Designerly Ways of Knowing
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Nigel Cross is Professor of Design Studies at the UK's Open University and a leading international figure in the world of design research. With academic and practical backgrounds in architecture and industrial design, he has conducted research in computer-aided design, design methodology and design education since the nineteen-sixties. His current principal research interest is in design cognition, based on studies of expert and exceptional designers. He has been a member of the academic staff of the pioneering, multi-media Open University since 1970, where he has been responsible for, or instrumental in, a wide range of distance education courses in design and technology. For many years Professor Cross was Head of the Department of Design and Innovation at the Open University - a department with one of the strongest research records in Art and Design in the UK. Recent books by Professor Cross include the third edition of his successful textbook on Engineering Design Methods (Wiley, 2000), and he has been a co-editor of books on Research in Design Thinking , Analysing Design Activity and Expertise in Design . His total publications list includes more than 120 items, plus many Open University course texts, broadcasts, etc. Professor Cross is also Editor-in-Chief of the international journal of Design Studies.
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Designerly Ways of Knowing.- The Nature and Nurture of Design Ability.- Natural and Artificial Intelligence in Design.- Creative Cognition in Design I: The Creative Leap.- Creative Cognition in Design II: Creative Strategies.- Understanding Design Cognition.- Design as a Discipline.
2 The Nature and Nurture of Design Ability (p. 15-16)
This chapter is in two parts. The first is concerned with the nature of design ability – the particular ways of thinking and behaving that designers, and all of us, adopt in tackling certain kinds of problems in certain kinds of ways. The second part is concerned with the nurture of design ability – that is, with the development of that ability through design education. My view is that through better understanding the nature of design ability, design educators may be better able to nurture it. I therefore see these two – nature and nurture – as complementary interests, and I do not intend to venture into those corners of psychology where fights go on over nature versus nurture in the context of general intelligence. However, I shall try to make a claim that design ability is, in fact, one of the several forms or fundamental aspects of human intelligence. It should, therefore, be an important element in everyone’s education.
Nature
What Do Designers Do?
Everything we have around us – our environments, clothes, furniture, machines, communication systems, even much of our food – has been designed. The quality of that design effort therefore profoundly affects our quality of life. The ability of designers to produce efficient, effective, imaginative and stimulating designs is therefore important to all of us. And so it is important, first of all, to understand what it is that designers do when they exercise this ability.
Pragmatically, the most essential thing that any designer does is to provide, for those who will make a new artefact, a description of what that artefact should be like. Usually, little or nothing is left to the discretion of the makers – the designer specifies the artefact’s dimensions, materials, finishes and colours. When a client asks a designer for ‘a design’, that is what they want – the description. The focus of all design activity is that end-point.
The designer’s aim, therefore, is the communication of a specific design proposal. Usually, this is in the form of a drawing or drawings, giving both an overview of the artefact and particular details. Even the most imaginative design proposals must usually be communicated in rather prosaic working drawings, lists of parts, and so on.
Sometimes, it is necessary to make full-scale mock-ups of design proposals in order that they can be communicated sufficiently accurately. In the motor industry, for example, full-scale models of new car bodies are made to communicate the complex three-dimensional shapes. These shapes are then digitized and the data communicated to computers for the production of drawings for making the bodypanel moulds. Increasingly, in many industries, computerisation of both design and manufacture is substantially changing the mode of communication between designer and manufacturer, sometimes with the complete elimination of conventional detail drawings.
Before the final design proposal is communicated for manufacture, it will have gone through some form of testing, and alternative proposals may also have been tested and rejected. A major part of the designer’s work is therefore concerned with the evaluation of design proposals. Again, full-scale models may be made – product manufacturing industries use them extensively for evaluating aesthetics, ergonomics, and consumer choice, as well as for production purposes. Small-scale 3D models are also often used in many industries – from architecture to chemical process plants.
However, drawings of various kinds are still the most extensively used modelling medium for evaluating designs – both informally in the designer’s skilled reading of drawings and imagining their implications, and more formally in measuring dimensions, calculating stresses, and so on. In evaluating designs, a large body of scientific and technical knowledge can be brought to bear. This modelling, testing and modifying is the central, iterative activity of the design process.
Before a proposal can be tested, it has to be originated somehow. The generation of design proposals is therefore the fundamental activity of designers, and that for which they become famous or infamous. Although design is usually associated with novelty and originality, most run-of-the-mill designing is actually based on making variations on previous designs. Drawings again feature heavily in this generative phase of the design process, although at the earliest stages they will be just the designer’s ‘thinking with a pencil’ and perhaps comprehensible only to him or her.
