Editorial

This special issue on Designing in Con-text consists of six representative art-icles from the fifth Design Thinking

Research Symposium held at Delft in December2001. Previous Design Thinking Research Sym-posiums have focussed, naturally enough, ondesign thinking. Analysing the thoughts ofdesigners has certainly proved fruitful for designresearch, but the view of design as an essentiallycognitive activity is receiving increasing criti-cism, particularly as it seems to confer a levelof omniscience on designers that an ever moredistributed world would seem to deny.

The strength of the symposium series has alwaysbeen its multi-disciplinary focus and this isreflected in this special issue with papersdescribing architectural, engineering, and indus-trial designing and with authors deriving fromdisciplines such as linguistics, psychology, andmarketing. These papers also reflect key issueswithin the design study field: the developmentof design theory (Coyne), the role of memoryand creativity in designing (Downing; Lloyd andSnelders), the description of design practice(Medway and Clark), and finally implicationsfor design education (Adams, Turns and Atman;Bucciarelli). The DTRS is nothing if not abroad church.

At the original symposium discussants weregiven the task of reading and criticising specificpapers and this proved a productive andinsightful approach. For the papers that appearin this issue an edited version of the subsequent

www.elsevier.com/locate/destud0142-694X/03 $ - see front matter Design Studies 24 (2003) 195–197doi:10.1016/S0142-694X(02)00051-0 195 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain

discussion is also included. This gives a moregeneral feel for the issues the papersaddress. Full videos of all symposium presen-tations and discussions can be viewed athttp://www.io.tudelft.nl/research/dic

In the first paper by Richard Coyne, MindlessRepetition: Learning from Computer Games, thesimilarities between the activities of designingand computer game playing are explored.Although seemingly quite different Coynedevelops a number of threads to this ‘designingas play’ metaphor. These include the idea ofexploring a (virtual) problem space, of pro-gressing through a number of levels, and parti-cularly the idea of repetition. Involved in theprocess of repetition is the paradoxical idea thatone can learn by repeating and so escape therepetition in progressing towards a final goal.There are also more complex resonances to thepaper. The idea that a problem space can be‘uncanny’ gives an insight into the emotionalnature of designing as well as thecognitive/rational element. Coyne also pointsout that repetition is often an end in itself, andthat designing could be considered in a similarway; as an inherently self-serving activity. Inthis respect the paper touches on ethical con-cerns.

Exploring spaces and places is also the themeof the second paper Transcending Memory:Remembrance and the Design of Place byFrances Downing. Downing describes how astrong sense of place, coupled with an aesthetic

feeling for ‘significant form’, can continue toinspire architects in new projects. Although onemight think this would lead to unnecessary senti-mentality in the design process Downing is clearthat this would not result in good designing:

“If what we re-create from memorable experience is to

be significant, it must remain aloof from sentimentality.

The re-creation of significant form is what allows

designers to transcend their own unique experience – to

abstract and apply knowledge and import in a new

context.”

Downing describes a large scale study wherearchitects were encouraged to talk about their‘image banks’, their idiosyncratic memories ofplaces coupled with feelings about those places.The paper categorises and illustrates these gen-eral places that hold such an influence over, andprovide such a wealth of associations for, thearchitectural imagination.

Do significant experiences embodied in designartifacts guarantee success? This is the questiontaken up in the third paper, What was PhillipeStarck Thinking of? by Peter Lloyd and DirkSnelders. The method they use is to take aniconic design object, Phillipe Starck’s JuicySalif lemon squeezer, and examine it’s causes intwo ways. Firstly, by considering the individualprocess of designing – what we normally thinkof as creativity and problem solving – and sec-ondly, by considering wider cultural (contextual)factors influencing designing, with the designerbeing in some sense an instrument of widersocial concerns within any given period. Aftercritically reviewing both arguments they suggestthat ‘the design process’ could be said to con-tinue long after the original designer has finishedthinking about it, and that what they term‘engaged use’ might be a better way of dis-cussing design success.

196 Design Studies Vol 24 No. 3 May 2003

Both the paper by Downing and the paper byLloyd and Snelders discuss the way that associ-ations of ideas find their way into design arti-facts. The paper by Medway and Clark, Imagin-ing the Building: Architectural Design asSemiotic Construction, takes this one stepfurther by examining the activities and conver-sations of architects working on a professionaldesign project. In doing this they describe howthe process is ‘palimpsest-like’, how layers ofmeaning are slowly built up (and also lost)through the drawing and discussion cycle. Themetaphorical nature of the architectural designprocess – how new metaphors are integrated intothe state of the ‘virtual building’ – is also wellillustrated in the snippets of discussion that theyanalyse. In the architects office, the authors sug-gest, the building is still virtual, an ongoingwork of imagination that “despite being real ina physical sense, is a solid social fact, somethingknown, often in great detail”.

Medway and Clark’s paper is reminiscent ofDonald Schon’s idea of reflection-in-actioninvolving changes in perception; seeing one ideaas another. Schon’s theories are used moredirectly in the fifth paper by Adams, Turns andAtman, Educating Effective EngineeringDesigners: The Role of Reflective Practice.

Adams, Turns and Atman take the reflectivepractice theory of Donald Schon1 and use it asa ‘lens’ to interpret the results of a large numberof novice-expert studies involving studentengineering designers. This is interestingbecause Schon does indicate what he feels gooddesigning to be (the ‘conversation with the situ-ation’ should be reflective) and therefore con-tained within this is the idea that we can dis-tinguish good designers from average designersusing Schon’s theory. The theory, once oper-ationalised, accounts well for the developmentof designing ability amongst participants. What

is interesting is the way in which Schon’s oftenvague terms: ‘backtalk of the situation’, ‘namingframing and moving’ are turned into measureswhich can account for individual development.

The proper development of engineering designstudents is also the concern in the last paper ofthe collection by Larry Bucciarelli: Designingand Learning: A Disjunction in Contexts. Usinghis well developed theory of ‘object worlds’Bucciarelli2 shows how traditional (one correctanswer) analytical engineering questions can beeasily re-written to foster more open-endeddesignerly thinking (maybe more akin to theassociative processes described by Downing andMedway and Clark). The by-product of this isthat students learn to actively set their own prob-lems rather than blindly, and passively, applying

197Editorial

analytical techniques. By teaching in this wayproblem solving has a context, and the tech-niques which have been taught can be appliedwithin that context. The result of this small butimportant change is to properly prepare studentsfor design practice, Bucciarelli claims.

Peter Lloyd

AcknowledgementsI’d like to thank the co-organizer of the sym-posium, Henri Christiaans, for his work in mak-ing the event possible.

References

1 Schon, D The Reflective Practitioner Basic Books, New York(1983)2 Bucciarelli, L L Designing Engineers MIT Press, Cambridge, Mas-sachusetts (1994)