Dear Chuck,
Thanks for the new paper on “Intuition, Imagination and Insight in Design Thinking” posted to Academia.edu. I’ve read it, and I have a few specific points of feedback.
The most important specific point occurs in the first paragraph of the abstract. The paper opens with the statement that there is no previous work and no theoretical definitions for subconscious processes in purposeful thought or design thinking.
“Significant subconscious processes in purposeful thought and design thinking and their systematic relationships have not been theoretically defined. As a consequence, there is no basis for scientific discrimination or practical assessment of hidden thinking where goals are broader than identifying and locating such events.”
This doesn’t seem right. The broad area of this inquiry has been covered in the literature since the 1890s. It would be helpful if you could clarify what aspect of this has not been subject to previous work.
A quick Google Scholar search will call up a significant amount of material. This material applies to purposeful or goal-directed thought as a general category and to the subsconscious processes that support purposeful thought. Within this, a significant body of material applies directly to design or to problem-solving processes that parallel design or planning in such fields as informatics, medicine, nursing, law, engineering, and architecture. Google Scholar makes a reasonable amount of material available in full-text form for direct download, as well as providing links to journal articles and resources that a university library will provide.
The number of hits vary slightly when I vary the search terms, using “processes” as a plural and “process” as a collective noun, using the terms “purposeful” and “goal-oriented,” and using the terms “thought” and “thinking.”
I entered these search terms:
subconscious processes in purposeful thought (18,800 hits)
subconscious process in purposeful thought (19,500 hits)
subconscious processes in purposeful thinking (18,800 hits)
subconscious process in purposeful thinking (18,400 hits)
subconscious processes in goal-oriented thought (3,450 hits)
subconscious process in goal-oriented thought (12,400 hits)
subconscious processes in goal-oriented thinking (3,670 hits)
subconscious process in goal-oriented thinking (13,400 hits)
subconscious processes in design thinking (41,200 hits)
subconscious process in design thinking (44,000 hits)
Within this literature, there are many hits or links to contributions by authors well known in design. For example, these include Herbert Simon (1964, 1977, 1987), or Nelson and Stolterman (2003 [2012]). There are also numerous articles in leading design journals, for example Howard, Culley and Dekonick (2008) and well known conferences, for example Warr and O’Neill (2005).
Every field of professional practice requires intuition, insight, imagination and expertise. Therefore, it is vital to review and incorporate the work of such scholars as Michael Polanyi (1974, 2009 [1966]), Harry Collins (2012; See also: Collins and Evans 2009), or Ikujiro Nonaka and his colleagues (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995; Von Krogh, Ichijo, and Nonaka 2000; Nonaka and Nichiguchi 2001).
Some of the literature points directly to the key issues in this paper – Polanyi’s last book (Polanyi and Prosch 1977), published just after his death, specifically addresses the human capacity for imagination as the foundation not merely for professional action but even for scientific judgment. No paper can use all of these. Nevertheless, there is a rich, explicit literature that a paper on “Intuition, Imagination and Insight in Design Thinking” should not overlook.
The paper describes seven processes: intuition, imagination, insight, recognition, processing, judgment, and recall. For each of these terms, there exists a substantial scientific literature with a long heritage of robust theory development, empirical research, and careful definition in both empirical and theoretical terms.
Again, using Google Scholar, the literature is massive. If you use a university library journal collection with careful search, you’ll find even more.
intuition (884,000 hits)
imagination (1,990,000 hits)
insight (3,440,000 hits)
recognition (3,440,000 hits)
processing (5,390,000 hits)
judgment (2,240,000 hits)
recall (3,270,000 hits)
On these topics, the number of serious scientific and scholarly hits is far too great to be useful. Even so, a search within these will reveal hundreds of articles that apply directly to the topic of a paper on “Intuition, Imagination and Insight in Design Thinking.” After discounting irrelevant items that turn up under such headings as processing or recall, a massive applicable literature remains.
In the absence of a search, your article attempts to identify a gap in the literature where no gap seems to exist. Rather, there is a rich body of well-developed empirical research and theory, along with many conceptual articles by solid researchers, scientists, and scholars.
Within this literature, there may indeed be gaps, but the paper does not appear to identify these gaps. Rather, the paper opens with the assertion that no work has been done in this area and for this reason, there can be “no basis for scientific discrimination or practical assessment.” I’d suggest that a literature search will reveal that this is not the case. It may be possible to improve scientific discrimination or practical assessment of intuition, imagination, and insight in design thinking. Doing this requires finding the current flaws and gaps in a literature that dates back to the 1890s and the work of William James.
To make a new theoretical contribution, it is useful to identify and to acknowledge the earlier contributions on which our work rests.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Home Page http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design> Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman About Me Page http://about.me/ken_friedman
Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China
References
Collins, Harry. 2012. Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Collins, Harry and Robert Evans. 2009. Rethinking Expertise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Howard, T. J., S.J. Culley, E. Dekoninck. 2008. “Describing the creative design process by the integration of engineering design and cognitive psychology literature.” Design Studies, Vol. 29, Issue 2, pp. 160-180.
Nelson, Harold, and Erik Stolterman. 2003 [2012]. The Design Way: Intentional Change In An Unpredictable World: Foundations And Fundamentals Of Design Competence. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Nonaka, Ikujiro, and Hirotaka Takeuchi. 1995. The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nonaka, Ikujiro, and Toshihiro Nichiguchi. 2001. Knowledge Emergence: Social, Technical, and Evolutionary Dimensions of Knowledge Creation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Polanyi, Michael. 1974. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Polanyi, Michael, and Harry Prosch. 1977. Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Polanyi, Michael. 2009 [1966]. The Tacit Dimension. With a new foreword by Amartya Sen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Simon, Herbert A. 1964. "Understanding Creativity" Carnegie Review 2 (Reprint #252) np. URL:
http://ptfs.library.cmu.edu/awweb/main.jsp?flag=browse&smd=1&awdid=1
Simon, Herbert A. 1977. “Scientific Discovery and the Psychology of Problem Solving.” Models of Discovery<http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-010-9521-1>. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science<http://link.springer.com/bookseries/5710>. Volume 54, 1977, pp. 286-303.
Simon, Herbert A. 1987. Making Management Decisions: The Role of Intuition and Emotion.” The Academy of Management Executive. Vol. 1, No. 1 (Feb., 1987), pp. 57-64.
Von Krogh, George, Kazuo Ichijo, and Ikujiro Nonaka. 2000. Enabling Knowledge Creation: How to Unlock the Mystery of Tacit Knowledge and Release the Power of Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Warr, Andy, and Eamonn O’Neill. 2005. “Understanding design as a social creative process.” Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Creativity & Cognition, pp. 118-127. New York: ACM.
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