How Designers Think

Bryan Lawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781136398001
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

How Designers Think is based on Bryan Lawson's many observations of designers at work, interviews with designers and their clients and collaborators. This extended work is the culmination of forty years' research and shows the belief that we all can, and do, design, and that we can learn to design better. The creative mind continues to have the power to surprise and this book aims to nurture and extend this creativity. Neither the earlier editions, nor this book, are intended as authoritative prescriptions of how designers should think but provide helpful advice on how to develop an understanding of design.In this fourth edition, Bryan Lawson continues to try and understand how designers think, to explore how they might be better educated and to develop techniques to assist them in their task. Some chapters have been revised and three completely new chapters added. The book is now intended to be read in conjunction with What Designers Know which is a companion volume. Some of the ideas previously discussed in the third edition of How Designers Think are now explored more thoroughly in What Designers Know. For the first time this fourth edition works towards a model of designing and the skills that collectively constitute the design process.

PART ONE WHAT IS DESIGN?

DOI: 10.4324/9780080454979-1

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780080454979-2

Put a group of architects, urban designers and planners in a sightseeing bus and their actions will define the limits of their concerns. The architects will take photographs of buildings, or highways or bridges. The urban designers will wait for that moment when all three are juxtaposed. The planners will be too busy talking to look out of the window.

Denise Scott Brown, AD Urban Concepts

To regard thinking as a skill rather than a gift is the first step towards doing something to improve that skill.

Edward de Bono, Practical Thinking

Design

The very word ‘design’ is the first problem we must confront in this book since it is in everyday use and yet given quite specific and different meanings by particular groups of people. We might begin by noting that ‘design’ is both a noun and a verb and can refer either to the end product or to the process. Relatively recently the word ‘designer’ has even become an adjective rather than a noun. Although on the one hand this can be seen to trivialise design to the status of mere fashion, this adjectival use implies something that will be important to us in this book. It implies that not all design is equally valuable and that perhaps the work of some designers is regarded as more important. In this book we shall not be studying how design can offer us the fashion accessory. In fact we shall not be much concerned directly with the end products of design. This book is primarily about design as a process. We shall be concerned with how that process works, what we understand about it and do not, and how it is learned and performed by professionals and experts. We shall be interested in how the process can be supported with computers and by working in groups. We shall be interested in how all the various stakeholders can make their voice heard.

To some extent we can see design as a generic activity, and yet there appear to be real differences between the end products created by designers in various domains. One of the questions running throughout the book then will be the extent to which designers have common processes and the extent to which these might vary both between domains and between individuals. A structural engineer may describe the process of calculating the dimensions of a beam in a building as design. In truth such a process is almost entirely mechanical. You apply several mathematical formulae and insert the appropriate values for various loads known to act on the beam and the required size results. It is quite understandable that an engineer might use the word ‘design’ here since this process is quite different from the task of ‘analysis’, by which the loads are properly determined. However, a fashion designer creating a new collection might be slightly puzzled by the engineer’s use of the word ‘design’. The engineer’s process seems to us to be relatively precise, systematic and even mechanical, whereas fashion design seems more imaginative, unpredictable and spontaneous. The engineer knows more or less what is required from the outset. In this case a beam that has the properties of being able to span the required distance and hold up the known loads. The fashion designer’s knowledge of what is required is likely to be much vaguer. The collection should attract attention and sell well and probably enhance the reputation of the design company. However, this information tells us much less about the nature of the end product of the design process than that available to the engineer designing a beam.

Actually both these descriptions are to some extent caricatures since good engineering requires considerable imagination and can often be unpredictable in its outcome, and good fashion is unlikely to be achieved without considerable technical knowledge. Many forms of design then, deal with both precise and vague ideas, call for systematic and chaotic thinking, need both imaginative thought and mechanical calculation. However, a group of design fields seem to lie near the middle of this spectrum of design activity. The three-dimensional and environmental design fields of architecture, interior design, product and industrial design, urban and landscape design, all require the designer to produce beautiful and also practically useful and well functioning end products. In most cases realising designs in these fields is likely to require very considerable technical knowledge and expertise, as well as being visually imaginative and ability to design. Designers in these fields generate objects or places which may have a major impact on the quality of life of many people. Mistakes can seriously inconvenience, may well be expensive and can even be dangerous. On the other hand, very good design can approach the power of art and music to lift the spirit and enrich our lives.

Architecture is one of the most centrally placed fields in this spectrum of design, and is probably the most frequently written about. Since the author is an architect, there will be many architectural examples in this book. However, this is not a book about architecture, or indeed about any of the products of design. It is a book about design problems, what makes them so special and how to understand them, and it is about the processes of design and how to learn, develop and practise them.

Already here we have begun to concentrate on professional designers such as architects, fashion designers and engineers. But there is a paradox here about design. Design is now clearly a highly professional activity for some people, and the very best designers are greatly valued and we admire what they do enormously. And yet design is also an everyday activity that we all do. We design our own rooms, we decide how to arrange things on shelves or in storage systems, we design our own appearance every morning, we plant, cultivate and maintain our gardens, we select food and prepare our meals, we plan our holidays. All these everyday domestic jobs can be seen as design tasks or at least design-like tasks. When we are at work we are still designing by planning our time, arranging the desktops of our computers, arranging rooms for meetings, and so we could go on. We may not aggrandise these humble tasks with the word ‘design’, but they share many of the characteristics of professional design tasks.

We can see, however, that these tasks vary in a number of ways that begin to give us some clues about the nature of designing. Some of these tasks are really a matter of selection and combination of predetermined items. In some cases we might also create these items. Occasionally we might create something so new and special that others may wish to copy what we have done. Professional designers are generally much more likely to do this. But professional designers also design for other people rather than just themselves. They have to learn to understand problems that other people may find it hard to describe and create good solutions for them. Such work requires more than just a ‘feeling’ for materials, forms, shapes or colours; it requires a wide range of skills. Today then professional designers are highly educated and trained.

Design Education

Design education in the form we know it today is a relatively recent phenomenon. That a designer needs formal instruction and periods of academic study and that this should be conducted in an educational institution are now commonly accepted ideas. The history of design education shows a progressive move from the workplace into the college and university studio. In a recent attempt to interpret the history of architectural education linked to establishment of the Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture, this change is interpreted as a series of political conspiracies (Crinson and Lubbock 1994). Certainly it is possible to argue that academically based design education lacks contact with the makers of things, but then as we shall see in the next chapter this reflects practice. The designers of today can no longer be trained to follow a set of procedures since the rate of change of the world in which they must work would soon leave them behind. We can no longer afford to immerse the student of architecture or product design in a few traditional crafts. Rather they must learn to appreciate and exploit new technology as it develops.

We are also seeing quite new design domains springing up as a result of technology. I have been lucky enough to spend some time working in the design faculty of a university entirely devoted to multi-media. Designers there learn to animate, to create web-sites, to design virtual worlds and to create new ways for people to relate to, and use, highly complex technology. Such design domains were unimaginable when the first edition of this book was published and yet today they are extremely popular with students. Even further along the spectrum of design fields we find the system designers and software designers who create the applications that we all use to write books, manipulate images and give lectures. Many contemporary products have in them hardware and software that are combined and integrated in a manner that makes the distinction increasingly irrelevant. Mobile phones, MP3 players and handheld personal computers are not only appearing, but converging and transforming into new kinds of devices. Such areas of design are changing our lives not only physically but socially. Until recently we would have thought of software and system designers as lying outside the scope of a book like this. However increasingly I am finding that people who work in those fields are seeing relevance in the ideas here and as a consequence are beginning to question the traditional ways in which such designers have been educated.

In the twentieth century technology began to develop so quickly that, for the first time in our history, the change was palpable within a single lifetime. Design has always been connected with our contemporary intellectual endeavour including art, science and philosophy. During that period we saw a change in design that was at the time thought to be more profound and fundamental than any of the stylistic periods that had preceded it. It was even known by its direct connection to the contemporary, ‘modernism’. This name implied that it provided a full stop at the end of design history and I was taught by tutors who genuinely believed that. This set of ideas has so profoundly influenced the way that we think about design that sometimes it is hard to disentangle. Only now are we beginning to see that it is possible for design to move on from modernism. We shall not here be primarily concerned with design as style, but nor can we think about process in isolation.

Design education has recently emerged from a period of treating history as deserving academic study but making little connection with the present. Thankfully those notions of modernism as the last word in design have been largely rejected and the design student of today is expected not only to appreciate historical work in its own right but to use it to inform contemporary design.

Design education has some very common features that transcend countries and design domains. Design schools characteristically use both the physical and conceptual studio as their central educational device. Conceptually the studio is a process of learning by doing, in which students are set a series of design problems to solve. They thus learn how to design largely by doing it, rather than by studying it or analysing it. It seems almost impossible to learn design without actually doing it. However the ideas in this book may offer a complementary resource. One of the weaknesses of the traditional studio is that students, in paying so much attention to the end product of their labours, fail to reflect sufficiently on their process. Physically the studio is a place where students gather and work under the supervision of their tutors. The studio is often assumed to replicate the offices of professional designers in the domain. However, one of the perennial problems here is that so much of the real professional world is very difficult to replicate in the college or university. In particular there is usually an absence of clients with real problems, doubts, budgets and time constraints.

It is often difficult therefore for design students to develop a process which enables them to relate appropriately to the other stakeholders in design. Rather it is easier for them to develop very personally self-reflective processes aimed chiefly at satisfying themselves and possibly their tutors. Thus, the educational studio can easily become a place of fantasy removed from the needs of the real world in which the students will work when they graduate. Not only does this tend to distort the skill balance in the process, but also the sets of values which the students acquire. Hubbard showed for example that town planners tend to acquire a different set of values about architecture to the public they represent and serve (Hubbard 1996). Similarly Wilson showed that architects use different evaluative systems to others about buildings (Wilson 1996). She also showed that this tendency is acquired during education. More disturbingly this work also revealed a strong correlation between preferences within each school of architecture and that these preferen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part One What is Design?
• Part Two Problems and Solutions
• Part Three Design Thinking