, it is not possible to identify which, if any, of the creative procedures actually occurred in the example.
However, if computational models of such procedures can be constructed, then progress is possible in computational modelling of creative design. Computational modelling of creative processes in the arts and sciences has had some reported success (Boden, 1990). The relative lack of progress in computational modelling of creative design may be due to the ‘appositional’ nature of design reasoning, in which function and form are developed in parallel, rather than in series. ... In practice, designing seems to proceed by oscillating between sub-solution and sub-problem areas, as well as by decomposing the problem and combining sub-solutions.

5. CREATIVE COGNITION IN DESIGN II: CREATIVE STRATEGIES * First published as ‘Strategic Knowledge Exercised by Outstanding Designers’ in the preprints of the international workshop Strategic Knowledge and Concept Formation III, edited by J S Gero and K Hori, Key Centre of Design Computing, University of Sydney, Australia, 2001.
94> [after descriptions of three expert designers’ designerly behaviour:] ... all three designers appear to explore the problem space from a particular perspective in order to frame the problem in a way that stimulates and pre-structures the emergence of design concepts.
97> From the analysis of the three examples, it appears that there are similar aspects to the creative strategies adopted by all three exceptional designers. It is perhaps surprising to see such commonalities between the three, considering the great disparity between the design projects in which they were engaged. However, although there are similarities in creative strategies across domains, this does not necessarily mean that experts can successfully switch practice between domains. Ericsson and Lehmann (1996) found that the superior performance of experts is usually domain-specific, and does not transfer across domains. Extensive training within a domain still seems to be crucial to professional expertise.

6. UNDERSTANDING DESIGN COGNITION * First presented at the international workshop on Knowing and Learning in Design, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, 1999, and first published as ‘Design Cognition: Results from Protocol and Other Empirical Studies of Design Activity’ in Design Knowing and Learning: Cognition in Design Education
100> ... In design, ‘problems’ are often defined only in relation to ideas for their ‘solution’, and designers do not typically proceed by first attempting to define their problems rigorously. ... Instead of generating abstract relationships and attributes, then deriving the appropriate object to be considered, the subjects always generated a design element and then determined its qualities.’ That is to say, the designer-subjects jumped to ideas for solutions (or partial solutions) before they had fully formulated the problem. This is a reflection of the fact that designers are solution-led, not problem-led; for designers, it is the evaluation of the solution that is important, not the analysis of the problem. It is not just that problem-analysis is weak in design; even when problem goals and constraints are known or defined, they are not sacrosanct, and designers exercise the freedom to change goals and constraints, as understanding of the problem develops and definition of the solution proceeds. This was a feature of designer behaviour noted by Akin (1979) from his protocol studies of architects: ‘One of the unique aspects of design behaviour is the constant generation of new task goals and redefinition of task constraints.’ As Ullman et al. (1988) pointed out, only some constraints are ‘given’ in a design problem; other constraints are ‘introduced’ by the designer from domain knowledge, and others are ‘derived’ by the designer during the exploration of particular solution concepts.
[main characteristics of designerly cognition:]
a. Problem Formulation
114> Goal Analysis: Designers appear to be ‘ill-behaved’ problem solvers, in that they do not spend much time and attention on defining the problem. However, this seems to be appropriate behaviour, since some studies have suggested that over-concentration on problem definition does not lead to successful design outcomes. It appears that successful design behaviour is based not on extensive problem analysis, but on adequate ‘problem scoping’, and on a focused or directed approach to gathering problem information and prioritising criteria. Setting and changing goals are inherent elements of design activity.
114> Solution Focusing: Designers are solution-focused, not problem-focused. This appears to be a feature of design cognition which comes with education and experience in designing. In particular, experience in a specific problem domain enables designers to move quickly to identifying a problem ‘frame’ and proposing a solution conjecture.
102> Co-evolution of Problem and Solution: Designers tend to use solution conjectures as the means of developing their understanding of the problem. Since ‘the problem’ cannot be fully understood in isolation from consideration of ‘the solution’, it is natural that solution conjectures should be used as a means of helping to explore and understand the problem formulation. As Kolodner and Wills (1996) observed, from a study of senior student engineering designers: ‘Proposed solutions often directly remind designers of issues to consider. The problem and solution co-evolve.
Problem Framing: Designers are not limited to ‘given’ problems, but find and formulate problems within the broad context of the design brief. This is the characteristic of reflective practice identified by Schön (1983) as problem setting: ‘Problem setting is the process in which, interactively, we name the things to which we will attend and frame the context in which we will attend to them.’ This seems to characterise well what has been observed of the problem formulation aspects of design behaviour. Designers select features of the problem space to which they choose to attend (naming) and identify areas of the solution space in which they choose to explore (framing). Schön (1988) suggests that: ‘In order to formulate a design problem to be solved, the designer must frame a problematic design situation: set its boundaries, select particular things and relations for attention, and impose on the situation a coherence that guides subsequent moves.’
103> b. Solution Generation
The solution-focused nature of designer behaviour appears to be appropriate behaviour for responding to ill-defined problems. Such problems can perhaps never be converted to well-defined problems, and so designers quite reasonably adopt the more realistic strategy of finding a satisfactory solution, rather than expecting to be able to generate an optimum solution to a well-defined problem. However, this solution-focused behaviour also seems to have potential drawbacks. One such drawback might be the ‘fixation’ effect induced by existing solutions.
104> Fixation: ... Designers may be too ready to re-use features of known existing designs, rather than to explore the problem and generate new design features. ... Purcell and Gero therefore concluded that the industrial designers seem to be ‘fixated on being different’, and that ‘fixation’ in design may exist in a number of forms. [this is reminiscent of our fixation with creativity] ... It is not clear that ‘fixation’ is necessarily a bad thing in design.
105> Attachment to Concepts: Another form of ‘fixation’ that has been found to exist amongst designers is their attachment to early solution ideas and concepts. Although designers change goals and constraints as they design, they appear to hang on to their principal solution concept for as long as possible, even when detailed development of the scheme throws up unexpected difficulties and shortcomings in the solution concept. Some of the changing of goals and constraints during designing is associated with resolving such difficulties without having to start again with a major new concept.
106> Generation of Alternatives: ... Fricke (1993, 1996), from protocol studies of engineering designers, found that both generating few alternative concepts and generating a large number of alternatives were equally weak strategies, leading to poor design solutions. Where there was ‘unreasonable restriction’ of the search space (when only one or a very few alternative concepts were generated), designers became ‘fixated’ on concrete 107> solutions too early. In the case of ‘excessive expansion’ of the search space (generating large numbers of alternative solution concepts), designers were then forced to spend time on organising and managing the set of variants, rather than on careful evaluation and modification of the alternatives. Fricke identified successful designers to be those operating a ‘balanced search’ for solution alternatives.
Creativity: Designers themselves often emphasise the role of ‘intuition’ in the generation of solutions, and ‘creativity’ is widely regarded as an essential element in design thinking. Creative design is often characterised by the occurrence of a significant event, usually called the ‘creative leap’. Recent studies of creative events in design have begun to shed more light on this previously mysterious (and often mystified) aspect of design. ... In these studies, Akin and Akin were looking for cases of the ‘sudden mental insight’ (SMI) that is commonly reported in cases of creative problem solving. They referred to the ‘fixation’ effect, such as the implicit nine-dot square, as a ‘frame of reference’ (FR) that has to be broken out of in order to generate creative alternatives. They suggested that a SMI occurs when a subject perceives their own fixation within a standard FR, and simultaneously perceives a new FR. The new FR also has to include procedures for generating a solution to the problem.
108> It may be also that ‘creative leaps’ or ‘sudden mental insights’ are not so personal and idiosyncratic as has been promoted before. In protocol studies of experienced industrial designers, Cross and Dorst (1998) observed that all nine subjects reported the same ‘creative breakthrough’. All nine linked together the same pieces of available information and used this as a basis for their solution concept. All nine appeared to think that this was a unique personal insight.
Sketching: Several researchers have investigated the ways in which sketching helps to promote creativity in design thinking. Sketching helps the designer to find unintended consequences, the surprises that keep the design exploration going in what Schön and Wiggins (1992) called the ‘reflective conversation with the situation’ that is characteristic of design thinking. ...
109>c. Process Strategy:
An aspect of concern in design methodology and related areas of design research has been the many attempts at proposing systematic models of the design process, and suggestions for methodologies or structured approaches that should lead designers efficiently towards a good solution. However, most design in practice still appears to proceed in a rather ad-hoc and unsystematic way. Many designers remain wary of systematic procedures that, in general, still have to prove their value in design practice.
Structured Processes: It is not clear whether learning a systematic process actually helps student designers. ... These designers worked reasonably efficiently and followed a fairly logical procedure, whether or not they had been educated in a systematic approach. In comparison, designers with too-rigid adherence 110> to a methodical procedure (behaving ‘unreasonably methodical’), or with very un-systematic approaches, produced mediocre or poor design solutions. ... The occurrence of some relatively simple patterns of design process activity has often been suggested from anecdotal knowledge. For example, there has been a broad assumption that designing proceeds in cycles of analysis-synthesis-evaluation activities. Although such patterns of design process activity frequently have been proposed or hypothesised, there has been little empirical confirmation.
Opportunism: In contrast to studies that confirm the prevalence and relevance of fairly structured design behaviour, there have also been reports of some studies that emphasised the ‘opportunistic’ behaviour of designers. 111> However, rather than regarding opportunism as unprincipled design behaviour, Guindon had suggested it might be inevitable in design: ‘These deviations are not special cases due to bad design habits or performance breakdowns but are, rather, a natural consequence of the ill-structuredness of problems in the early stages of design.’ So it may be that we should not equate ‘opportunistic’ with ‘unprincipled’ behaviour in design, but rather that we should regard ‘opportunism’ as characteristic of expert design behaviour.
Modal Shifts: An aspect of cognitive strategy that emerges from several studies is that, especially during creative periods of conceptual design, designers alternate rapidly in shifts of attention between different aspects of their task, or between different modes of activity.
112> Novices and Experts: Novice behaviour is usually associated with a ‘depth-first’ approach to problem solving, i.e. sequentially identifying and exploring sub-solutions in depth, whereas the strategies of experts are usually regarded as being predominantly top-down and breadth-first approaches. But this may be too simplistic a view of the reality of process strategy in design. ... They concluded that ‘it would be surprising if it is practicable for expert designers to adopt a purely breadth-first or depth-first approach. Indeed, a flexible mixture of modes is a more psychologically realistic control structure for expert design.’ They suggested that, whilst a depth-first approach minimises cognitive load, a breadth-first approach minimises commitment and optimises design time and effort. Those suggestions would also quite reasonably reflect the respective concerns and strategies that we might expect of novices and experts.

7. DESIGN AS A DISCIPLINE * First presented as ‘Designerly Ways of Knowing: Design Discipline vs Design Science’ at the international conference Design+Research, Politecnico di Milano, Italy, 2000.
119> [for our overt disregard for methodology in both design research and the studio:]
... aspirations to scientise design surfaced strongly again in the ‘design methods movement’ of the 1960s. The Conference on Design Methods, held in London in September, 1962 (Jones and Thornley, 1963) is generally regarded as the event which marked the launch of design methodology as a subject or field of enquiry. The desire of the new movement was even more strongly than before to base design process (as well as the products of design) on objectivity and rationality. The origins of this emergence of new design methods in the 1960s lay in the application of novel, scientific and computational methods to the novel and pressing problems of the 2nd World War – from which came civilian developments such as operations research and management decision-making techniques.
120> ... the decade culminated with Herbert Simon’s (1969) outline of ‘the sciences of the artificial’ and his specific plea for the development of ‘a science of design’ in the universities: ‘a body of intellectually tough, analytic, partly formalizable, partly empirical, teachable doctrine about the design process.’ However, in the 1970s there emerged a backlash against design methodology and a rejection of its underlying values, notably by some of the early pioneers of the movement. Christopher Alexander, who had originated a rational method for architecture and planning (Alexander, 1964), now said: ‘I’ve disassociated myself from the field… There is so little in what is called “design methods” that has anything useful to say about how to design buildings that I never even read the literature anymore… I would say forget it, forget the whole thing’ (Alexander, 1971). Another leading pioneer, J. Christopher Jones (1977) said: ‘In the 1970s I reacted against design methods. I dislike the machine language, the behaviourism, the continual attempt to fix the whole of life into a logical framework.’ To put the quotations of Alexander and Jones into context it may be necessary to recall the social/cultural climate of the late-1960s – the campus revolutions and radical political movements, the new liberal humanism and rejection of conservative values. But also it had to be acknowledged that there had been a lack of success in the application of ‘scientific’ methods to everyday design practice. Fundamental issues were also raised by Rittel and Webber (1973), who characterised design and planning problems as ‘wicked’ problems, fundamentally un-amenable to the techniques of science and engineering, which dealt with ‘tame’ problems. Nevertheless, design methodology continued to develop strongly, especially in engineering and some branches of industrial design. (Although there may still have been very limited evidence of practical applications and results.) The fruits of this work emerged in a series of books on engineering design methods and methodology in the 1980s. Just to mention some English-language ones, these included Tjalve (1979), Hubka (1982), Pahl and Beitz (1984), French (1985), Cross (1989), Pugh (1991). Another significant development throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s was the emergence of new journals of design research, theory and methodology. Just to refer, again, to English-language publications, these included Design Studies in 1979, Design Issues in 1984, Research in Engineering Design in 1989, the Journal of Engineering Design in 1990, Languages of Design in 1993 and the Design Journal in 1997.
121> The Design Research Society’s 1980 conference on ‘Design : Science : Method’ (Jacques and Powell, 1981) gave an opportunity to air many of these considerations. The general feeling from that conference was perhaps that it was time to move on from making simplistic comparisons and distinctions between science and design; that perhaps there was not so much for design to learn from science after all, and rather that perhaps science had something to learn from design. Cross et al. (1981) claimed that the epistemology of science was, in any case, in disarray, and therefore had little to offer an epistemology of design. Glynn (1985) later suggested that ‘it is the epistemology of design that has inherited the task of developing the logic of creativity, hypothesis innovation or invention that has proved so elusive to the philosophers of science.’
122> Design Science: [about the ever-fleeting idea of an institute of design sciences:] ‘Design Science’ was a term perhaps first used by Buckminster Fuller, but it was adapted by Gregory (1966) into the context of the 1965 conference on ‘The Design Method’. The concern to develop a design science thus led to attempts to formulate the design method – a single rationalised method, as ‘the scientific method’ was supposed to be. ...
So we might conclude that design science refers to an explicitly organised, rational and wholly systematic approach to design; not just the utilisation of scientific knowledge of artefacts, but design in some sense a scientific activity itself. This is certainly a controversial concept, challenged by many designers and design theorists.
123> Science of Design: However, Grant also made it clear that ‘the study of designing may be a scientific activity; that is, design as an activity may be the subject of scientific investigation.’ There remains some confusion between concepts of design science and of a science of design, since a ‘science of design’ seems to imply (or for some people has an aim of) the development of a ‘design science’. But the concept of a science of design has been clearly stated by Gasparski and Strzalecki (1990): ‘The science of design (should be) understood, just like the science of science, as a federation of subdisciplines having design as the subject of their cognitive interests’. ...
Design as a Discipline:
Donald Schön (1983) explicitly challenged the positivist doctrine underlying much of the ‘design science’ movement, and offered instead a constructivist paradigm. He criticised Simon’s ‘science of design’ for being based on approaches to solving well-formed problems, whereas professional practice throughout design and technology and elsewhere has to face and deal with ‘messy, problematic situations’. Schön proposed instead to search for ‘an epistemology of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes which some practitioners do bring to situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict,’ and which he characterised as ‘reflective practice’. Schön appeared to be more prepared than his positivist predecessors to put trust in the abilities displayed by competent practitioners, and to try to explicate those competencies rather than to supplant them. This approach has been developed particularly in the series of workshops and conferences known as the ‘Design Thinking Research Symposia’, beginning in 1991 (Cross, et al., 1992).
>It is the paradoxical task of creating an interdisciplinary discipline. Design as a discipline, rather than design as a science. This discipline seeks to develop domain-independent approaches to theory and research in design. The underlying axiom of this discipline is that there are forms of knowledge peculiar to the awareness and ability of a designer, independent of the different professional domains of design practice. Just as the other intellectual cultures in the sciences and the arts concentrate on the underlying forms of knowledge peculiar to the scientist or the artist, so we must concentrate on the ‘designerly’ ways of knowing, thinking and acting.
Design Research: At the 1980 ‘Design : Science : Method’ conference of the Design Research Society, Archer (1981) gave a simple but useful definition of research, which is that ‘Research is systematic enquiry, the goal of which is knowledge’. Our concern in design research has to be the development, articulation and communication of design knowledge. Where do we look for this knowledge? I believe that it has three sources: people, processes and products.
125> My own taxonomy of the field of design research would therefore fall into three main categories, based on people, process and products: 1. design epistemology – study of designerly ways of knowing 2. design praxiology – study of the practices and processes of design 3. design phenomenology – study of the form and configuration of artefacts ...
Good research is: Purposive based on identification of an issue or problem worthy and capable of investigation, Inquisitive seeking to acquire new knowledge, Informed conducted from an awareness of previous, related research, Methodical planned and carried out in a disciplined manner, Communicable generating and reporting results which are testable and accessible by others.

from the references:
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