What Designers Know

Bryan Lawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136349003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Each chapter deals with a different technique from which we can best represent and make explicit the forms of knowledge used by designers. The book explores whether design knowledge is special, and attempts to get to the root of where design knowledge comes from. Crucially, it focuses on how designers use drawings in communicating their ideas and how they 'converse' with them as their designs develop. It also shows how experienced designers use knowledge differently to novices suggesting that design 'expertise' can be developed. Overall, this book builds a layout of the kinds of skill, knowledge and understanding that make up what we call designing.

1

Uncovering design knowledge

A designerly way of knowing.

Nigel Cross

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Is there such a thing as ‘design knowledge’?

Describing what designers know is not an easy task. At a recent forum on architectural education one speaker challenged the conference to say what architects did. An easy question to answer you may think but not one of the experienced practitioners and educationalists present was brave enough to take up the challenge. No one felt able to offer a succinct description that they were confident would be widely agreed upon and yet describe the work of all architects. It is quite possible to find two people who call themselves architects and yet hardly share any of their daily tasks. The more generic question about what designers do is even more difficult to answer simply and successfully. This book is not about architecture or specifically about architects, nor is it a book that will tell you how to design. Rather it will attempt to develop part of what has to be a rather long answer to some very short questions. What is it that designers know? Does design knowledge involve a special way of knowing? How do designers acquire and make use of their knowledge? In this book then we will explore the common features we can detect in the kinds of knowledge designers rely upon and try to explain why they are indeed rather special and in some ways rather unconventional.

To begin with we can see that designing is not alone in being so difficult to pin down. We could, for example, ask ‘What do farmers do?’ It is perfectly possible to find two farmers who share almost no common activities in carrying out their work. One might be a hill farmer who tends sheep while the other might be an arable lowland farmer growing wheat. We have no difficulty in agreeing that both of these two fine and honest fellows are farmers and yet they do quite different jobs. ‘Well’, you might say, ‘the common factor is easy to see, they both grow food in one way or another. So the answer is that farmers grow food.’ Now this might be true in this case, but the hill farmer may turn out only to breed sheep for their wool and never sends them to market, so not all farmers grow food. The definition is thus not as easy as it may at first seem.

In How Designers Think (Lawson, 1997) I listed many definitions of design and found them mostly wanting in some way and I shall not repeat the exercise here. However, let us briefly follow the farming example by comparing two designers. One might be a fashion designer creating exclusive, expensive and perhaps largely impractical one-off collections of clothes for the haute couture market in one of our great fashion centres such as Paris, Milan, Sao Paulo or London. Our other designer might be an architect employed by an international chain of fast food retail outlets that shall remain nameless here. Our first designer is likely to achieve success largely through originality and novelty while our second would almost certainly lose his or her job by designing anything remotely original. The haute couture world thrives on a kind of wackiness and yet also moves with a kind of global consensus, at one time conforming to this hem length and colour palette, at another time to quite different ideas. By contrast the whole notion of the multinational fast food concession is that each outlet is instantly recognizable to its patrons at all times and in all countries, cultures and climates.

So is it possible that these two designers really belong to the same basic occupational group? Can we really discuss design in such a wide-ranging way or must we always confine our analysis to one tightly defined group at a time? The answer surely must be that there are likely to be some common features or we would never have the concept of ‘design’ in the first place, and just like the two farmers we have no difficulty in recognizing both of our odd couple as ‘designers’. However, clearly we must delve deeper into their differences and try to find a theory that allows us to position each designer in a meaningful structure that can relate one to another. That structure is surely something to do with the knowledge that the designers depend upon for their work and the skills they use to manipulate it. It is that which we shall explore here.

Expertise in design

We must also be able to explain yet another variation, which, it turns out, is at least as interesting and important. That is the level of expertise that designers have. Some designers become very successful while others may be much less so. A difficulty here is just how we define success, and in fact there are many indicators we might use. Some designers get repeated commissions, may command higher fees, have international reputations, and may influence the development of ideas in their field. So what distinguishes these outstanding or expert designers? What do they ‘know’ that others do not, or what skills do they have that others have not developed? The study of expertise and excellence is in itself an interesting business. In some areas of human endeavour expertise is almost certainly largely a matter of knowing more. Perhaps we might expect the best academics to have more knowledge than their less illustrious counterparts. In other fields expertise is less a matter of knowledge and more one of skill. The top football players who are transferred from one club to another perhaps across international boundaries for astronomical fees are not generally able to articulate more knowledge but clearly can execute certain skills at a higher level and more consistently than those languishing in the lower leagues. But it is not as simple as that; we also often admire a sporting star not just for the execution of a skill but also for the ability to ‘see’ a shot or a pass that lesser players would not have even thought of playing. This may well give us some hints about expertise that we shall find helpful later in the book. Sometimes it is neither skill nor knowledge per se that is important but a way of seeing or perceiving that may be the crucial ability in an activity. But we must delay a more full examination of expertise in design until after we have explored the range of issues involved in design knowledge.

Types of knowledge

It is now time to admit to something about the title of this book. Taken at face value the title may actually be rather misleading. This is because our everyday use of the words ‘know’ and ‘knowledge’ is often restricted to our retention and articulation of facts. But even from our very brief exploration so far it must already be apparent that there are many ways of ‘knowing’. There is certainly what has been recognized as ‘knowledge in action’. We may, for example, ‘know’ how to ride a bicycle or how to swim. Such knowledge is often hard to acquire, and even more difficult to describe or explain, and yet easy to recognize. We may also ‘know’ how to see or hear in particular ways. You may be able to identify a song by the Beatles or a concerto by Mozart perhaps even if you have not heard them before. Such ways of knowing how it turns out are rather important in designing. This chapter began with a quotation from that greatly influential scholar of design theory, Nigel Cross. In fact Nigel coined the phrase ‘a designerly way of knowing’ and used it as the title of a paper that has provoked much thinking by many others (Cross, 1982). It is now probably fair to say that there is a general consensus among researchers that there is indeed such a thing as a ‘designerly way of knowing’. But just how do we find out what it is?

Ways of uncovering design knowledge

In fact there are several things we can do. They all turn out to have serious disadvantages as research tools, but we can learn something from each of them. We shall rely on all of them in this book.

First, we can simply sit and think about design knowledge. We can look at the information designers are given and the information they produce. From this we can attempt some inferences about the information they may have used to transform the inputs into the outputs. Such an approach appears simple and logical, but it turns out to be far from adequate. This is primarily because design is a creative process by its very nature. Much highly valued or successful design begins with very little external information and yet creates highly influential outputs and ideas. It seems then that the designers must have used a considerable amount of knowledge which has never been externalized or articulated.

Second, we can attempt some more rigour and put the designer in a controlled situation and observe him or her under empirical conditions. This may represent a very respectable form of research but it is extremely difficult to conduct with a sufficient degree of realism to be relevant to what those designers actually do in practice. In fact when we carry out such experiments and ask the subjects about them they most frequently complain about two features. First, they are likely to point out that they were not able to visit the site, interrogate the client, look at parallel situations, discuss problems with the manufacturer, test aspects of the design by watching its use in real situations, or browse information sources in the way they would have chosen to. All of these and many other similar complaints suggest that in this artificial experimental world they were deprived of much information that their experience suggests might have been helpful and perhaps even crucial. Second, experimental subjects complain that they do not very often design in this way and usually do many other things at the same time and that these periods of thinking about other matters are often when they make important progress on their design projects. This suggests that they use their knowledge in ways they do not even fully understand themselves.

A third research approach allows our investigated designers to work in their natural settings and relies on simply observing them in their studios. While this offers more realism it seldom offers much useful data! Unfortunately the really interesting things that happen in the design process are hidden in designers’ heads rather than being visible. It does not necessarily reveal the actual knowledge they are using although it may reveal the important sources. If we simply listen to what designers are saying or watch what they are doing we are likely to be missing the main action. Recording the events when groups of designers are at work under reasonably controlled conditions is a compromise which is increasingly popular. However, experienced groups of designers seem able to develop such important and powerful forms of verbal and visual ‘shorthand’ that even here the investigator may be missing very important material. Later in this book, however, we shall explore the way designers communicate in teams during the process and see what we can learn from all this.

Our fourth technique for investigating design is simply to ask designers to tell us what they know. We might try to gather this from what they write about themselves or we might interview them. Reading what designers write is rather dangerous since we have little or no guide as to how reliable and accurate this is. Actually we do perhaps have some reasons for being just a little suspicious about such data for several reasons. The first is that designers are not professional communicators through writing. Second, they may well be writing in order to promote themselves and their practices, and are thus more likely to be seeking to impress than to explain. Finally, designers are used to having to act as advocates for their work during interviews or meetings with their clients. Since by its very nature design is an activity that cannot be theoretically proved to be optimal, clients often take some convincing. Even as students, designers learn through the studio to ‘sell’ their ideas. My overwhelming experience of teaching design students for many years is that they tend to present their process as having been far more logical and founded on solid knowledge than it was in reality. This may not necessarily be a deliberate deceit as they may have come to believe this version of events themselves. So we must at least be cautious about what designers write about themselves when they become fully fledged professionals. Interviewing designers may be subject to all these dangers too. However, I have found that interviewing designers privately and confidentially not about individual projects but about their process in general and the knowledge they rely upon can alleviate some of these problems. Unfortunately such a technique requires considerable skill to carry out. To obtain meaningful results the researcher needs extensive knowledge of the designers and their work. This is all very time-consuming as the data gathered is often highly specific and hard to generalize. It is also hard to persuade the very best designers to subject themselves to this process, although some are much more willing to participate in interviews than to be subjects in laboratory experiments.

Our fifth and final technique for investigating design knowledge is a very indirect one and a rather recent addition to our research toolkit. We can try to simulate the design process. There are signs that cognitive scientists are beginning to invent software which can make design-like decisions. Interestingly it turns out that modelling design-like thinking challenges cognitive science in ways that many other kinds of cognition do not. However, a problem with this method is that even if we manage to develop software that appears to design and even if we can get it to produce results similar to those produced by designers we still cannot be sure that it relied upon the same kind of knowledge and used it in the same kind of way.

So we are left with a varied toolkit full of imperfect methods for investigating design. This book will rely on all of them at various points in the argument. No one technique and indeed no one piece of research can give us all the answers. Somehow we have to take it all together, with all the caveats and cautions that are appropriate and get an overall picture. That is what this book will try to do. In it we shall try to uncover the kinds of knowledge that designers use and how they bring it to bear in their process. We shall review research which is done in the field and in the laboratory. We shall examine the drawings that designers make and the conversations they hold. We shall explore the way they collaborate and interact with other designers and with their clients and users. We shall look at how they interact with computers. We shall look at research which enables us to compare how experienced and expert designers behave compared with novices and students. All these sources of information will enable us to piece together some understanding of what it is that designers know.

2

Why might design knowledge be special?

If it is true that there is an irreducible element of art in professional practice, it is also true that gifted engineers, teachers, scientists, architects, and managers sometimes display artistry in their day-to-day practice.

Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner (1983)

You think philosophy is difficult enough, but I tell you it is nothing to the difficulty of being a good architect.

Wittgenstein

Is there a prima-facie reason to believe that design knowledge is in some way special and therefore deserving the attention of a book such as this? Why might we believe that design knowledge is likely to turn out to be different or special? There are some clues that may help us answer this question. One clue is that design education looks different to much else of what goes on in universities around the world. In fact you can go into schools of design and see a very similar pattern repeating time and again. This is true whether the school is in England, The Netherlands, the USA, Australia, Malaysia or Hong Kong. In fact it appears to be a pretty global pattern. It is true whether the school is teaching architecture, product design, interior design or landscape design. All these institutions seem to have understood and appreciated something that has driven them to organize their departments and courses in certain similar ways.

Knowing by doing

And yet there is also something very hard to pin down about all this. At the time of writing this book I have been studying the design process for around four decades. I have read degrees in architecture and in psychology. I have conducted studies and experiments on design. I have studied, observed and interviewed many leading designers. I have taught in many countries and universities. I have written books and papers on the design process and attended countless conferences on the subject. And yet! And yet I still find something curious and slightly disturbing which is this … Whenever I hear someone deliver a lecture or I read a paper on the design process, somehow I can usually tell whether or not that speaker or author is actually a designer. There seems to be a certain kind of knowledge and understanding that it is very hard to attain in any way other than by actually designing seriously. All those schools of design understand this too and use methods of learning by doing in the ‘studio’ format as their primary educational tool.

I remember well early in my career teaching architecture working with a young and very talented urban sociologist on some joint studio projects. I must have infuriated the poor girl who had no previous knowledge of design at all. She would occasionally demonstrate this with some quite impractical or unrealistic suggestion about how she thought the students would work, or what we might require them to achieve. I think I probably told her that she did not understand how design worked and that we could not do it like that. Eventually her justifiable anger at my failure to explain my criticism of her overflowed and she banged the table we were working at. OK why don’t you just give me the undergraduate textbook in architecture and I will go away and read it, she shouted at me. Of course my response to this was only to further inflame the situation when I tried to explain that of course there was no such text, and never would be and could not be. Design has to be learned by doing rather than by reading a textbook. I had been lucky. I had studied architecture first and then read a postgraduate degree in psychology. I did indeed go away and read the undergraduate textbook in psychology. As I recall I did so in a couple of weeks effectively skimming through a complete first degree syllabus. Now while of course I could not claim at that time to have the more comprehensive understanding I have gathered over the years I could very nearly catch up with those on my course who had read psychology as a first degree. My urban sociologist colleague’s prospects of catching up with me as a designer were slight indeed by comparison. That was not due to any failing on her part or to any significant achievement on mine. Rather it tells us something about the nature of design knowledge and how it might be different from many other kinds of knowledge.

Some years ago in the UK a group of building contractors were trying to do something about the confrontational and litigious nature of the relationships between the various professions involved in delivering new buildings. They strongly advocated a common undergraduate degree should be developed (Bill, 1990). Virtually all of the schools of architecture thought the idea ridiculous and howled in protest. It appeared that perhaps the architects were being separatist, elitist or just plain awkward. But in fact their experience told them that the idea simply would not work because design knowledge has to be acquired in a special kind of way. The contractors just could not see this and the architectural educators found it very hard to explain.

Yet another clue would be the understanding that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Uncovering design knowledge
• 2. Why might design knowledge be special?
• 3. Sources and types of knowledge
• 4. Drawings and types of design knowledge
• 5. Manipulating design knowledge embedded in drawings
• 6. Exchanging design knowledge with computers
• 7. Design conversations
• 8. Theoretical and experiential knowledge in design
• 9. Expert knowledge in design
• Bibliography
• Index