design knowledge

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.

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.