Design Thinking

by Nigel Cross

  In analysing the team’s design process, David Radcliffe spotted a potential weakness in their approach. They decomposed the overall problem into subproblems of joining ‘pack to rack’ and ‘rack to bike’, as shown in Ivan’s white-board lists of the various concepts (previous chapter, Figure 6.4). Radcliffe noticed that this decomposition of the problem made it difficult for the team to consider solution concepts that did not fit the decomposition. At the core of their problem structure was the concept of a ‘rack’. At separate times both Kerry and John commented on the fact that the existing external frame of the backpack was in itself a structure something like a rack. Kerry commented that ‘We’ve already got that nice frame on the pack; it would be nice if we can take advantage of that.’ A little later, John commented that ‘there’s a kind of other class of solutions outside of our design problem [structure], and that’s that you could somehow use the external frame and wouldn’t need the rack’. Just a little later again, Kerry formulated a solution concept for a simple device, suggesting that ‘maybe the attachment is kind of a leg that attaches right to the external frame.’ Radcliffe notes that, ‘Ivan records the concept on the whiteboard as “legs on frame” under the “pack to rack” heading … There is no explicit acknowledgement that this concept falls outside the pack-to-rack/rack-to-bike dichotomy. In terms of the recorded work of the team, listing concepts under suitably decomposed headings takes precedence over capturing less structured or controllable emergence of design ideas.’ A ‘no-rack’ concept clearly does not fit anywhere within the team’s problem decomposition. Although the team went on to consider some more ideas for such a ‘no-rack’ concept, eventually it was lost as they returned to their more orderly sequence of planned activities. This loss of a potentially radical, creative solution was precisely due to the team creating, and sticking to, a specific structuring of the problem.

  Nevertheless, there did seem to be a classic ‘creative leap’ in the team’s activity when John proposed that ‘maybe it’s like a little vacuum-formed tray’, and this ‘tray’ concept became key to developing the team’s final design proposal. Did the tray idea just come ‘out of the blue’ or was it an ‘accumulation’ of previous ideas and contributions? It was certainly the first instance of the use of the word ‘tray’, but some possibly related concepts that had been mentioned earlier included references to plastic as a possible material, and flat, solid forms for the rack device. In fact, nearly 20 minutes earlier than he first expressed the tray idea, John had referred to a similar kind of rack idea that he recalled: ‘Actually a friend of mine suggested, a couple of years ago, a product that he would do, an injection-moulded rack that would kind of like fold down.’ And Ivan immediately responded with recalling a similar bicycle luggage device that he remembered: ‘It’s like a little rack that was flat, it had these panels … but these panels were solid, it had little wheels … and it would come off and then it would be like a little trailer.’ Ivan went on to explain how it worked when folded up on the back of a bicycle by over-drawing it on a sketch that Kerry had made (silently) much earlier of something very like a ‘tray’ on the back of a bike (Figure 7.3).

  So ideas related to the device as a tray-like, flat sheet, probably of plastic, had been suggested earlier, both explicitly by John and Ivan and implicitly by Kerry in her sketch. The significant difference seems to be the overt expression by John of this concept as a ‘tray’ – i.e., a flat surface with a raised lip around its circumference. The strength of the ‘tray’ concept seems to be that it identified and summarised an easily recognisable, appropriate solution, in a way that was significantly different from the earlier concepts of a ‘flat’, ‘folded’, ‘panel’. We can see that it drew upon those earlier concepts that, in retrospect, seem very similar, but that lacked the apparently critical feature of ‘containment’ that a ‘tray’ has. Its generation was perhaps aided by the immediately prior consideration of a more extreme form of containment, a bag. Like the bag, the ‘tray’ concept seemed to focus on one particular problem (containing the backpack’s straps) as the most significant consideration, but it was quickly elaborated to satisfy a range of other problems and functions. John’s expression of the concept was also timely – it came at the point when the team was trying to ‘select a concept’ and move on from problem exploration and concept generation to final design work.

  7.3 Ivan’s sketch of the ‘convertible trailer’ design, overdrawn on an earlier sketch made by Kerry.

  To some, it might seem that John’s apparently sudden expression of the ‘tray’ concept is an example of a ‘creative leap’. However, our analysis has shown that the expression of the concept actually ‘accumulates’ a lot of prior concepts, examples and discussion. Creative design is not necessarily the making of a sudden ‘leap’ but is the formulation of an ‘apposite’ proposal. Once the proposal is made, it is seen to be an apposite response to the given, explored and possibly re-framed problem situation. It creates a resolution between the design requirements and the design structure of a potential new product. The sudden illumination that occurs in creative design is therefore more like building a ‘creative bridge’ between the problem space and the solution space than taking a ‘creative leap’ from one to the other.

  In Victor’s design work there were several points at which he clearly recognised breakthroughs or significant concept generation points, using expressions such as ‘Ah-ha!’ and ‘Good idea!’ Ömer Akin and Chengtah Lin analysed Victor’s work, and identified a number of what they called ‘novel design decisions’: non-routine decisions that ‘turn out to be critical for the progress of the entire design.’ An example is Victor’s decision to design a triangular frame, for rigidity. While there were ‘hundreds’ of routine design decisions in Victor’s protocol, Akin and Lin identified just ten novel design decisions (NDDs), characterised by three features: an NDD resolves a problem or bottleneck, it does not follow from previous assumptions, and the designer identifies the NDD as an important feature of the overall design. Akin and Lin also sorted Victor’s activities into three categories: examining (such as reading information, inspecting the available bike or backpack), thinking (whether verbal or silent), and drawing. They then went on to record the frequency with which Victor switched between these activities, and found an interesting correlation between the frequency of switching and the occurrence of NDDs. In almost all cases, they found Victor was alternating between the three activity modes in rapid succession at the point of reaching a novel design decision.

  Akin and Lin were rightly cautious about drawing any inference that rapid succession between different activities actually causes or produces novel design decisions. Their observation was only that the two seem to go together. They concluded only that ‘Our data suggest that designers explore their domain of ideas in a variety of activity modes when they go beyond routine decisions and achieve design breakthroughs’, and that ‘The designer appears to be decidedly engaged in all three major activities at the time of the NDD.’ What their analysis suggests is that a designer’s level of engagement rises, and they work across a wider span of attention to different facets of the problem and solution, as they sense the achievement of a critical, creative point in the process.

  Some studies of student designers have also noted the apparent importance of frequent shifts of attention or activity mode in influencing either the creativity or overall quality of the design concepts produced. For example, in his protocol studies of industrial design students, Henri Christiaans segmented the students’ activities into the three modes of gathering information, sketching and reflecting. He suggested that the more successful students (in producing creative design concepts) were those who showed evidence of rapid alternation between the activity modes. Also, Cindy Atman and her colleagues, from studies of engineering design students, found that overall quality of design concepts was related to more rapid transitions between different activities in the design process, such as gathering information, generating ideas
and modelling. As before, there can be no suggestion of causality; simply flitting more quickly between activity types is not necessarily going to help a designer to be more creative. It seems rather that, in intensive design sessions such as these experiments, creative work is associated with a high level of concentration and engagement.

  Sources

  Full references are included in the Bibliography.

  Ömer Akin and Chengtah Lin: Design Protocol Data and Novel Design Decisions, Design Studies.

  Cindy Atman et al.: A Comparison of Freshman and Senior Engineering Design Processes, Design Studies.

  Margot Brereton et al.: Collaboration in Design Teams, in Analysing Design Activity.

  Henri Christiaans: Creativity in Design.

  Henri Christiaans and Kees Dorst: Cognitive Models in Industrial Design Engineering, in Design Theory and Methodology. See also Cross, Christiaans and Dorst: Design Expertise amongst Student Designers, Journal of Art and Design Education.

  Andy Dong: The Latent Semantic Approach to Studying Design Team Communication, Design Studies.

  Kees Dorst and Nigel Cross: Creativity in the design process, Design Studies.

  Vinod Goel: Sketches of Thought.

  Gabriela Goldschmidt: The Designer as a Team of One, Design Studies.

  Raymonde Guindon: Designing the Design Process, Human-Computer Interaction.

  Joachim Günther et al.: Investigation of Individual and Team Design Processes, in Analysing Design Activity.

  Peter Lloyd et al.: Can Concurrent Verbalization Reveal Design Cognition? Design Studies.

  David Radcliffe: Concurrency of Actions, Ideas and Knowledge Displays Within a Design Team, in Analysing Design Activity.

  Donald Schön: Designing: Rules, Types and Worlds, Design Studies.

  Rianne Valkenburg and Kees Dorst: The Reflective Practice of Design Teams, Design Studies.

  Willemien Visser: More or Less Following a Plan During Design, International Journal of Man-Machine Studies.

  8

  Design Expertise

  At the beginning of this book, in Chapter 1, I set out some of the ways that the activity of designing can be investigated, and in the intervening chapters I have reported and discussed some of my own studies, and related these to the work of other researchers. In the main, my approach has been one of empirical investigation, based on reported experience or observation and analysis. In explaining and relating these various studies, I have tried to build an evidence-based understanding of how designers think and work. But presenting a description of how designers design has also been attempted in other, sometimes more imaginative ways. One of these is the use of metaphors or analogies that help to explain what it is that designers do, and the complexity of that task.

  One of the most unusual metaphors was that used by Herbert Simon, when he likened the activity of a designer to that of an ant. Simon compared any creative problem solver, such as a designer, to an ant returning to its nest across a stony terrain. At any given moment, the ant’s own horizon is very close, and all it can see are the rocks around it. To the ant, the terrain is not all visible in advance, and it cannot foresee all the obstacles lying in its path on its way to its goal. All it can do is deal with the obstacles as it comes to them – working a way around or over them. The ant, like a creative problem solver, according to Simon, is likely to take what would appear to an outside observer, with much more of a global view, to be a circuitous route ‘home’ to the solution goal. What Simon tried to communicate by this metaphor was his view that the apparent complexity of the ant’s (or problem-solver’s) behaviour is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment (or problem situation) in which it finds itself, while the underlying cognitive processes that control the behaviour may be relatively simple. So in this view, understanding designing is more about understanding design problems than about understanding design thinking.

  Christopher Jones used another metaphor of the designer, this time as an explorer, searching for a hidden treasure. Although apparently very different, this metaphor shares several features with that of Simon’s: there is a definite goal, which will be recognised once it is reached; there is an unknown and difficult terrain; and the route to the goal may in retrospect appear to have been unnecessarily circuitous. However, Jones assumed that the explorer, unlike Simon’s ant, has a significant intelligence. This intelligence can be used to help plan a search strategy, and to respond to any clues about the path to take that might be found during the search. Jones was suggesting that the designer can have a map, or a model, of the design process, to guide and control the search.

  However, the metaphors used by both Simon and Jones seem to be wrong in one important respect. In design there is not an already-known goal; the designer creates the goal in creating a solution concept. If there is an already-known goal, then problem solving is a matter of searching for that goal, as Jones and Simon suggest. But searching for something that is lost is not what designers do. They do not search for a lost city or a buried treasure. Rather, they construct a fantasy city or magical treasure of their own. In a sense, they are genuine explorers, mapping unknown territories and returning with fascinating finds, rather than the searchers after certainties that both Jones and Simon describe.

  Design Intelligence

  Jones was right, of course, in emphasising that, unlike an ant, a designer has a higher-level intelligence that can be used to plan, review, reflect, adapt and, above all, create novel solutions. What I have attempted to show throughout this book is that design ability is such a multifaceted cognitive skill. More than that, I have tried to show that there are particular, ‘designerly’ ways of thinking and working, that set design apart from other forms of cognitive skill. In fact, it seems possible to make a reasonable claim that design ability is a form of natural intelligence, of the kind that the psychologist Howard Gardner identified. Gardner’s view is that there is not just one form of intelligence (as conventionally identified in forms of ‘intelligence tests’), but several, relatively autonomous human intellectual competences. He distinguished six forms of intelligence:

  linguistic

  logical-mathematical

  spatial

  musical

  bodily-kinaesthetic

  personal

  Aspects of design ability seem to be spread through these various forms of intelligence in a way that does not always seem entirely satisfactory. For example, spatial abilities in problem-solving (including thinking ‘in the mind’s eye’) are classified by Gardner under spatial intelligence, whereas many other aspects of practical problem-solving ability (including examples from engineering) are classified under bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence. So in this classification, for example, the inventor’s competence is placed together with that of the dancer and the actor, which doesn’t seem appropriate. It seems reasonable, therefore, to try to separate out design ability as a form of intelligence in its own right.

  We have seen many aspects of this ‘design intelligence’ in the case studies in this book. For example, we have seen that good designers have a way of thinking that involves operating seamlessly across different levels of detail, from high-level systemic goals to low-level physical principles. Rather than solving merely ‘the problem as given’ they apply their intelligence to the wider context and suggest imaginative, apposite solutions that resolve conflicts and uncertainties. They have cognitive skills of problem framing, of gathering and structuring problem data and creating coherent patterns from the data that indicate ways of resolving the issues and suggest possible solution concepts. Design intelligence involves an intense, reflective interaction with representations of problems and solutions, and an ability to shift easily and rapidly between concrete representations and abstract thought, between doing and thinking. Good designers also apply constructive thinking not only in their individual work but also in collaboration in teamwork.

  The nature of design intelligence becomes particularly, and tragically, highligh
ted in rare cases where it is impaired through neurological damage in the brain, such as through a stroke. One of these cases was reported by cognitive scientists Vinod Goel and Jordan Grafman, who studied an architect who had had a seizure, associated with a meningioma tumour in his right prefrontal cortex, a region at the front of the brain that is associated with high-level cognitive functions. Before his attack, this person had practised successfully as an architect. Goel and Grafman compared his post-attack design ability with that of a ‘control’ subject, another architect with similar education and design experience, on being given a relatively simple task of re-designing a laboratory space. The sequences of design sketches that the two subjects produced are shown in Figures 8.1 and 8.2. Each began by making a survey drawing of the existing laboratory and its furniture. The healthy control subject then produced a coherent series of sketches, beginning with abstracted considerations of circulation and organisation, then developing proposals and refining the preferred one. The neurological patient produced three separate, basic and incomplete proposals, finishing with a ‘final proposal’ that was still inadequate and incomplete.

  8.1 The sequence of sketches made by the healthy control subject.