In recent years, design theorists have coined the term “designerly ways of knowing”
in an attempt to define what distinguishes designers and makes them successful.
They argue that intuition and subjective experience acquired in the process of designing,
is what empowers designers to create fitting designs.
However this is not a useful line of thought—more important to designers is the
ability to draw connections between seemingly disparate elements or pieces of
information, and to understand context objectively (or at least as objectively as
humanly possible). This is for several reasons.
Firstly, it is through literacy in multiple fields rather than introspection that
designers can be creative and better able to understand design across various contexts.
Secondly, explicitly searching out and understanding the language of external precedents
rather than reflecting on personal precedents can provide a better base for a good
design to be built on.
The rapidly-advancing technological landscape also means that not only are we as
people are getting overloaded with information, but we are also being faced with
more wide-ranging design problems. However, there is a positive conse- quence in
that we are also getting more exposed to unfamiliar and/or new ways of thinking
about problems. Adapting to these new ways of thinking can lead to superior methods
of solving design problems; however, this relies on us as designers being able to
externalise these problems and think analytically.
Finally, “designerly ways of knowing” as a model for thinking about design is flawed,
in that it fails to take into the contributions of different modes of thought, ignores
the history and changing circumstances of technology and human civilisation, and
hinders progress and the design process by needlessly sequestering design skills
as unique and tacit, when it is more practical and constructive for them to be open
and externalised.
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