Design Expertise

Bryan Lawson, Kees Dorst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134209538
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Design Expertise explores what it takes to become an expert designer.It examines the perception of expertise in design and asks what knowledge, skills, attributes and experiences are necessary in order to design well. Bryan Lawson and Kees Dorst develop a new model of design expertise and show how design expertise can be developed.

This book is designed for all students, teachers, practitioners and researchers in architecture and design. To enable all readers to explore the book in a flexible way, the authors' words are always found on the left hand page. On the right are diagrams, illustrations and the voices of designers, teachers and students and occasionally others too.

'Design Expertise' provides a provocative new reading on the nature of design and creative thought.

1	JOURNEYS THROUGH DESIGN

“The artist is not a special kind of man. Every man is a special kind of artist.

ERIC GILL

Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they ill create their own problems.

SCOTT ADAMS”

WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT?

Designing is one of the most complex and sophisticated things we can do with our minds. Many of those who design for a living find it to be so addictive that when they do not have a current commission they may invent one for themselves. And yet designing remains one of the least well understood of all our cognitive powers and most difficult to teach. Part of the excitement of designing is that you never really know how good a job you can do; each project is unique and there is no comfortingly repeatable process that will guarantee success. Above all designing is creative and unpredictable. The comments on the opposite page by the British architect, Richard MacCormac summarise this duality with the feeling born of experience. This book explores the process of becoming a designer, the creation of design expertise. What knowledge, skills, attributes and experiences are necessary in order to design fluently and to good effect?

In one sense we are all designers. Many of us design parts of our homes, gardens, and workplaces. At the very least we make decisions about how to dispose and arrange items; we all make decisions about which clothes to buy and design our own appearance every day. And yet we admire, seek out and pay for the work of the world's most outstanding professional designers. There seems a huge gulf between what they do and the everyday design of ordinary people. Exactly what does it take then to become such an expert designer? What is the real nature of design expertise and how do we create and develop that expertise? Throughout the book we shall discuss these questions and offer some answers.

Implicit in much design education and criticism is the idea of the ‘talented designer’. Behind this notion rests an assumption that some people have an innate ability to design and others do not and might as well give up. We shall challenge that notion throughout this book. While it may well be the case that some people design without apparent effort, we shall argue that for most of us design is, like so much other human cognitive activity, a skill. In fact we shall argue that it is a complex collection of skills.

That simple notion leads us inevitably to the consequence that these skills can be identified, learned and taught. It also suggests that there may be some ways of doing all these things that are more likely to be effective than others. Although it is possible to teach and learn sophisticated skills such as a sport or playing a musical instrument, this sadly does not mean we can all become world ranked or a virtuoso. But most of us can improve significantly if we can only find the best way for us of learning and creating expertise. So it is for design.

Fig 1.1 Fitzwilliam College Cambridge Chapel by Richard MacCormac—a fine example of his sensitive approach to university buildings

JOURNEYS THROUGH DESIGN
RICHARD MACCORMAC

“This is not a sensible way of making a living, it's completely insane. You agree to do this job with no idea really that you can come up with anything worthwhile… no idea how much it will take to do it… there has to be this big thing that you're confident you're going to find, you don't know what it is you're looking for and you hang on, it's a journey really, I mean the analogy of a journey is a very interesting one… the design process is a journey, an episodic journey towards a destination which you don't know bout, which is what life is and what writing and all arts are like; a journey.”

RICHARD MACCORMAC

Richard MacCormac studied architecture at Cambridge and the Bartlett School in London. He was heavily influenced by the work of Leslie Martin and Lionel March. He admits to having an ‘almost obsessive interest’ in the Prairie Houses of Frank Lloyd and has developed an almost equal respect for Sir John Soane. After setting up his own small practice he soon formed a partnership with Peter Jamieson and eventually also David Pnchard. They became known for a series of influential low rise housing schemes including student accommodation as well as a number of academic university buildings at both Oxford and Cambridge. Richard MacCormac has written and lectured extensively on his approach to architecture, and taught architecture at Cambridge and Edinburgh Universities. He was elected president of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1991 and championed high quality design. His presidency was celebrated by the ‘Art of the Process’ exhibition at the RIBA that showed the evolution of designs by a series of well-known British architects. His more recent work includes a major centre for Cable and Wireless, an underground station on the Jubilee Line and the redevelopment of Broadcasting House for the BBC.

We hope that those who are reading this book, whether they are students, practitioners, educators or researchers, will find help and inspiration here in developing their own particular way of understanding designing.

WHAT IS IN THE BOOK?

We begin in Chapter 2 by rehearsing our contemporary understanding of the nature of design problems and the activities that, taken together, constitute the act of designing. Even the most cursory examination of design reveals that it is not a simple singular activity but involves a complex array of tasks. Design is not like some physical skills such as riding a bicycle or swimming. Designing is not a matter of doing one thing but of doing many things. Designing depends not only on some clearly defined and well understood set of knowledge but also makes use of apparently remote and wide ranging ideas. Our more detailed analysis will show that design depends upon skills, knowledge and understanding. The design student then is challenged by having to acquire all three, and the educator bears the responsibility of assisting in that process. Professional designers must keep developing the skills, knowledge and understanding that make up design expertise through their professional practice.

Some of the skills that designers rely upon can be isolated and studied in their own right and this book will not dwell extensively on those. An obvious example would be the skill of drawing. There are many excellent books to help the student learn to draw and this book will not tread on their territory. However, there may well be some issues to do with drawing that impact on the more central cognitive processes and activities of designing and that will definitely be of interest to us here. Similarly, designers obviously need substantial chunks of knowledge. They need to know about the technicalities of constructing the things they are designing. They may need to know about the relative costs of different ways of manufacturing and operating the objects or systems they are designing. They will need to be able to calculate and compare some features of the technical performance of their objects, or at least work with other professionals who specialise in such matters. Again it is not the job of this book to explore, teach or research such areas. As with skills, it may be that certain ways of knowing about such matters do indeed impact on the very business of designing, and we shall be interested in that.

In Chapter 3 we shall begin to turn our attention to the issue of expertise in general. One of the key common characteristics of generic expertise models suggests that experts do not necessarily do the same things as novices. Whether we look at the playing of chess, the solving of mathematical

EXPERIENCE
RICHARD MACCORMAC

“I think that my role in the practice is to initiate the design processes in all the major jobs, not so much in building types like housing where I think we have established a kind of repertoire, a typological repertoire, which is to do with density… it's sort of vernacular if you like, we do quite a lot of it for housing associations and so on… vernacular in the sense that it's a language that's the common language…”

roblems or the flying of aeroplanes, we find that it is not simply a case of experts working faster, more effectively or better than novices. What we find is that they operate differently. We shall explore the implications of this for design. It strongly suggests that there are several modes of designing. These modes depend upon different levels of experience and knowledge enabling designers to think in different ways. Some modes may suit some individuals better than others and some may be difficult to operate on without considerable practice and experience.

One example of this being explicitly recognised is given by Richard Mac-Cormac who tells us that his role in the design practice changes when the job involves an unfamiliar building typology. He clearly feels that he should adjust the way he relates to the design team according to the extent of their experience. Effectively MacCormac is telling us the way the design process is organised even within his own practice depends upon the level of expertise available. Designers are thus aware of the development of expertise through their practice and yet relatively little has previously been written about the nature and growth of expertise in design.

Design research is now maturing as an area of study and in recent years we have begun to understand more about this process of creating expertise. Design has been taught as a central subject in the degree courses for such disciplines as architecture, interior design, industrial design and graphics. More recently, other areas of design have become popular including urban and landscape design, theatre design, fashion and textile design, and have been joined by web and interface design. Of course there have always been those who wanted to understand and improve design but as a serious field design research is a relative newcomer. In the middle of the twentieth century there were enough people working in the field to begin to hold conferences and publish their proceedings.

Even so it would not have been possible to write this book until recently. While the output of the world's greatest designers has always been examined in the greatest detail and endlessly argued over, their processes have been relatively neglected. Around the turn of the century, a number of studies began to appear that focused specifically on outstanding designers.

In Chapter 4 we look at the start of the journey. We investigate the kinds of skills and ways of thinking and seeing that those starting out as designers need to acquire and develop. In particular, we look at the changes that take place as people are transformed from everyday designers into students of design. This is often a time of great confusion and some doubt for many design students. Not only do many of them need to develop new skills for

WRITING THIS BOOK

The first significant international conference to explore the nature of design expertise took place in Sydney in 2003 (Cross and Edmonds, 2003). This built on attempts to understand the whole idea of expertise that in turn had been driven by attempts to develop artificial expert systems and the consequent need to capture human expertise in symbolically coded digital environments. Design however remains a human activity beyond the capability of artificial intelligence and therefore poses some interesting challenges to the computational theory of mind that lies behind such work. While some have argued that it is merely a matter of time before computers will be able to design, others including the authors of this book argue that there is something essentially human about this highly creative activity.

representing design externally, such as drawing and modelling, but they also have to restructure the way they represent design in their minds. They have simultaneously to begin gathering knowledge and creating meaningful mental structures and concepts with which to evaluate and order that knowledge.

In Chapter 5 we turn our attention to the higher levels of design expertise as found in professional practice. Our model of design expertise developed in Chapter 3 will show that a graduate can normally only expect to have reached the lower levels. Design is something that has to be at least partly learned in practice. However, because of the essentially creative, experimental and unpredictable nature of design this makes learning on the job a little hit and miss. We will look at just why it takes time to acquire higher levels of design expertise and the kinds of knowledge that designers create through extended practice. We will explore the very different ways of working that are often developed by experienced designers.

In the final two chapters of the book we shall return to a more detailed investigation of design education and practice. We shall assemble together many of the questions that have been thrown up by our investigation of design expertise in order to develop a theoretical critique of current design education. One of the extraordinary features of the design education system is the consistency with which it is organised. We may look at the education of industrial designers, architects or urban designers, for example, and see remarkably similar patterns. We may travel to the continents of North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia or Australasia and see these patterns repeated. Why is this? Has design education evolved into a well honed and highly effective system, or are there some commonly accepted practices that we have simply stopped questioning because they are so firmly embedded? We are convinced that the latter is the case, and will argue for a critical reapprai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1. JOURNEYS THROUGH DESIGN
• 2. UNDERSTANDING DESIGN
• 3. EXPERTISE IN DESIGN
• 4. STARTING OUT AS A DESIGNER
• 5. BEING PROFESSIONAL
• 6. EDUCATING DESIGNERS
• 7. THE CONTINUING JOURNEY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY