- Associate Professor
BES, MEDes
In his essay "Wicked Problems in Design Thinking" Richard Buchanan notes that design has no distinct subject of its own*. Industrial designers will tackle the design of all types of artifacts and in doing so apply knowledge from a wide spectrum of inquiry. This includes insights from art, science, engineering, material science, manufacturing technologies, emerging technologies, ergonomics, psychology, anthropology, business development, kinesiology, culture, history, and so on. Indeed the list continually expands with emerging areas of sustainability and bio-mimicry as recent additions.
Yet, for design thinking, it is not so much ‘what' designers think about, but rather ‘how' they think about things that is important. In effect, design, when considered as a subject, represents an area that addresses the application of knowledge in resolving a specific problem. The ‘how' of such design thinking is evident in Buchanan's notion of "placement,* Krippendorf's view of "context"* and even ideas of 3D composition as espoused by Kostellow*. And all of these insights can further be seen to echo Lehar's discussion of Gestalt perception*. The intent of my research then, is to build on and tie together these ideas of perception and sense-making into a theoretical framework that addresses the elements and mechanisms inherent to design thinking.
*Richard Buchanan, "Wicked Problems in Design Thinking" in The Idea of Design ed. Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan, 3-20 (The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1995): 10.
*Ibid.
*Klaus Krippendorf, "On the Essential Contexts of Artifacts or on the Proposition that ‘Design is Making Sense (of Things)'" in The Idea of Design ed. Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan, 156-184 (The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1995): 159.
*Gail Greet Hannah, Elements of Design: Roweena Reed Kostellow and the Structure of Visual Relationships (New York, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002): 50.
*Steven Lehar, The World in Your Head: A Gestalt View of the Mechanism of Conscious Experience. (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 2003).
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Industrial Design Work