How Designers Think

Design today has become an extremely wide area of expertise, overlapping with many other disciplines. Knowledge of the classics of modern design has almost become a common cultural property. Design objects today are presented in a similar manner as art. This book is my interpretation of the design process, covering all disciplines. In the book, I will be occasionally shifting from one discipline to another, but this is because, in reality, disciplines are overlapping themselves. I think it is important to provide as much as possible a holistic overview. There are many different interpretations of design and according to me, as long as the designer can explain and communicate his work in a rational matter, there are no wrong or right design interpretations. I make no attempt here to create an encyclopedic enumeration of some kind; rather this book is designed, to present a survey of the main lines of the design development, and influential factors that may and will determine the future of the design process. This book represents a contemporary overview of that process and relates to the tendencies of the integrated design approaches in industry and the knowledge that lies behind. This book has been written and designed as a Masters Project at the Bergen National Academy of Arts (2004 - 2006). I would like to thank this institution for choosing me to become a part of the first generation of the Master students in Design and Visual Communication in Norway. Having American, German, French, British, and Norwegian professors, made the work on this book a valuable international experience.

Artificial Intelligence in Engineering, 1995

Fred Collopy maya lin's book Boundaries provides a rich, self-reflective assessment of design. In it, she reflects upon her sources of inspiration; the roles that sketches, models, and narrative writing play in her designs; and the effects of scale, names, and feelings on the resulting works. Her descriptions of her projects are filled with observations about what she does and how she does it. Like most personal narratives, it contains a mix of well-developed insight, big ideas and small ones, and the occasional contradiction.

The design of artifacts and how designers make them have garnered renewed societal interest as interactive technologies create new opportunities and challenges. The world we experience has never before been as diverse, socially and materially, or as malleable as it now. Increased computation and interactivity are changing the appearance, evolution, and interactions of the personal and collective artifacts that shape our everyday experiences, family and community life, and learning and work activity. These digital artifacts increasingly leverage sensing and physical interaction to provide information at our fingertips and connect us to people around the globe. This new generation of digital technologies gives people a great deal of discretion as to what artifacts and services they use and how they use them (Grudin, 2005). Adoption and appropriation of new digital artifacts is increasingly part of everyday life, and this change draws our attention-and sense of curiosity-to how these artifacts are designed. When we talk about designing, we share Herbert Simon's (1969) broad view that ''everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones'' (p. 129). The articles in this special issue can usefully be read with that broad view of design. That said, we and the authors focus on design professionals, students, and researchers as canonical instances. As computational artifacts take on new shapes and play new roles, so do designers (Moggridge, 2007). Designers of digital artifacts face more complex constraints than, say, furniture designers a century ago. Their work must integrate diverse considerations, physical and mechanical engineering, software engineering, user interface design and user experience, and aesthetics, as well as diverse culture and human values (Dreyfuss, 1955). The position of design and designers at the nexus of so many complex

The issue of defining design is open in many quarters. Definitions abound, yet convergence, especially between different design disciplines, remains elusive. In this speculative paper, the authors consider what designing is like, rather than what it is. In particular, we consider some other activities that have been likened to designing (problem-solving, creativity, planning, synthesis, specification, and a natural human ability), and study the boundaries between designing and these other activities. These boundaries are not crisp, but may be analogous to boundary layers -grey areas in which certain, otherwise steady, characteristics change. While no clear answers result, we do believe we have shed some light on the nature of designing with respect to these other activities. In the end, we see designing as a confluence of other activities, each with their own existence, but combining uniquely to form the activity we call designing.

The current popularity of ‘design thinking’ in business and engineering presupposes an understanding of the decision-making process in design. However, knowledge about designing often does not go deeper than the superficial content of the process phases. In this paper we will discuss decision-making in design by showing the complexity of this hermeneutical process. How are decisions made in design which, first of all, has the nature of a dialogue, based on abductive reasoning in which both intuition and logic play a role? Even more relevant, designing is a multidisciplinary endeavor with players from several fields: designers, economists, lawyers, engineers, psychologists, anthropologists,and marketers. Hence, a designer must work effectively with a team composed of members of different disciplines. Every discipline will have its own way of decision-making according its educational tradition and type of problems to solve. To tune these different approaches in decision-making is the ...

1995

This essay proposes new contours for design as a profession in a world whose industrial products have become more and more language-like and incommensurate discourses compete with one another for hegemony-the design discourse being merely one of many. It takes design to be constituted (that is, defined with)in processes of languaging. It calls on us to recognize and act in the awareness of how our discursive practices identify us as the experts we are, create the objects of our concerns, and provide us with a vocabulary to communicate or coordinate our actions relative to each other. 1 The motivation for this essay stems from the far too common experience that whenever designers do work with their counterparts from the so-called 'harder' disciplines, professionals who can argue with statistics, with experimental findings, with calculations or from positions of administrative authority, they most often lose out. Examples are abound. 2 I conclude from them that, first, designers often are preoccupied with products when what matters is how their ideas occur in talk, in clear presentations, in hard evidence, and in compelling arguments. It is communication that makes a difference and gets results. Second, design is foremost conceptual and creative of future conditions. Dwelling on existing facts often inhibits and is generally less important than the ability to bring a multiplicity of people to recognize the benefits of collaborating in the realization of new ideas. Designers are bound to fail when they do not act on the premise that their conceptualizations must make sense to those that matter. Third, the success of famous designers is based primarily on carefully nourished publicity, personal connections, or longtime working relationships with clients. The visual qualities and functionalities in terms of which 1 The insight that we humans, whether as ordinary people, as professionals or as scientists of one kind or another, are living in language is the starting point of several philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Richard Rorty. I can not review their ground and must go on here. 2 The version of this essay which was presented to the conference included five examples, among them Robert Blaich's account of how Philips' well known Roller Radio almost didn't come to be. See Robert Blaich (1990), Forms of Design, pp. d1-d14 in Seppo Väkevä (Ed.