The lure of the sirens' song: Part 1, first thoughts on process

Journal of Architectural Education

Volumn 52, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 174-188

  Harfield, Steve ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY SYDNEY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33847302640     PISSN: 10464883     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1531-314x.1999.tb00267.x     Document Type: Article

References (89)

1. Morris Asimow, Introduction to Design (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962)
2. D.G. Thornley, "Design Method in Architectural Education," in Conference on Design Methods, ed. J.C. Jones and D.G. Thornley (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1963), pp. 37-51
3. J. Christopher Jones, "A Method of Systematic Design," in Jones and Thornley, eds., Conference on Design Methods, pp. 53-81
4. L. Bruce Archer, "Systematic Methods for Designers," Design 172, 174, 176, 179, 181, 185, 188 (Apr. 1963-Aug. 1964) (rev. version, London: Design Council, 1965)
5. and L. Bruce Archer, "The Structure of the Design Process," in Design Methods in Architecture, ed. Geoffrey Broadbent and Anthony Ward (London: Lund Humphries, 1969)
6. Bill Hillier, John Musgrove, and Pat O'Sullivan, "Knowledge and Design," in Environmental Design: Research and Practice, ed William J. Mitchell (Irvine: University of California, 1972), pp. 29-3-1-14
7. J. Christopher Jones, "Designing Designing," Design Studies 1/1 (1979): 31-35
8. and Nigel Cross, John Naughton, and David Walker, "Design Method and Scientific Method," Design Studies 2/4 (1981): 195-201
9. Abbey Suckle ed., By Their Own Design (London: Granada, 1980)
10. Vello Hubel and Diedra B. Lussow, Focus on Designing (Montreal: McGraw-Hill, 1984)
11. Peter Rowe, Design Thinking (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987)
12. Bryan Lawson, How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified (London: Architectural Press, 1986)
13. and Bryan Lawson, Design in Mind (Oxford: Butterworth, 1994)
14. Richard Hyde, "Problems of Method: The Evaluation of Conceptual Design for Beginning Students," Design Methods and Theories 23/4 (1989):1101-23
15. Richard Hyde, "Design Procedures in Architectural Design: Applications in CAAD," Design Studies, 10/4 (Oct. 1989): 239-45
16. Michael Eckersley, "On Heuristics and Design-Problem Solving Behavior: Cracking the 'Black Box,'" Design Methods and Theories, 24/3 (July-Sept. 1990):1267-84
17. and N.F.M. Roozenburg and N.G. Cross, "Models of the Design Process: Integrating across the Disciplines," Design Studies, 12/4 (Oct. 1991): 215-20
18. John S. Gero ed., Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Design (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1988)
19. John S. Gero ed., Artificial Intelligence in Design (Southampton: Computational Mechanics Publications, 1989)
20. John S. Gero (ed.), Artificial Intelligence in Design '91 (Oxford: Butterworth, 1991)
21. John S. Gero and Tarko Oksala (ed.), Knowledge-Based Systems in Architecture (Helsinki: Acta Polytechnica Scandinavica, 1989)
22. and John S. Gero and Sudweeks (ed.), Artificial Intelligence in Design '96 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1996)
23. Francis D.K. Ching, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1979)
24. and Kazys Varnelis, "The Education of the Innocent Eye," JAE 51/4 (May 1998): 212
25. Varnelis, "Innocent Eye," p. 212
26. Amos Rapoport, "Facts and Models," in Broadbent and Ward, eds., Design Methods in Architecture, pp. 138, 139
27. On the subject of the role of the design studio in general, see, for example, Donald Schön, The Design Studio (London: RIBA Publications, 1985)
28. on criticisms of its preeminence within architectural education, see Amos Rapoport, "Architectural Education: There Is an Urgent Need to Reduce or Eliminate the Dominance of the Studio," Architectural Record (Oct. 1984):100, 103
29. William S. Saunders, "Architectural Education: Current Confusions-Is Architecture Allegory, Craft, or Art?" Architectural Record (May 1986): 19, 51
30. and A.T. Purcell, "Ritualistic, Rhetorical, Reactionary," Architecture Australia (July 1985): 62-67
31. For a more overwrought critique of the "squadlike spectacle of the review" with its "fascist-style adjudication techniques," see Brian Boigon and Sanford Kwinter, "Manual for five Appliances in the Alphabetical City: A Pedagogical Text," Assemblage 15 (Aug. 1991): 30-42
32. On the effect of ideology on both the studio and design in general, see, for example, James M. Mayo, "The Manifestation of Politics in Architectural Practice," JAE 50/2 (Nov. 1996): 76-88
33. Bryan Lawson, "The Act of Designing," Design Methods and Theories 13/1 (Jan-Apr. 1979): 29-30
34. and Peter G. Rowe, Design Thinking (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 37ff, 115ff
35. Specific comments on the ideological effects of educational practices may be found in Sarah M. Dinham, "Teaching Design: Designing Teaching," in Pedagogy of Design, ed. J. Pericot (Barcelona: Publicacions Elisava, 1991), p. 145: "Another aspect of the teacher's conceptual frame is his view of design, and of the process of designing. Teachers' conceptions of the design process permeate all their work
36. For example, the teacher who says 'You design by drawing and then you draw your design - these two things work into each other - you use drawing as a means of designing' will plan students' tasks to foster this process." A. Ward, "Ideology, Culture and the Design Studio," Design Studies 11/1 (Jan. 1990): 10, comments, "The concept of the hidden curriculum is taken to mean the collection of those tacit normative value structures which stem from the social, professional and political milieus as well as from the content of the course, and which structure and constrain that which is included or excluded from the content itself."
37. Richard Bunt, "Means and Ends," in Design: Science: Method ed. Robin Jacques and James A. Powell (Guildford: Westbury House, 1981), pp. 82-85
38. and Hubel and Lussow, Focus on Designing, pp. 37-40
39. Steve Harfield, "Off the Top of Their Heads: The Nature and Processes of Architectural Design as Perceived by New Intake Students," Form/Work 1 (Oct. 1997): 36ff. Of the sample surveyed, 73 of the 257 respondents (28.4 percent) indicated "process" as being central to design, the second most common citation after "ideas" (36.2 percent)
40. Antony Flew ed., A Dictionary of Philosophy (London: Pan Books, 1979), pp. 9, 136
41. Larry Briskman, "Creative Product and Creative Process in Science and Art," Inquiry, 23/1 (1980): 83-106
42. A potentially useful parallel might be drawn here with Gilbert Ryle's 1949 distinction in "Knowing How and Knowing That," in The Concept of Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), esp. pp. 28-32
43. J.L. Lemke, "Education, Cyberspace, and Change," Arachnet Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture 1/1 (Mar. 22, 1993): 4
44. J. Christopher Jones, "How My Thoughts about Design Methods Have Changed during the Years," in Essays in Design (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1984), p. 18
45. and Roozenburg and Cross, "Models of the Design Process," p. 216
46. See Thomas F. Heath, "The Algorithmic Nature of the Design Process," in Emerging Methods in Environmental Design and Planning, ed. Gary T. Moore (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), pp. 57-68
47. Steve Harfield, "The Lure of the Sirens' Song: Part 2," JAE (forthcoming)
48. Harfield, "Off the Top of Their Heads," p. 41
49. Eckersley, "On Heuristics and Design-Problem Solving Behavior," p. 1267
50. see also Ivan Hybs and John S. Gero, "An Evolutionary Process Model of Design," Design Studies 13/3 (July 1992): 273: "A designer is anyone engaging in an intentional, purposeful activity with the aim of devising a description (plan) for a product or artifact."
51. Donald Brook, unpublished manuscript, and discussion with the author, 1977
52. Others tacitly accept the existence of process while rejecting completely any possibility of methodology. Thus, for example, Andries Van Onck, in "The Search for Design," in Pericot, ed., Pedagogy of Design, pp. 116-20) offers a somewhat standard morphogenetic view of design process - "The process of designing is carried out with a pencil or with a model, by experimenting with different forms until, by a series of successive steps, a solution is found which seems satisfactory" (p. 119) - while appearing to deny any possibility of methodological assistance within this process: "Practice shows that there neither exists nor can exist any theory or methodology of design. . . . The product is always born spontaneously as the result of infinite combinations of "input" and intuition, evading all description or classification."
53. Alan Bullock, Oliver Stallybrass, and Stephen Oliver, eds., The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, 2d ed. (London: Fontana, 1988), p. 382
54. See, for example, Graham Wallas, The Art of Thought (London: Jonathan Cape, 1926)
55. See the discussions in Douglas N. Morgan, "Creativity Today: A Constructive Analytic Review of Certain Philosophical and Psychological Work," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 12 (1953), 1: 24
56. Carl R. Hausman, "Mystery, Paradox, and the Creative Act," Southern Journal of Philosophy, 7(3) (1969), 289-96
57. Reuben Abel, "Creativity," in Man Is the Measure (New York: Free Press, 1976), pp. 265-71
58. and Briskman, "Creative Product and Creative Process,"
59. Abel, "Creativity," pp. 266-67
60. Hausman, "Mystery, Paradox, and the Creative Act," p. 2
61. Lawson, "The Act of Designing," pp. 29-30
62. Claims as to the centrality of problem solving in the design process are legion, from basic design textbooks like Peter Green, Design Education: Problem Solving and Visual Experience (London: Batsford, 1974), pp. 12ff
63. Anthony Horrocks, "Design Education in Practice: Art Rooms," in Attitudes in Design Education, ed Ken Baynes (London: Lund Humphries, 1969), p. 37
64. Rowe, Design Thinking
65. and Lawson, How Designers Think, e.g., pp. 63-91
66. to more deliberate analyses like Horst Rittel, "Some Principles for the Design of an Educational System for Design - Part One," DMG Newsletter (Dec. 1970), pp. 8-10
67. Phil Roberts, "Learning to Mean," Design Studies 314 (1982): 206-8
68. Hyde, "Design Procedures in Architectural Design," p. 240
69. and Jill M. Franz, "A Critical Framework for Methodological Research in Architecture," Design Studies 15/2 (Apr. 1994): 438-39
70. Quote from Lawson, "Act of Designing," p. 29
71. See also Christopher Alexander's use of the term program: "Finding the right design program for a given problem is the first phase of the design process," in Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 84
72. Of relevance here is Donald Schön's contention that architects work under conditions of complexity and uncertainty: "In designing . . . things are made under conditions of complexity. Designers discover or construct many different variables. These interact in multiple ways, never wholly predictable ahead of time." "Architects make things under conditions of uncertainty. This means not only that the consequences of design moves are never wholly predictable but that design situations are, in John Dewey's language, 'problematic' Although the programme or brief to be satisfied by a design may be highly specified, design situations are always partly indeterminate. In order to formulate a design problem to be solved, the designer must frame a problematic design situation: set its boundaries, select particular things and relations for attention, and impose on the situation a coherence that guides subsequent moves. Moreover, the work of framing is seldom done in one burst at the beginning of a design process. Designing triggers awareness of new criteria for design: problem solving triggers problem setting." Donald Schön, "Designing: Rules, Types, and Worlds," Design Studies 9/3 (July 1988): 182
73. Bryan Lawson, Design in Mind, p. 2
74. Lawson specifically cites Sydney Gregory (ed.), The Design Method (London: Butterworth, 1966)
75. Schön, "Designing: Rules, Types, and Worlds," p. 181
76. Horst Rittel, "Some Principles for the Design of an Educational System for Design - Part Two (Conclusion)," DMG Newsletter (Jan. 1971): 2-10. One is reminded of Arthur Koestler's observation on the centipede frozen into immobility when asked the order in which it moved its legs!
77. Chris Abel, "Function of Tacit Knowing in Learning to Design," Design Studies 2/4 (1981): 209
78. See for example, Rivka Oxman, "Prior Knowledge in Design: A Dynamic Knowledge-Based Model of Design and Creativity," Design Studies 11/1 (Jan. 1990): 17-28
79. and Ömer Akin, "Necessary Conditions for Design Expertise and Creativity," Design Studies 11/2 (Apr. 1990): 107-13
80. Oxman, "Prior Knowledge in Design," p. 23
81. Robert A. Fowles, "What Happened to Design Methods in Architectural Education? Part One," pp. 17-31. Fowles himself is obviously aware of this, noting that: "the 1970's saw the nature of the discipline begin to change, with growing doubts and criticisms concerning both its applicability to real world problems (no one had yet described a convincing application of design method thinking), and whether in fact the methods did correspond to the actual processes of designers" (p. 24)
82. Robert A. Fowles, "What Happened to Design Methods in Architectural Education?: Patt One - A Survey of the Literature," Design Methods and Theories, 11,1 (1977), pp. 17-31
83. J. Christopher Jones, "The State-of-the-Art in Design Methods," Broadbent and Ward, eds., p. 193
84. Adrian Snodgrass and Richard Coyne, "Models, Metaphors, and the Hermeneutics of Designing," Design Issues 9/1 (fall 1992): 56
85. and Jones, "State-of-the-Art in Design Methods," p. 193
86. See Charles M. Eastman, "On the Analysis of Intuitive Design Processes," Gart T. Moore, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), pp. 21-37
87. Jane Darke, "The Primary Generator and the Design Process," Design Studies 1/1 (1979): 36-44
88. and Abbey Suckle, ed., By Their Own Design (London: Granada, 1980)
89. Wayne Attoe, Architecture and Critical Imagination (London: John Wiley and Sons, 1978), p. 34