eBook - ePub
The Design Student's Journey
understanding How Designers Think
Bryan Lawson
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eBook - ePub
The Design Student's Journey
understanding How Designers Think
Bryan Lawson
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Ă propos de ce livre
Being a professional designer is one of the most intellectually rewarding careers. Learning to become a designer can be tremendous fun but it can also be frustrating and at times painful. What you have to do to become a designer is not often clearly laid out and can seem mysterious. Over the past 50 years or so we have discovered a great deal about how designers think. This book relies upon that knowledge but presents it in a way specifically intended to help the student and perhaps the teacher. Bryan Lawson's classic book How Designers Think has been in print since 1980 and has gone through four editions to keep it up to date. This book can be seen as a companion volume for the design student.
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Informations
Chapter 1
Design as a set of skills you can learn
This book
In writing this book I am making some basic and simple guesses about you the reader. I assume you are either considering starting, or have begun to study, a design course. This course will involve either two- or three-dimensional design or possibly what we might call abstract or conceptual design.
Two-dimensional design courses usually involve graphic design of some sort and increasingly web page design. Three-dimensional design courses are concerned with the creation of objects or places. They include product or industrial design and architecture as well as interior, landscape and urban design. Abstract courses include software and systems design.
This book is intended to be a helpful companion on your journey through a design-based course as you gradually become a more competent and, hopefully, creative designer. The sequence of ideas introduced should approximate to the way you meet challenges as you go. It is all based on our current understanding of the design process and how we learn to acquire design expertise. We are all different and there is no one right way to learn, just as there is no one right way to design.
The material found in these insets gives more detail, examples, quotes and images that should help to amplify understanding. You will often find the words of admired designers or of other students here to help explain.
Learning
Learning to design is not something that you can do just from a book. You must experience and make sense of design for yourself. The kind of learning you are embarking on requires you to acquire and absorb knowledge but it also requires you to develop a whole range of skills. This book is mostly about the skills rather than the knowledge. Some of the knowledge you will need is technical or historical. You will not find that in this book. Other knowledge you will need is about the materials of design including geometry, form, colour, texture, proportion and so on. That is not here either. You will also need to know about lots of designs in your field. This book should help you to understand how to use all this knowledge.
You will also need to acquire a number of what we might call practical skills. Drawing, surveying and measuring and using computers are obvious examples. Again, this book will not help you much with those but it should help you to understand their importance and how to use them in your design process.
Finally, you will need to learn the various mental processes that make up the wonderful act of designing. This book will help you to recognise those skills, learn and practise them and integrate them into a design process that works for you and makes a natural fit with your developing views about what makes good design.
You might like to choose between two images of possible learning models (Figure 1.1).
1. You are effectively some kind of raw material. Your design school/university is a production line that will take you and mould you into a finished product.
2. Your design school/university is like a secret cave, the walls of which are encrusted with precious jewels. Your degree course gives you the tools that enable you to prise out the jewels.
Essentially the question here is are you a raw material or are you an explorer? If you have chosen the first image in Figure 1.1 this book is unlikely to help you. I have written it with the second model in mind. I doubt design can ever really be learned using the first model. You will also find that this book returns to some ideas several times. This is because the mental tools you need to extract the most precious jewels can only be developed after acquiring some understanding of the simpler tools.
Learning to design
Designing is one of the most exciting, fascinating and rewarding tasks the human mind can perform. We have done it for centuries and yet for most of that time we have understood very little about how we do it. This does not make for a very easy educational experience. Some in design education would argue that design cannot be taught and that you simply have to learn it for yourself. There is something in this argument since, as we shall see, design is a highly individual process. In the end you must find a way of taking responsibility for your own development as a designer. This book should not be seen as teaching you how to design but rather helping you to learn from your experiences. You are likely to be learning by tackling a series of design projects that increase in complexity. My own tutor was fond of saying that âsimplicity is beyond complexityâ. Learning to make a complicated problem into a simple solution is one of the most precious design skills.
Frans de la Haye is an industrial designer who has also worked in furniture and graphic design. He is known for being able to reduce complex sets of functions to simple human-friendly forms (Figure 1.2). He has been highly influential in Dutch design education, particularly through his work at Eindhoven. He has summed up this process of learning by designing perfectly.
If all goes well you will have changed after every project; you will have developed yourself further. If you manage to deal with change in this manner it energises you. I think this can be taught. If you confront students with this in design school, you are just in time.
(Lawson and Dorst 2009)
This book is intended to help with this timely process.
We strive to achieve the best we can in all our design projects. This is the first of many paradoxes about design education. At the end of your course how good each of your designs were will actually matter very little. What really matters is how much you learn from each project. For many of us learning to design is a lifetime journey and certainly one that will extend to long after you leave university and qualify.
It may take longer than you think.
An exhibition celebrating the work of the best upcoming architects in Singapore defined âyoungâ architects as those under 45 years of age. And the architectural critic Hugh Pearman said âin architecture, you are young if you are under 50, an infant if you are under 40 and a babe in arms if you are under 30â (Lawson 2006).
By comparison, Professor John Postgate FRS, writing about the career of scientists, said
It would be greatly to the advantage of all concerned if they (scientists), like the military, were normally taken on for a career-length term, say 25 years. At age 45 they would, subject to performance, normally be promoted by one grade and retired immediately on half pay.
Some involved in the education of designers may tell you that they cannot teach you to design and you must learn for yourself. This is probably true but, after a lifetime of teaching design students, I am sure we can help that process along a little bit.
This book (again)
The chapters in this book are put in an order that, I hope, follows the learning experience as well as any fixed order can. Learning, and most certainly learning to design, does not follow a linear path. It is probably better to think of it as somehow circling around and getting a deeper understanding each time. There is even a whole set of educational ideas known as the âspiral curriculumâ based on this (though it really is more like a helix than a spiral). This means that we will often come back to ideas mentioned earlier in the book.
I have written the chapters to be as self-contained as possible. They are all fairly short and deal with only a very few main ideas; in many cases a whole chapter only deals with one major idea. I hope you will find you can read a chapter at one sitting as it were. To make this work for you some important illustrations appear more than once. You might notice already that this section has a heading that also appeared at the start of the chapter. It will be helpful if you get into your head this idea of going around in circles but with an increasingly deeper understanding, helped by the learning you have been doing. In that cave I mentioned earlier, you can dig more out of it each time you return to it. Things often make more sense once you have begun work yourself. If, on the other hand, you want to probe a deeper understanding then you might like to try looking at one of the other books mentioned below.
This book is written specifically for those learning to design. If you are trying to increase your understanding of design or would like to explore that field further then you may find my other books of interest. They include:
How Designers Think, 4th Edition (Lawson 2006);
What Designers Know (Lawson 2004);
Design in Mind (Lawson 1994);
Design Expertise, written jointly with Kees Dorst (Lawson and Dorst 2009).
In addition, similar ground is covered in different ways in:
Design Thinking by Nigel Cross (Cross 2011);
Understanding Design by Kees Dorst (Dorst 2006).
Finally, if you want to look at similar issues to those covered here as a teacher rather than a student you might also look at:
Design Education (Lyon 2011);
Design Pedagogy (Tovey 2015).
A special way of thinking and unusual places
Design involves a very special way of thinking. We will learn more about this as we proceed but some features are very obvious on design courses. They are different from most other university courses in a number of ways. I have walked into industrial design schools in London and Delft, into architecture schools in Brazil, Sydney and Singapore, interior design schools in Birmingham and Hong Kong and landscape schools in Edinburgh and Philadelphia, and immediately felt at home. I could quickly get a good feeling for what was going on and what they were trying to do. Here is a delightful paradox; I visited the chemistry department in my own university and found myself in what felt a very foreign place.
You would expect to find a laboratory in a chemistry department. In a department teaching design-based courses you expect to find a studio. This is one of the studios at the Sheffield University School of Architecture that I have been connected with for nearly 50 years (Figure 1.3). People come and go and the furniture gets replaced but it has looked like this since I first saw it. A...