Hi Chuck,

Thank you for your reply. 

<snip> So do I get the theory prize you offered?

Bottle of wine in post tomorrow. My apologies for the delay, it's been an unusual  time over here, and abstractions got in the way of practicalities!

From your post, I can see that you value creative thinking and trust it in a way that is opposite to my perspective.  I'm not sure we can progress this any further at the moment. We seem to have opposite views.

You asked  several questions of my position on human thinking.

I feel it is amazing we can think and do lots of things in mind, it is one of the delights of life  and lots of what we do with our thinking and feeling are inspiringly beautiful, insightful, creative and accurate. In other cases, not so.   We are not perfect. Intrinsically, our thinking doesn't work well in many circumstances. Prediction is one of them but there are others. 

Nothing new, and I guess we simply differ. Regardless, I look forward to seeing how you develop your Theory of Design Thinking further.

Wishing you all the best.

Warm regards,
Terry



-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of CHARLES BURNETTE
Sent: Sunday, 28 February 2016 11:18 AM
To: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Theory of Design Thinking and prediction of design outcomes

> On Feb 27, 2016, at 10:51 AM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Hi Chuck,
> 
> Thank you  for your comments.  I can see that the Theory of Design Thinking can address many and perhaps all of the challenges to it.
> 
> What you wrote about a) makes sense - thanks.
> 
> For b) I don't think speed is at all an issue. Imagine a situation where a human is generating and reviewing new partially-conceived partial design possibilities (the sort of thing where a designer is focusing at that particular time on one part of a design in a situation where the other parts aren't yet resolved.). In this situation, subconscious influences within the designer shape which new ideas for partial design solutions come to their mind.  These are perhaps better described as  *subconscious* fixations about how they believe different aspects  design will create particular design outcomes.

The theory postulates hierarchical and sequential processes that can be going on concurrently, separately, or associatively. It assumes that subconscious processes are very complex, parallel and extremely fast. They are highly interactive but require 200 milliseconds  to engage conscious thought after “data mining” memory to generate a preconscious input or intuition.
> 
> During this design activity the designer may use a computerised design tool that predicts design outcomes. The output predictions of this computerised design tool are likely to contradict the designer's subconscious fixated  assumptions about what the outcomes are likely to be (if the situation  follows the usual pattern of the human processes being in error). This is not an instantaneous process. Time is not of the essence.

> I think "subconscious fixations" is too pejorative and don’t accept human processes as necessarily in error or that computerized predictions are “likely to contradict the designers subconscious fixated assumptions”. Time is always of the essence.
> 
> The problem is that there is then a contradiction between the subconscious influences of the designer's subconscious fixations and the designer's subconscious processes relating to the computerised  prediction data.

Why do you think there is a contradiction?

> Both influence the subconscious processes of creative idea generation  on the creativity leading to new design ideas. 

My belief is that subconscious idea generation has a far greater effect on creativity than predictive processes because of the constraints imposed on most predictive models.
> 
> So the question I was asking was about how you model this situation and  create tools to resolve it to avoid the designer's subconscious fixations forcing the designer's  idea generation to follow their erroneous subconscious  beliefs.  The underlying challenge is that so much of the processes are subconscious and hence hidden and unknown, even to the designer.

I think the designers subconscious conclusions are more often correct or helpful then erroneous. They are not beliefs but propositions before they can be expressed executed and evaluated. My best ideas come as I wake up at 4 am, often solving problems I didn’t know I had. The theory allows error in computer algorithms and predictions unless they are caught by dissatisfaction, doubt,  better knowledge, and intelligence during reflective thought. If their errors aren’t caught we’ve got big problems.

So, why are you so negative about human thought processes?
Chuck
> 
> 


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