"As the student or the practicing designer moves from one problem situation
to the next, the student discovers, with or without the assistance of her
instructor, a way to see her problem as like a problem she has already
encountered. The law-sketch functions as a tool, informing the student what
similarities to look for, singaling the gestalt in which the situation is
to be seen. The resultant ability to see a variety of situations as like
each other is the main thing a student acquires by doing exemplary
problems. She has assimilated a time-tested and group-licensed way of seeing.

Designers solve projects by modelling them on previous project-solutions,
often with only minimal recourse to symbolic generalisations.

Members of a community share few rules by which they make the transition
from law-sketch to the specific forms demanded by individual problems.
Exposure to a series of exemplary problem-solutions teaches them to see in
a gestalt. Before this, the law-sketch was to them little or no more than a
string of uninterpreted concepts. Though they shared it, they did not know
what it meant and it therefore told them little about design. This example
displays a paradigm as fundamentally an artefact which transforms problems
into projects and enables them to be solved even in the absence of an
adequate body of theory.

What I mean by learning from problems to see situations as like each other,
as subjects for the application of the same law or law-sketch. To borrow
Michael Polanyi's useful phrase, what results from this process is 'tacit
knowledge' which is learned by doing design rather than by acquiring
knowledge for doing it."

This excerpt, as many may have recognised it, is an adapted version of
Thomas Kuhn (1970). I think it is relevant because today designers seem to
share something but are unable to articulate a definition of design due to
the lack of theory building.

I think many on this list would agree that today many design students are
being trained in Universities mostly by 'riding the bike' of design, that
is, by doing it and only marginally drawing knowledge from theory. Odd that
(like Ken suggests in his post on bycicle riders) a professional athlete
today benefits more from theory building than the people who shape our
built environment. If this is so, it means that the discipline of
professional design will exist only when designers build theory (during my
bachelor degree I was surprised that most of the relevant publications were
not written by designers -and yet more surprised at the reluctancy of my
colleagues to read them). Until that day the formation of designers will
not defer too much from the workshop apprentice; it will continue to be
difficult to claim that design disciplines deserve University education and
to convince anyone that they have surpassed the level of a trade. Nothing
wrong to be a shoemaker, a locksmith or a Photoshop craftsman: lots of
skill and no reading involved! Just software manuals and glossy magazines.
Until then 'design' will be something that people do without knowing what
they are doing, something that people with the ability to draw and a
flagrant aversion to anything related to numbers and text in standard fonts
choose to do for a living. And 'creativity' I'm afraid, will continue to be
something mysterious and inextricable that no one should inquire about, it
just happens inside some people's heads.

Yet, this is obviously an exaggerated depiction of the situation. There has
been for a long time a strong and increasing interest within design circles
for knowledge and thinking that directly and indirectly advances the
materials, tools, and skills with which shoemakers and pixelcarvers are
able to work.

I find the thread on "Theory" extremely useful and valuable to foster
discussion and would like to thank those who contribute. At the same time I
would like to contribute to the creativity thread making explicit some
basic assumptions: a) that design research is valuable for theory building,
b) that theory is essential for design practice, c) that design can and
should look into research originated from other disciplines that could give
insights into what is design, d) that creativity -as in design- is a human
activity that is subject to formal inspection the same way every other
psychological and social activity is, and e) that creativity is not solely
a mental process carried out by an individual in a black-box or any other
way but is a construct shaped both by individual and social processes. Two
quotes from (intellectually opposite) scholars carry special significance
under the previous assumptions:

<<"Marvin Minsky about creativity: when creative people simply show us the
outcome, we can view it as creative; if we observe both the process of
doing it and the outcome, the creativity is gone.">> Liu, 2000

<<One can only be surprised by a result if one does not have entire access
to the complete historic sequence.>> Maturana, H. & Varela, F. (1987)



References

Kuhn, T.: 1970, Reflections on my critics, in Lakatos, I. And Musgrave, A.
(ed), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Cambridge University press,
Cambridge, pp. 231 278.

Liu, Y.: 2000, Creativity or novelty?, Design Studies 21 (3) 261-276.

Maturana, H. and Varela, F.: 1987, El Arbol del Conocimiento: Las Bases
Biologicas del Conocimiento Humano, Debate, Barcelona.


-- Ricardo Sosa
PhD candidate, 3rd year
Key Centre of design Computing and Cognition
Faculty of Architecture, University of Sydney
http://www.arch.usyd.edu.au/~rsos7705