by Nigel Cross
Another theme that emerged from Davies’s interviews with these leading designers is related to this tricky relationship between the ‘problem’ (what is required) and its ‘solution’ (how to satisfy that). Designers recognise that problems and solutions in design are closely interwoven, that ‘the solution’ is not always a straightforward answer to ‘the problem’. A solution may be something that not only the client, but also the designer ‘never dreamed he wanted’. For example, commenting on one of his more creative designs, the furniture designer Geoffrey Harcourt said, ‘As a matter of fact, the solution that I came up with wasn’t a solution to the problem at all. I never saw it as that … But when the chair was actually put together, in a way it quite well solved the problem, but from a completely different angle, a completely different point of view.’ This comment suggests something of the perceptual aspect of design thinking – like seeing the vase rather than the faces, in the well-known ambiguous figure (Figure 1.2a). It implies that designing utilises aspects of emergence; relevant features emerge in tentative solution concepts, and can be recognised as having properties that suggest how the developing solution-concept might be matched to the also developing problem-concept. Emergent properties are those that are perceived, or recognised, in a partial solution, or a prior solution, that were not consciously included or intended. In a sketch, for example, an emergent aspect is something that was not drawn as itself, but which can be seen in the overlaps or relationships between the drawn components (Figure 1.2b). In the process of designing, the problem and the solution develop together.
Given the complex nature of design activity, therefore, it hardly seems surprising that the structural engineering designer Ted Happold suggested to Davies that, ‘I really have, perhaps, one real talent, which is that I don’t mind at all living in the area of total uncertainty.’ Happold certainly needed this talent, as a leading member of the structural design team for some of the most challenging buildings in the world, such as the Sydney Opera House and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and in his own engineering design work in lightweight structures. The uncertainty of design is both the frustration and the joy that designers get from their activity; they have learned to live with the fact that design proposals may remain ambiguous and uncertain until quite late in the process. Designers will generate early tentative solutions, but also leave many options open for as long as possible; they are prepared to regard solution concepts as temporarily imprecise and often inconclusive.
1.2 (a) Ambiguity: vase or faces? (b) Emergence: two overlapping triangles also contain emergent features such as a hexagon and a six-pointed star.
Another common theme from Davies’s interviews is that designers need to use sketches, drawings and models of all kinds as a way of exploring problem and solution together, and of making some progress when faced with the complexity of design. For example, Jack Howe said that, when uncertain how to proceed, ‘I draw something. Even if it’s “potty” I draw it. The act of drawing seems to clarify my thoughts.’ He means that, when faced with a blank sheet of paper, he can at least draw something that may at first seem silly or inappropriate, but which provides a starting point to which he can respond; if it doesn’t seem right, why doesn’t it? Designing, it seems, is difficult to conduct by purely internal mental processes; the designer needs to interact with an external representation. The activity of sketching, drawing or modelling provides some of the circumstances by which a designer puts him- or herself into the design situation and engages with the exploration of both the problem and its solution. There is a cognitive limit to the amount of complexity that can be handled internally; sketching provides a temporary, external store for tentative ideas, and supports the ‘dialogue’ that the designer has between problem and solution.
Summarising from the interviews with RDIs, Robert Davies and Reg Talbot also identified some personality characteristics which seem key to making these people successful in dealing constructively with uncertainty, and the risks and opportunities that present themselves in the process of designing. ‘One of the characteristics of these people,’ they suggested, ‘is that they are very open to all kinds of experience, particularly influences relevant to their design problem. Their awareness is high. They are sensitive to nuances in their internal and external environments. They are ready, in many ways, to notice particular coincidences in the rhythm of events which other people, because they are less aware and less open to their experience, fail to notice. These designers are able to recognise opportunities in the way coincidences offer prospects and risks for attaining some desirable goal or grand scheme of things. They identify favourable conjectures and become deeply involved, applying their utmost efforts, sometimes “quite forgetting” other people and/or things only peripherally involved … What turns an event from a crisis into an opportunity, it seems, depends upon the way events are construed by the individual rather than the nature of the events per se.’ Successful designers are optimists, exploring hopefully, dedicated to the task in hand. And, like all good explorers, they are opportunists, taking advantage of any unexpected openings or vantage points, and spotting what look like fruitful ways ahead.
Many aspects of design ability that emerge from Davies’s study are also reflected in another set of interviews with highly successful designers, conducted by Bryan Lawson, who interviewed a number of internationally leading architects. The importance of drawing and sketching within the design process is one thing especially emphasised by these architects. For example, the British architect Richard MacCormac said, ‘Whenever we have a design session or a crit review session in the office I cannot say anything until I’ve got a pencil in my hand … I feel the pencil to be my spokesman, as it were … I haven’t got an imagination that can tell me what I’ve got without drawing it … I use drawing as a process of criticism and discovery.’ Here, MacCormac is saying that he uses drawing both as a means of imaging, imagining or discovering something that he cannot construct just in his mind, and as a means of communicating with others – the pencil is his ‘spokesman’, communicating by means of what he draws. Note that the ‘spokesman’ is both critic and discoverer, which reinforces just how cognitively important the act of sketching is to the designer. And note also that he and his colleagues in his office must be able to read, as well as ‘write’, substantial and significant information from sketches and drawings.
The Spanish engineer-architect Santiago Calatrava also uses sketching and drawing as a key part of his design process. Lawson reported that Calatrava is ‘a prolific drawer, but one senses that his graphical output is never the result of a wish to produce a drawing but rather to understand a problem. He seldom works at a drawing table but usually on rather small pads of paper perhaps at about A3 size. “I could take a big piece of paper and draw the whole thing, but I prefer to concentrate.” His design process depends heavily on a stream of graphical output, sometimes pencil sketches, often watercolours, which he uses to communicate his ideas to his staff. He sees this very much as a journey of exploration with each sketch following on from its predecessors as the ideas develop. “You are discovering the layers of your project … I mean, to start with you see the thing in your mind and it doesn’t exist on paper and then you start making simple sketches and organising things and then you start doing layer after layer … it is very much a dialogue.” He likes to have pads or books of paper in front of him so he can see how far he has got down this journey’. Although Calatrava says here that, unlike MacCormac, he can ‘see the thing in his mind’, it is clear that what he may initially ‘see’ has to be ‘concentrated upon’ in an external representation. The early design concept has to be developed and explored through the ‘dialogue’ of sketching, through a related visual and cognitive process, like MacCormac’s, of criticism and discovery.
Also as in the study by Davies, Lawson identified from his interviews something of the complex relationship in design between problem and solution. Richard MacCormac spoke of defining the problem through
attempting solutions: ‘Issues which are the stuff of the thing often only come out when you try and produce a scheme, and therefore the design process defines objectives in a way in which the brief could never do.’ In fact, when I had interviewed Richard MacCormac, some years before Lawson’s study, he told me: ‘I don’t think you can design anything just by absorbing information and then hoping to synthesise it into a solution. What you need to know about the problem only becomes apparent as you’re trying to solve it.’ This confirms a view that the design brief is not a specification for a solution, but the starting point for an exploration. Like Denys Lasdun saying that the architect’s job is to give the client something other than ‘what he wants’, Richard MacCormac told Lawson, ‘Often in competitions the winning scheme is the one that tells the client something that they never knew before … something that is terribly important to them and was not in the brief.’ This is the reason why unsuccessful design competition entrants sometimes complain that the winner ‘didn’t stick to the brief’. As Lawson commented, ‘Although we tend to admire designers for their solutions, it is often their ability to find the right problems which distinguishes good from adequate or poor design.’
Lawson also suggested that good designers are good at coping with uncertainty. Several of his interviewed architects spoke of carrying on ‘parallel processes’ of cognition relevant to the same design job at the same time. For example, the Czech architect Eva Jiricna spoke of working on detail junctions of materials at the same time as on general spatial concepts of a design. Lawson found a strong example of what he called such ‘parallel lines of thought’ in the American architect Robert Venturi’s description of working on his design for the Sainsbury Wing extension to the National Gallery in London. One particular line of thought concerned ideas for relating the circulation system in the new building to that in the older part (issues of the plan, and of floor levels), while another was for relating together the external appearances of the new and old parts (issues of the elevation, and of architectural styles). Lawson suggests that Venturi kept these two sets of ideas in progress, both equally important to his design thinking, before resolving them into a single solution. ‘The problem for the designer,’ Lawson commented, ‘is when the attempt should be made to reconcile all the ideas, or lines of thought, which are developing. If this is attempted too early, ideas which are still poorly understood may get lost, while if this is left too late they may become fossilised and too rigid. There is no formula or easy answer to this conundrum, the resolution of which probably depends almost entirely on the skill and sensitivity of the designer. However, what seems clear is that a degree of bravery is required to allow these lines of thought to remain parallel rather longer than might seem reasonable to the inexperienced designer.’ Coping with uncertainty, as Ted Happold emphasised, seems to be a key factor in design ability.
One way to cope with uncertainty is to try to impose order. Jane Darke also interviewed a number of successful architects, and noticed how they sought to impose order on the rather nebulous problems they faced. Some brought to the problem a personal set of guiding principles that offered starting points, some sought to find starting points in the particularities of the site on which they were to build. In each case, Darke observed how these starting points enabled the designers to limit the problem to something manageable, to provide a narrower focus within which they could work. ‘The greatest variety reduction or narrowing down of the range of solutions occurs early on in the design process,’ she observed, ‘with a conjecture or conceptualisation of a possible solution. Further understanding of the problem is gained by testing this conjectured solution.’ The designers imposed a limited set of objectives, or an idea about the building form, as a ‘primary generator’, as Darke called it, a means of instantiating a solution concept. This seems to be a necessary part of the design process, because a solution concept cannot be derived directly from the problem statement; the designer has to bring something to it.
Deconstructing what Designers Do
What designers say about what they do can of course be rather biased, or based on partial recall, or limited by their willingness or ability to articulate what are, after all, complex cognitive activities. But I said before that it is possible to unravel even Philippe Starck’s mystical account of the conception of his Juicy Salif lemon squeezer into a much less mysterious explanation. To do this, I am drawing upon an exercise in deconstructing this particular design act by Peter Lloyd and Dirk Snelders, in which they utilised what Philippe Starck has said about himself in various interviews, what (little) he has said about the conception of the lemon squeezer, and the evidence of Starck’s very first design sketches for it.
In the late 1980s, Philippe Starck was already a renowned designer of a wide range of different products. The Alessi company had started a new series of products designed by internationally famous designers, including kettles and coffee pots by architects Michael Graves and Aldo Rossi, and cutlery and condiment sets by industrial designers Richard Sapper and Ettore Sottsass. Alessi invited Starck to offer a new product in the ‘designer’ series, a lemon squeezer. Starck went to Italy to visit Alessi and discuss the project. He then took a short break on the small island of Capraia, just off the Tuscan coast, and went to dine in a pizzeria restaurant, Il Corsaro. He was obviously already thinking about the lemon squeezer project, because, as he waited for his food, he began to sketch on the paper place mat. At first, the sketches were just very rough images of a fairly conventional form of lemon squeezer (see the centre-right area of the place mat, Figure 1.3), but then something happened to inspire a leap to making sketches of something quite different – his anti-pasto plate of baby squid had arrived, and Starck began to get his ‘vision of a squid-like lemon squeezer’! His sketches on the place mat now became images of strange forms with big bodies and long legs, and eventually (bottom left in Figure 1.3) something emerged that is now recognisable as the Juicy Salif concept.
1.3 Starck’s design sketches for the lemon squeezer on the restaurant placemat.
Lloyd and Snelders recount what probably went on in this quick process of creative sketching and thinking, as Starck drew for inspiration not only on the squid but also on his boyhood interests in sci-fi comics and spaceship imagery. ‘First he tries to make a conventional lemon squeezer out of a squid, but then he realises that won’t really work. The squid begins to evolve – Philippe has always been interested in evolution – into something with legs, but he doesn’t like it. It seems to be dragging, injured almost.’ Here, one might interject, Starck seems to be using his pencil, like Richard MacCormac, in a process of discovery and invention. ‘He keeps going, eating while he sketches. His sketches abstractly remind him of the old comics he used to read … Things begin to gel in his mind, and from the dragging creature emerges a lighter, three-legged form. Like one of the spaceships he used to think about jetting up to space in. He likes the form, it’s “working” … The next morning he phones Alessi, “I’ve got a lemon squeezer for you,” he teases. Of course there are a few details to work out, exact dimensions, what material to use, how to get the juice out of the lemon efficiently. But these are all sub-problems; someone else can solve them. The main problem is solved.’
So we see that the concept for the strange new type of lemon squeezer did not leap fully formed into Philippe Starck’s mind, but emerged, albeit pretty quickly, in a process of sketching inspired by seeing a squid shape as a potential source of form, and driven by recall of other imagery. This other imagery comes from Starck’s repertoire of other interests, including aircraft design (his father’s occupation), space rockets, science fiction, comic strips, and organic evolution. Lloyd and Snelders suggest that Starck has retained a kind of juvenile enthusiasm for futuristic imagery. The lemon squeezer will be made of aluminium. ‘Aluminium as a material has been said to give a feeling of “nostalgia for the future”,’ say Lloyd and Snelders, ‘and there are other features of the lemon squeezer that one can associ
ate with a future imagined from the past. Chief among these is its rocket or spaceship associations. Not with rockets of the present, but with old-style rockets, like those of Soviet inventors. At the time rockets promised an exciting, high-tech future of space exploration, a long way from war-torn planet Earth. This “future of the past” feeling is maintained by the streamlining of the squeezer’s body (a teardrop being a good aerodynamic shape). Starting in the [nineteen-] thirties and continuing into the fifties streamlining made everything look modern, and the metaphor of streamlining, speeding unhindered towards the future, became a metaphor of social and technological progress. In the late 1980s streamlining might just be thought of as retro, but it could also be taken as ironic, especially as there is actually a fluid moving over the surface of the lemon squeezer, albeit not at a speed that streamlining would help at all.’
In deconstructing Philippe Starck’s creative act, Lloyd and Snelders implied that the ‘squid-like’ concept was not an inexplicable flash of inspiration from nowhere, but that it arose rather more prosaically by applying an analogy (the form of the squid) to the problem that was in Starck’s mind (a novel form for a lemon squeezer). This kind of analogy-making is often proposed as a means of encouraging creative thinking. What was particularly striking in this case was Starck’s ability to make such a leap of imagination from ‘squid’ to ‘lemon squeezer’. Thereafter, Lloyd and Snelders suggested, Starck, in developing the concept, was doing what many designers do, which is to draw upon a repertoire of precedents, of remembered images and recollections of other objects that helped him to give a more coherent, practicable and attractive form to the concept.
