Book Review: Design Expertise

2010 May 16

Title: Design Expertise
Author(s): Bryan Lawson, Kees Dorst
ISBN: 1856176703
Read: May 2010

Summary

Design Expertise aims at demystifying how regular people and students develop their design skills and thinking abilities to become proficient and professional designers. Lawson and Dorst build on theories, interviews and examples from educational experience in Architecture and Industrial Design (ID) respectively to understand what is design, and how one achieves a professional competency in it.

The book, a mixture of style between a textbook and a research article, is easy to read and elegantly offers numerous quotes, images and diagrams to support the text. Although many examples and case studies relate to Architecture, they remain informative and can be easily understood/translated to an ID perspective.

The authors first try to dissect design, its characteristics and attributes. They introduce various established models describing groups of activities, levels and types of thinking associated with it. They then try to define the expertness or expertise in design. They start with a provocative question “Is thinking a skill?” and lead the reader through the process of skill acquisition. At this point, they introduce the generic model of expertise from Dreyfus: Novice, Advanced Beginner, Competent, Expert, Master and Visionary. They explain in details the various levels and support them with real world examples.

The next part of the book tries to establish the differences between design and general problem solving. Is design a separate intelligence? Some interesting comparisons are made with medicine and laws, in particular regarding the lack of formal design precedent in the design discipline. This directly leads to how designers develop design constructs and schemata (sophisticated combination of simpler ideas) to organize their world and their work.

The last third of the book has a strong focus on education. How should we go about educating designers? What is the current status of design education or curriculum? The authors describe it as moving through layers of expertise. They refer to various work like Kolb’s learning cycle and the LEAF project with its real world (a)synchronous IPA (Intentions, Practice and Aspirations) model.

Personally, I really enjoyed reading this book. I discovered various models and ideas I never encountered before. It will definitely contribute to my PhD project, trying to support design expertise in haptics for designers.

One of the main highlights for me was that the book discussed and dissected activities/experiences I personally had during my own design education. I was fascinated to link the notions from the book to my own impressions of going through school projects in Design School. I also appreciated the new perspectives it brought for teaching, tutoring and design curriculum in general.

/Camille
2010-05-16

Interesting bits

Design as a mixture of creativity and analysis.

Difficult to model design, some takes on it:

Model #1 from Cross
Groups of activities and skills that are all needed and are commonly found in successful design: formulating, representing, moving, evaluating and managing [p 50]

Model #2
Design Levels: Project, Process, Practice and Profession [p.61]

Model #3: Types of thinking in Design [p. 68]
Convention-based, Situation-based and Strategy-based

What is Expertise or an expert? Definition: someone having a special knowledge or skill in a subject.

Is thinking a skill? [p. 88]

In general, expertise is hierarchical and sequential [p. 92]

Acquisition of skill does not necessarily make it easy to describe it.
Once a skill is learned to a level of unconscious effort, then it tends to become transparent and automatic.

Generic model of Expertise [Dreyfus, p. 99] based on ways of perceiving, interpreting, structuring and solving problems:
Novice
Advanced Beginner
Competent
Expert
Master
Visionary

Thinking through visual language, and developing a domain-specific vocabulary

Hatchuel: 4 key differences that distinguish design from simple problem solving [p. 115]
-creative step about what you mean, lack of pre-packaged solutions, use of learning devices, whole process needs to be created.

Symbolic and Episodic knowledge.

Design precedent (like in Law or medecine), very little in design discipline.

Design Constraints model from Lawson [p. 131]

Design Constructs. [Kelly, p. 148]

The development of personal design schemata. Schemata: sophisticated combination of simpler ideas.

Student self-evaluation grid to describe their education activities. [p. 151]

Describing Design work/situation:
MAYA: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable (Raymond Loewey).
“A high standard of ordinariness” (Maguire, 1971)

Gambit: Italian phrase ‘Dare il gambetta’, stick out a leg. First move or beginning of something

‘Real’ and ‘Fake’ creativity [p. 191]

Design as a separate intelligence? Not really, but a necessary mix of many
Howard Gardner, 6 forms of intelligence: linguistic, logical/mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily/kinesthetic and personal.

Educating Designers – Moving Through layers of expertise

Four important features of Design Eduction:
the Studio, the Design Tutorial, the Crit and the Library

Studio: co-location, learning by doing, unrestricted timetable, integration and mimicking practice

Tutor as teacher, tutor as consultant, tutor in parrot mode

A student-led Crit, very interesting setup [p. 255]

Continuing education.
Master designers describe themselves through their projects.
Learning from practice

Kolb’s learning cycle [p. 283]
Concrete experience
Reflective observation
Abstract conceptualization
Active experimentation

Design as a form of research
Reflecting at the right time

LEAF: learning from experience applying feedback

The reality of Design Practice
IPA: Intentions, Practice and Aspirations
Asynchronous and synchronous practice (see diagram p. 293)

Comments are closed.