Notes

Sketching Is Not Communicating

Sketching is not communicating.

Or at least, not where “communicating” means “transfer”.

I cannot look inside your head. The only thing I can see is the sketch. It is a public construction. One that I and you may have different mental models of. But the sketch, the model, is all there is.

You might say that you weren’t able to accurately express what you had in mind. But that tells me nothing, except that you judge the sketch to be a bad or incomplete proposal. Fine. Make another proposal. Change it. Develop it. Iterate. Or make it explicit (and public!) what it is that you find unsatisfactory in the model, or how your ideal might differ from it. Because again: I cannot magically look inside your head.

What Designers Know Depends on What They Want to Do

Designers’ knowledge is organized around typological models. But each discipline has their own way of modelling their subject. In fact, each discipline has a set of modelling languages in which they work.

Not only the kind of modelling is different, the breadth or level of abstraction is, too. Designers’ model knowledge serves not just to understand the world, but it is a tool for creating new artefacts and systems. So the way a designer models the world (relevant precedent) depends on their goal and professional context.

Paul’s “Designing Scientist”

Paul thinks that the modelling step is essential for someone to be a “scientist”. Why? Is it because it’s mathematical? Not quite, I’d say. More important is that a model is a system where the meaning of each and every part is made explicit. It makes it possible to communicate what you’ve constructed to others, and for them to understand it in the same way as you, to check the results’ validity.

The step of publishing, and having others check your work, Paul doesn’t feel is necessary. Someone working intelligently and rigorously in their back-garden shed could also count as doing science. I disagree. It is exactly the collective aspect that makes the whole endeavour reliable. And it is the possibility of building on others’ work that makes it productive.

In design and engineering, however, the universe can take the place of peers in reviewing your work. When you build something in the belief that it will work a certain way, that belief has little influence on wheter it will actually work in the way you expected it to. When you’ve made a fundamental error somewhere, or you were unaware of some phenomenon that has an effect on your device or machine, nature will tell you so. It won’t work. Or it will do something you didn’t see coming. Nature will prove you wrong much more unequivocably and persuasively than you peers could have.

Law and Order in the Studio

Or: Due Process for Design Criticism

At the end of one of the design courses I used to teach, students presented to tutors that had never seen their work, and their presentations were graded by those tutors. I’ve always found this an interesting exercise; students are forced to present a coherent case because they can’t rely on the shared understanding they’ve built up with their regular tutor during the project, and tutors aren’t tempted to let that same shared understanding influence what is supposed to be an assessment of what’s presented – and only what’s presented.

The whole thing is tricky business, though.

Design, Not As “Research”

I’m interested in how creative design can be research. Or rather, how designing develops knowledge. Developing “Design as Research” feels like a dead end to me.

Asking how design can be research assumes that there is something called “research” that design processes can qualify for under certain circumstances. The term invites comparisons to scientific research, and the question how design is or can be similar. But design is not the same as research, scientific or otherwise. What’s interesting is how designing teaches us new things, what sorts of things we learn from it, and how this knowledge can develop from project to project.

Three Limits

As a part of becoming competent designers, students need to become aware of, accept, and learn to deal with, three cognitive limits. Students often believe (1) that they can imagine forms and geometries accurately in their mind’s eye, (2) that they can keep complex structures in thought, and (3) that they can predict their behaviour and other properties. But people in general are quite bad at all three of these things. Sketching and making models are necessary to overcome these limitations and to prevent unpleasant surprises when conflicts, omissions, and unexpected effects are discovered too late in the process.

Study / Practice / Read

I studied design at university. Or did I? You don’t really “study” design. You practice it. So perhaps I should say that I trained as a designer. Or even that I was trained in design.

Is this analogous to how the British say that they “read” philosophy or history at university? Reading history, learning its contents, is different from training to become a historian, able to add something to the field.

Come to think of it, is this what is happening in the master “Design Curating & Writing” at the design academy in Eindhoven, and at the MFA “Products of design” in New York? These students seem more to “read” design than to practice design ability.

Balancing Plan and Opportunity

Design is something you learn through experience. And all design projects, even though they may have started from the same assignment, are unique. This means that every student experiences a certain course differently from their colleagues, and that each of them learns different things as a result.

On the one hand, you want to minimize these differences. After all, courses have learning goals, and you want all your students to achieve those same goals. On the other hand, sometimes something happens in a student’s project that gives them—and only them—a valuable opportunity to learn something. As a design teacher or tutor, you should jump on this. You never know when or if another opportunity will arise for that student to learn that particular lesson.

But focusing on one thing means diverting attention from another thing. So by responding to this unexpected opportunity for some unplanned but valuable lesson, you decrease the likelihood of that student learning the thing that you hoped they would learn beforehand. Or at least you might detract from the depth of their learning experience on that point.

Explanation and Instruction

Designing isn’t something you can learn by having it explained to you. It’s something you must learn from experience. You can only learn how to do it by doing it. This creates a paradoxical situation. Design students find themselves in a predicament. They must start doing without knowing how to. They must accept that there is something they need to learn without knowing what skills and habits, exactly, their desired expertise entails, or how they’ll know whether they’ve learned it.

Teachers of design find themselves on the other side of this same frustrating, paradoxical situation. You cannot teach design, or any other complex skill, for that matter, by teaching it. Not if teaching means explaining or transferring knowledge. You can’t even explain why, exactly, the exercises you assign are important because learning how they are useful can only happen by looking back at having done them.

This paradox and predicament is described by Donald Schön (in The Design Studio and in Educating the Reflective Pracitioner). His analysis helps to explain one of the trickier situations in design education.