English

A Note on In-Lecture Discussions

I gave a lecture on different ways of modelling where I asked the students to discuss with neighbors which role each of 6 ways of modelling might play in the design process, what they show, and what they hide. The goal was to explain that each does in fact highlight and leave out different aspects, so you should use as many of them as possible, and keep using different modelling methods throughout the project.

But they were at a point in their design projects where it was hard for them to understand the relevance of this, I think, so weren’t curious to know.

But also, for these in-lecture discussions to work, perhaps there needs to be a right answer. It helps when they can try to get it right, and then find out whether they did.

So not “discuss what a good problem statement looks like”, but “each of these three problem statements is good in one way, and bad in another way’. Find what is good and bad about each statement”.

Two Views of the Teacher-Student Relationship

One follows from the view that teachers know something students do not and that students do not know what’s good for them. Both true. But people seem to draw as a conclusion from this that teachers need to tell students what to do and that students should simpy listen. This does not work.

Another view sees students as rational adults, who can and should decide for themselves what they want and how to achieve this. This also seems to me a solid assumption. But proponents of this view draw from it the conclusion that we should let students take the lead, that they should decide how to approach their projects and what learning activities to engage in. This does not work, I believe, because it conflicts with the above truth that students –in the subject of what’s being taught– do not know what’s good for them. Teachers do. Or should, in any case.

But students need some understanding of how what they’re being asked to do is useful or necessary.

Teachers must understand how naïve and mistaken models can be dislodged and developed into the ones the teacher wants to teach. This is diffucult. But one way this most surely cannot be done is to simply tell the student and expect them to take your word for it.

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.

On Design as Research

Designing a building or product forces you to solve a range of problems, to answer a set of questions. A car needs an engine cover, doors, a trunk that opens, openings in the body for headlights, etcetera. A building needs a stable structure, doors, windows, insolation, waterproofing, perhaps floor levels, it should provide functional spaces, etcetera. There are issues to deal with at the level of the whole design, and there are parts, fragments, and details to work out.

Dealing with such a set of issues, and their interactions, conflicts, and overlap, leads to a thorough interrogation of the material or technology you’re working with. Some of the answers will be specific to this one design. But a few of them will be of more general value. They could become a standard component, technique, or pattern. A standardized detail, combination of techniques, or construction method, for instance.

Such experiments can test and/or explore. They can ask, does it work? Or they can ask, what if?

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.