Dear Mike,
I think what you are doing makes good sense.
When I reflect on what you reported, I see most of undergraduate design
education (including 'creativity') is about making design situations as
'well-structured' as possible. It seems to be the primary task of design
education in every design domain I can think of.
Take for example, graphics design for web, some of the earliest and most
important design lessons and skills are to do with creating structure:
repetition, hierarchy, association, contrast, proximity etc. Similar for
semantic web design issues.
Thank you for drawing attention to the issue!
Best wishes,
Terry
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Mike
McAuley
Sent: Thursday, 24 April 2008 8:38 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Mike's question - well-structured and ill-structured activity
in designing
Hi Paraq,
The analysis-synthesis model was not actually part of my methodology.
I referred to it only to quickly establish that in a design project we start
by making sense of the information we have at hand and then respond to it.
As individuals - within a constructivist- interpretivist framework, it is
our life experience which will determine what sense we make. However, in my
own study, which was an action research investigation, I set out to address
a situation involving text interpretation. The problem identified from
previous experience teaching illustration was that some students developed
concepts which were either very literal or based on secondary propositions
contained within the text. Through a three cycle approach I was able to
build an argument that some students were not particularly good at
establishing the gist of the text, what Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) call
the macrostructure. By not being able to sort the information into a
hierarchical structure and relationship, poorer students would then, based
on what they understood, conceptualise. So the argument is that a creative
response to a problem is determined by how the problem is understood.
As regards "the idea that a human designer is able to operate with full
knowledge of what he is doing and why he is doing it", I would agree with
that only if we are talking of tacit knowledge. If we value the idea that
explicit knowledge and metacognitive awareness is desirable and achievable
by a more systematic approach to how design is taught, then working with
novice students through the iterative and cyclical structure of action
research is one way to explore how that can be achieved. What I have been
analysing is, in a sense, the analysis approach students have taken to
comprehend text. The data itself, is based on interviews and questionnaires
and much of the evaluation is carried out by the students themselves.
Getting back to well-structured-ill-structured problems; I am arguing that
part of the problem students had to deal with was well- structured
.(comprehend the macrostructure of the text) and part of it ill-structured
(interpret understanding into an illustration). And I think it is reasonable
to argue that different, identifiable thinking strategies were required for
each stage.
Regards
Mike
Louwerse, M. M., and Graesser, A.C. (2006) Macrostructure. In K.
Brown (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, (2nd ed), 7, (pp.
426-429). Oxford: Elselvier.
Van Dijk, T.A., & Kintsch, W. (1983) Strategies of discourse comprehension.
New York: Academic Press.
|