2.2 Three Major Theorists of Design
2.2.3 Nigel Cross
Nigel Cross is another frequently cited scholar in the field of design and design thinking. With a background in architecture and industrial design, he has been writing and researching on design since the 1960s. He is perhaps best known for his workDesignerly Ways of Knowing, which outlines the case for treating design as a part of a general education occupying a role as important as those taken up by the sciences and the humanities. Design education in this context should not be confused with what is taught in vocational schools: it is “notprimarily a preparation for a career, nor is it primarily a training in useful productive skills for‘doing and making’in industry. It must be defined in terms of the intrinsic values of education”
(emphases in the original; Cross, 2007, p. 21). Design education contributes to education by developing abilities to solve ill-defined problems and to broaden the horizon of cognitive development to include areas of nonverbal thought and communication, among others.
To help develop design as a discipline in its own right, Cross outlines the way towards a science of design, not unlike Simon’s approach inThe Sciences of the Artificial. To that end, he proposes a design methodology that “includes the study of how designers work and think, the establishment of appropriate structures for the
2.2 Three Major Theorists of Design 23
design process, the development and application of new design methods, tech- niques and procedures, and reflection on the nature and extent of design knowledge and its application to design problems” (Cross, 2007, p. 123). In taking this disciplined and structured approach to design, Cross exhibits reservations similar to those Simon had towards the role that intuition plays in the design process. In the section on the development of design ability, he writes:
In contrast to the artistic, intuitive procedures encouraged by the Bauhaus, design education has more recently concentrated on teaching more rational, systematic approaches. Some aspects of design ability have been codified into design methods. . .Designing is a form of skilled behavior. Developing any skill usually relies on controlled practice and the devel- opment of technique. The performance of a skilled practitioner appears to flow seamlessly. . .But learning is not the same as performing, and underneath skilled perfor- mance lies mastery of technique and procedure. The design student needs to develop a strategic approach to the overall process, based on some simple but effective techniques or methods. (Cross,2007, pp. 46–47)
There is no doubt that the teaching of design can be facilitated by a methodo- logical approach and that the skills of design students and designers alike can be improved by controlled practice and the mastery of technique. But nothing in this account of the education in design explains why intuition should not figure in the design process. After all, Cross’s own reference to the Bauhaus school shows that at least one tradition of design practice takes intuition seriously.
Cross’s inexplicable discomfort with intuition is not entirely innocent as it colors his understanding of design. In a later work, Design Thinking, Cross refers to interviews with professionals regarding their understanding of the practice of design. One recurring theme that emerged from these interviews is the designers’ reliance on what they regarded as “intuition” and on the importance of an “‘intu- itive’approach” (Cross,2011, p. 9). The thing to note is that by putting the term intuition in scare quotes, Cross seems to indicate that the designers may not understand their own thinking processes or that he has a better grasps of what the designers think they are doing. Indeed he then goes on to say:
[Designers] are perhaps right to call their thinking‘intuitive’in a more profound sense, meaning that it is not based upon conventional forms of logical inferences. The concept of
‘intuition’is a convenient, shorthand word for what really happens in design thinking. The more useful concept that has been used by design researchers in explaining the reasoning process of designers is that design thinking is abductive: a type of reasoning different from the more familiar concepts of inductive and deductive reasoning, but which is the necessary logic of design. (Cross,2011, p. 10)
The amazing thing about this claim is that it is not backed by the research evidence. Moreover, he implies that the designers are engaged in a form of logical reasoning and that they have mischaracterized their thinking as a form of intuition.
It is difficult not to see Cross in this context as attempting to impose an alien concept on professionals with respect to their self-understanding of the process of design.
The notion of abduction that Cross refers to is drawn from Lionel March who attributes it to the philosopher C.S. Peirce (Cross,2007, p. 37). But it should be
recalled that Peirce introduced the notion of abduction to explain the process of scientific discovery. For Peirce, abduction is the process “of forming explanatory hypothesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea”
(Douven, 2011). But there is controversy about what it means to say that the discovery of a new idea or an explanatory hypothesis is a logical operation. What is more significant, however, is that in the chapter recounting how outstanding designers think, Cross never once mentions the process of abduction, which is supposed to be necessary to the process of designing. On the contrary, he points to the significance of nonlogical processes like flashes of insight and sudden illumi- nation: “Not all the innovators reported examples of sudden illumination, and for some, solutions only come from continuous hard work, but it is clear that sudden illumination (within a prepared mind) is a frequent element in creative design thinking” (Cross,2011, p. 72). Later he would add the observation that the working methods of innovators are “for the most part, not systematic; there is little or no evidence of the use of systematic methods of creative thinking, for example”
(Cross,2011, p. 74). In other words, there is clearly more to design thinking than abductive reasoning.
There is no doubt that the works surveyed here have had considerable impact on the development of theories of design as well as the practice of design in various professional as well as nonprofessional fields of activity. Even so these theories were mainly articulated with the view to raise the academic status of design and design thinking among the established professional disciplines. Nigel Cross in particular tries to make a case for design thinking as an academic discipline in its own right. The survey here is intended to show that even in the case of the professional disciplines, there is still more work to be done to clarify the nature and role that design and design thinking plays. Apart from the apparent incompat- ibility between Simon and Sch€on’s approach to design, there are also legitimate questions about the similarities and differences in the way design is understood and practiced among the various professional and academic disciplines. This consider- ation does not even take into account the vast domain of design activities that take place in the nonprofessional and nonacademic realms.
Clearly it is not possible for one theory or school of thought to encompass the universe of design activities. In this connection, too, it should be noted that not all man-made things are necessarily the products of design, even though they may seem to be so. Some practices, norms, or institutions may have risen spontaneously or may have been the unintended consequences of disparate but intentional human activities. We need to be able to separate the world of artifacts into those that are the products of purposeful, intentional human design and those that are not. In addition more thought and effort needs to be put into the way the various domains of design activities are demarcated or classified and to make clear what may be significant differences in the nature, understanding, and practice of design and design thinking in these various domains. This would show how rich and diverse the field of design and design thinking is, without having one theory or set of theories unnecessarily dominating the discourse on design and thereby limiting an aspect of human creativity that may not be fully comprehensible.
2.2 Three Major Theorists of Design 25
Both Simon and Sch€on are clearly well aware that the contexts in which pro- fessionals currently practice have become increasingly complex, and this has come about partly because of the advances in technology and the growing marketization of professional work. In terms of the design of social systems, Simon acknowledged that members of society have to play their part as codesigners in systems that affect their well-being. But the reality is that the human environment is characterized by competing and conflicting desires, goals, and purposes that can confuse and even corrupt the practice of design. Moreover, among these contending parties are large and powerful institutional and organizational interests that influence the conduct and practice of the professions. Though evidently concerned with the question of ethics, none of the works surveyed here adequately addresses the ethical aspects of design and design thinking. The world that humans have created to meet their needs and desires also threatens to destroy humanity. None of the works in question have taken serious notice of the morally ambivalent role that design and human making plays in the history of human thought.