by Nigel Cross
DESIGN
THINKING
UNDERSTANDING HOW
DESIGNERS THINK AND WORK
Nigel Cross
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Introduction
1 Design Ability
Asking Designers about what they Do
Deconstructing what Designers Do
Watching what Designers Do
Thinking about what Designers Do
The Natural Intelligence of Design
Sources
2 Designing to Win
Formula One Designing
Radical Innovations
City Car Design
Learning from Failures
Design Process and Working Methods
3 Designing to Please
Background
Product Innovations
Learning from Failures
Design Process and Working Methods
4 How Designers Think
Motivation and Attitude
Other Outstanding Designers
Common Features
Design Strategies
Sources
5 Designing to Use
The Experiment
Design in Action
Discussion
6 Designing Together
Teamwork versus Individual Work
Roles and Relationships
Planning and Changing Activities
Gathering and Sharing Information
Generating and Adopting Concepts
Avoiding and Resolving Conflicts
Discussion
7 How Designers Work
Collaboration
Design Process
Creative Design
Sources
8 Design Expertise
Design Intelligence
Development of Expertise
Novice to Expert
Sources
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Acknowledgements
Blurb
Imprint
Introduction
In writing this book, my goal has been to help anyone interested in design to develop their understanding of how designers think and work. Anyone so interested might be a design student, a design researcher or teacher, a manager in a design-oriented company, or even a designer who still finds their own processes mysterious or difficult. The focus of the book is on revealing what designers do during the activity of designing, and on building an understanding of the nature of design ability. Readers should gain from the book some insight into what it means to be a designer, how designers employ creative thinking skills, and what is known about different aspects of design ability and its development from novice student to expert professional.
My own background includes architecture and industrial design, but primarily I am a design researcher with an interest in the common aspects of designing that recur across different professional domains of practice. My approach to trying to understand how designers think and work is research-based: I look for and report evidence that comes from observation, experiment, analysis and reflection. My aim is to reveal and articulate the apparently mysterious (and sometimes deliberately mystified) cognitive and creative abilities of designers, that are common across many design domains.
At the core of the book is a number of case studies, each treated in depth as a complete chapter. These are interlaced with chapters that summarise and discuss what can be learned from the case studies in more general terms, and from the research literature of studies of design cognition. The case studies provide a focused resource for the study of high-quality design thinking. The summary and overview chapters provide discussion and reflection that I hope lead the reader into a deeper understanding of the nature of design thinking. This not a ‘methods’ or ‘how-to’ book, but a book that reveals what has been learned from research into many different aspects of design thinking. It is a book that provides commentary and advice, rather than instruction.
The first two case studies (Chapters 2 and 3) are interview-based, and draw upon the work of famous, contemporary, outstanding designers: one an automotive designer, and the other a product designer. Another two case studies (Chapters 5 and 6) are experiment-based research studies, using an expert engineering designer and a small, high-quality product design team each tackling the same project in a recorded, laboratory situation. In addition to the observations to be made, and lessons to be drawn from these particular case studies, I draw upon the research literature in order to amplify and extend from the particular to the general.
I take an interdisciplinary approach to design, so throughout the book observations are made, and comparisons are drawn, across various professional fields such as architecture, product, engineering and automotive design. Other professional design domains, such as computer software and interaction design, furniture, textiles and graphic design are also mentioned. But because I take a research-based approach to understanding design thinking, some domains get less coverage in the book simply because less research has been conducted in them. Nevertheless, I believe that many aspects of design thinking are common across the different domains, and so I trust that my observations and comments will be valid across them all.
1
Design Ability
Our job is to give the client, on time and on cost, not what he wants, but what he never dreamed he wanted; and when he gets it, he recognises it as something he wanted all the time.
Denys Lasdun, architect.
Everyone can – and does – design. We all design when we plan for something new to happen, whether that might be a new version of a recipe, a new arrangement of the living room furniture, or a new layout of a personal web page. The evidence from different cultures around the world, and from designs created by children as well as by adults, suggests that everyone is capable of designing. So design thinking is something inherent within human cognition; it is a key part of what makes us human.
We human beings have a long history of design thinking, as evidenced in the artefacts of previous civilisations and in the continuing traditions of vernacular design and traditional craftwork. Everything that we have around us has been designed. Anything that isn’t a simple, untouched piece of nature has been designed by someone. The quality of that design effort therefore profoundly affects our quality of life. The ability of designers to produce effective, efficient, imaginative and stimulating designs is therefore important to all of us.
To design things is normal for human beings, and ‘design’ has not always been regarded as something needing special abilities. Design ability used to be somehow a collective or shared ability, and it is only in fairly recent times that the ability to design has become regarded as a kind of exceptional talent. In traditional, craft-based societies the conception, or ‘designing’, of artefacts is not really separate from making them; that is to say, there is usually no prior activity of drawing or modelling before the activity of making the artefact. For example, a potter will make a pot by working directly with the clay, and without first making any sketches or drawings of the pot. In modern, industrial societies, however, the activities of designing and of making artefacts are usually quite separate. The process of making something does not normally start before the process of designing it is complete.
Although there is so much design activity going on in the world, the ways in which people design were rather poorly understood for rather a long time. Design ability has been regarded as something that perhaps many people possess to some degree, but only a few people have a particularly strong design ‘gift’. Of course, we know that some people are better designers than others. Ever since the emergence of designers as professionals, it has appeared that some people have
a design ability that is more highly developed than other people – either through some genetic endowment or through social and educational development. In fact, some people are very good at designing. However, there are now growing bodies of knowledge about the nature of designing, and about the core features or aspects of design ability.
Through research and study there has been a slow but nonetheless steady growth in our understanding of design ability. The kinds of methods for researching the nature of design ability that have been used have included:
Interviews with designers
These have usually been with designers who are acknowledged as having well-developed design ability, and the methods have usually been conversations or interviews that sought to obtain these designers’ reflections on the processes and procedures they use – either in general, or with reference to particular works of design.
Observations and case studies
These have usually been focused on one particular design project at a time, with observers recording the progress and development of the project either contemporaneously or post hoc. Both participant and non-participant observation methods have been included, and varieties of real, artificially constructed and even re-constructed design projects have been studied.
Experimental studies
More formal experimental methods have usually been applied to artificial projects, because of the stringent requirements of recording the data. They include asking the experiment participants to ‘think aloud’ as they respond to a given design task. These statements and the associated actions of the participants are sub-divided into short ‘protocols’ for analysis. Both experienced designers and inexperienced (often student) designers have been studied in this way.
Simulation
A relatively new development in research methodology has been the attempt of artificial intelligence (AI) researchers to simulate human thinking through artificial intelligence techniques. Although AI techniques may be meant to supplant human thinking, research in AI can also be a means of trying to understand human thinking.
Reflection and theorising
As well as the empirical research methods listed above, there has been a significant history in design research of theoretical analysis and reflection upon the nature of design ability.
We therefore have a varied set of methods that have been used for research into design ability. The set ranges from the more concrete to the more abstract types of investigation, and from the more close to the more distant study of actual design practice. The studies have ranged through inexperienced or student designers, to experienced and expert designers, and even to forms of non-human, artificial intelligence. All of these methods have helped researchers to develop insights into what has been referred to as ‘designerly’ ways of thinking.
The use of a variety of research methods has been required because to understand design ability it is necessary to approach it slightly obliquely. Like all kinds of sophisticated cognitive abilities, it is impossible to approach it directly, or bluntly. For example, designers themselves are often not very good at explaining how they design. When designers – especially skilled, successful designers – talk spontaneously about what they do, they talk almost exclusively about the outcomes, not the activities. They talk about the products of their designing, rather than the process. This is a common feature of experts in any field. Their enthusiasm lies in evaluating what they produce, and not in analysing how they produce it.
Sometimes, some designers can even seem to be wilfully obscure about how they work, and where their ideas come from. The renowned (perhaps even notorious) French designer Philippe Starck is known to suggest that design ideas seem to come to him quite magically, as if from nowhere. He has said that he has designed a chair while sitting in an aircraft during take-off, in the few minutes while the ‘fasten seat belts’ sign was still on. Perhaps the instruction to ‘fasten seat belts’ was an inspirational challenge to his designing. Of the design process of his iconic lemon squeezer for the Italian kitchenware manufacturer Alessi, he has said that, in a restaurant, ‘this vision of a squid-like lemon squeezer came upon me …’ And so, Juicy Salif, the lemon squeezer (Figure 1.1), was conceived, went into production and on to become a phenomenally successful product in terms of sales (if not necessarily in terms of its apparent function).
Designers can also seem to be quite arrogant in the claims that they make. Perhaps it seems arrogant for the architect Denys Lasdun to have claimed that ‘Our job is to give the client … not what he wants, but what he never dreamed he wanted …’ But I think that we should try to see through the apparent arrogance in this statement, to the underlying truth that clients do want designers to transcend the obvious and the mundane, and to produce proposals which are exciting and stimulating as well as merely practical. What this means is that designing is not a search for the optimum solution to the given problem, but that it is an exploratory process. The creative designer interprets the design brief not as a specification for a solution, but as a starting point for a journey of exploration; the designer sets off to explore, to discover something new, rather than to reach somewhere already known, or to return with yet another example of the already familiar.
1.1 Philippe Starck’s ‘Juicy salif’ lemon squeezer for alessi.
I do not want to imply here that designing is indeed a mysterious process, but I do want to suggest that it is complex. Although everyone can design, designing is one of the highest forms of human intelligence. Expert designers exercise very developed forms of certain tacit, deep-seated cognitive skills. But, as we shall see later, it is possible to unravel even Philippe Starck’s visionary Juicy Salif moment into a much less mysterious explanation in terms of the context of the task he was undertaking, and of the iconography upon which Starck drew for inspiration.
Asking Designers about what they Do
The spontaneous comments of designers themselves about designing can seem obscure, but it is possible to gain some insights by interviewing them more carefully, and interpreting the implications of their responses. Asking designers about what they do is perhaps the simplest and most direct form of inquiry into design ability, although this technique has not in fact been practised extensively.
Robert Davies interviewed members of the UK-based ‘Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry’. This is an élite body of designers, affiliated to The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, or the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) as it is more conveniently known. The number of Royal Designers for Industry (RDIs) is limited to a maximum of 100 at any given time, and they are selected for the honour of appointment to the Faculty on the basis of their outstanding achievements in design. So choosing RDIs for interview is one way of ensuring that you are interviewing eminent designers with a record of achievement and accomplishment; that they do indeed possess and use a high level of design ability. At the time Davies conducted his interviews there were sixty-eight RDIs, ranging over professions such as graphic design, product design, furniture design, textile design, fashion design, engineering design, automotive design and interior design. He interviewed thirty-five of these, conducting the interviews informally at their own homes or places of work, but video-recording the discussions.
Davies was especially interested in the creative aspects of design ability, focusing on asking the designers how they thought that they came up with creative insights or concepts. But his informal interviews tended to range widely over many aspects of the design process, and on what seems to make some people ‘creative’. One theme that recurred in their responses was the designers’ reliance on what they regarded as ‘intuition’, and on the importance of an ‘intuitive’ approach. For example, the architect and industrial designer Jack Howe said, ‘I believe in intuition. I think that’s the difference between a designer and an engineer … I make a distinction between engineers and engineering designers … An engineering designer is just as creative as any other sort of designer.’ This be
lief in ‘intuition’ seems surprising in someone like Jack Howe, whose design work consistently looked rather austere and apparently very rational. The product designer Richard Stevens made a rather similar comment about the difference between engineering and designing: ‘A lot of engineering design is intuitive, based on subjective thinking. But an engineer is unhappy doing this. An engineer wants to test; test and measure. He’s been brought up this way and he’s unhappy if he can’t prove something. Whereas an industrial designer, with an Art School training, is entirely happy making judgements which are intuitive.’
What these designers are saying is that they find some aspects of their work appear to them to be natural, perhaps almost unconscious, ways of thinking, and they find that some other types of people (notably, the engineers with whom they come into contact in the course of their work) are uncomfortable with this way of thinking. They believe that this ‘intuitive’ way of thinking may be something that they inherently possess, or it may be something that they developed through their education. Making decisions, or generating proposals, in the design process is something that they feel relaxed about, and for which they feel no need to seek rational explanations or justifications. But it may be that they are overlooking the experience that they have gathered, and in fact their ‘intuitive’ responses may be derived from these large pools of experience, and from prior learning gained from making appropriate, and inappropriate, responses in certain situations. We all behave intuitively at times, when we respond in situations that are familiar.
However, designers are perhaps right to call their thinking ‘intuitive’ in a more profound sense, meaning that it is not based upon conventional forms of logical inferences. The concept of ‘intuition’ is a convenient, shorthand word for what really happens in design thinking. The more useful concept that has been used by design researchers in explaining the reasoning processes of designers is that design thinking is abductive: a type of reasoning different from the more familiar concepts of inductive and deductive reasoning, but which is the necessary logic of design. It is this particular logic of design that provides the means to shift and transfer thought between the required purpose or function of some activity and appropriate forms for an object to satisfy that purpose. We will explore this logic of design later.
