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designer87 — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 16:57:01 GMT

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THE ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION OF INTERIORS

designer879455 — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 12:16:04 GMT

We seem to have a natural fascination with the way people choose to decorate and furnish their homes,

as is borne out by the multitude of interior magazines that grace the shelves of every newsagent.

This is in part nosiness – to catch a glimpse of a private sanctuary that usually remains behind closed

doors and in part an aesthetic appreciation of interior design, from which personal styles can be

developed or copied. The extent to which this is successful depends on the confidence of the designer

and stylist to create aesthetically appealing interiors, and the ability of the artist or photographer to

express these three-dimensional atmospheric experiences as mere two dimensional images.

This chapter begins with a look at how artists and photographers have chosen to depict interiors, and

concludes with a brief history of interior decoration as useful background knowledge.

Seventeenth century interpretation The artistic interpretation of interiors has a long historical

tradition, perhaps best exemplified by the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century.

The exaggerated realism of the contrast of light and shade in their paintings stimulates in the viewer a

sense of magic, romance and nostalgia.

The oil painting by Pieter de Hooch in Figure 1.1, An Interior, with a Woman Drinking with Two Men

(1658), is a fine example, and his work is described by art historian Mariet Westermann in The Art of

the Dutch Republic 1585–1718 (1996) in the following way:

De Hooch, and the majority of painters represented in this book share one of the uncanniest realist

strategies: a fine meticulous handling of oil paint that makes the

Continue reading topic on ( Image 1 )

Source:

Professional Interior Photography
The Internet

Join us for the 2013 Student Design Challenge...

designer87 — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 10:02:43 GMT

Join us for the 2013 Student Design Challenge... This year’s theme is Street Vending.
Want to add to your portfolio, connect with other up-and-coming
designers in the region and showcase yourself internationally?

Interior Design
Conceptualize, design and prototype a contemporary
street vendor kiosk. Designs should be multifunctional, modular and
movable. Choose your own client, program and site.
Visual Communication
Explore the street vending theme using
an infographic poster or motion graphic. Answer the who, what, when,
where, why and how. Think past, present and future.

Please mailto:abusliman@yahoo.com

INTERIOR DESIGN AS A PROFESSION

designer87 — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 12:06:57 GMT

Until recently, interior design has been a self-certifying profession, similar to urban and regional planning (with its professional appellation, "certified planner”). In many states, individuals are still free to call themselves interior designers, regardless of their qualifications, and to offer interior design services.

Only a business license is required. This is beginning to change. Regional chapters of both the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) and the International Interior Design Association (IIDA) are pushing hard to secure for interior designers the same protections—of title and practice—that architects now enjoy in the United States.

Architects are licensed on a state-by-state-basis, and their activities are overseen by registration boards that administer licensing examinations, issue licenses, and discipline their licensees for malpractice and other practice-act infractions. To advocate change in the interest of the profession and their clients, design professionals should understand the nature of the arguments currently being made for and against such professional protections, and the factors that justify guarding interior design as a profession.

Arguments and Counter-arguments

Historically, both professions and trades have sought to limit entry to their ranks and to guard their traditional privileges by eliminating potential competitors.

When possible, they have used the law to support this gatekeeping.

California Governor Jerry Brown, in the late 1970s, proposed to "sunset” the practice and title acts of a wide range of trades and professions, including architecture and landscape architecture. The trades and professions resisted, arguing that public health, safety, and welfare would suffer if registration ended. That was their only possible argument: in America, anything else would be restraint of trade.

In seeking to license the title and practice of interior design, the ASID and IIDA are also making a public health, safety, and welfare argument. Opposing them, understandably, are architects and interior decorators, their main competitors among design professionals, who question whether such public health and safety considerations apply. Some architects question the need for state sanction of interior design practice, given its focus on non-load-bearing structures. Some interior decorators and residential interior designers argue that the requirements put forward by the proponents of interior designer licensing go beyond what is actually needed to protect public health, safety, and welfare. That would make those requirements exclusionary and therefore in restraint of trade.

The arguments for and against licensure have a political component as well.

A dispute in the early 1980s in California pitted licensed architects against registered building designers—a category created as a compromise to preserve the traditional rights of draftsmen, carpenters, and others to design houses and small buildings. Similarly, the AIA and its civil, professional, and structural engineering counterparts regularly bicker over what their respective practice acts allow them to design or engineer. Similar compromises can be expected for interior design in relation to architecture, interior decoration, and residential interior design.

The legal and political possibilities available to both sides in arguments for professional protections will continue to cloud rather than resolve the issue of what constitutes a profession, so let us consider other factors that justify

interior design as a profession.

Professionalism

Traditionally, professionals have pointed to credentials as evidence of their professionalism. This is what separates them from lay people, paraprofessionals, and "mere technicians. ”However, David Maister —a well-known consultant to professional service firms—argues that while these things may point to competence, true professionalism depends on attitude. A professional, in Maister’s view, is a "technician who cares”—and that entails caring about the client.

The real subject of interior design is enclosed space—that is, the settings within buildings that house human activity.

First and foremost, interior designers are concerned with how people experience

these settings . . .

In trying to define professionalism, Maister lists the following distinguishing traits:

• Taking pride in your work (and being committed to its quality)

• Taking responsibility and showing initiative

• Being eager to learn

• Listening to and anticipating the needs of others

• Being a team player

• Being trustworthy, honest, loyal

• Welcoming constructive criticism2

His point is that professionalism is not just education, training, a certificate or license, and other credentials. In saying that these things are not the sine qua non of professionalism, Maister is really arguing for a client-responsive professionalism—as opposed to one that uses its credentials and presumed expertise as an excuse for ignoring or even bullying the client.

Arrogance is an issue in the design professions. Too many designers regard their clients as patrons, not partners.

Design commissions become opportunities to further personal ambition rather than meet the client’s goals and needs. The implication is that design is self-expression, that the creative process is largely if not exclusively the province of the designer alone.

Although there is inevitably an aspect of self-expression in the design process, its creative power is enhanced, not diminished, by collaboration. In collaboration, we become partners in a larger enterprise, and that gives our work its energy and spark. In arguing for "professionals who care,”

Maister is drawing attention to the collaborative nature of their relationships with their clients. It is a partnership to which both parties contribute their expertise. Formally, professionals act as the agents of their clients.

As professionals, they have other obligations that affect this relationship—obligations that are intended, among other things, to protect clients from themselves. However, designers who assume they "know better” than their

clients miss the opportunity to get into their clients’ heads and understand their world. They need that knowledge to connect their work to their clients’ larger goals and strategies, the real starting points of innovation in the design process.

What Makes Interior Design a Profession?

Interior design is a profession in part because of designers’ special skills and education, but also because of designers’ special relationships with their clients. According to Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, a profession is "a calling requiring specialized knowledge and often long and intensive academic preparation.”4 An art is a "skill acquired by experience, study, or observation, an occupation requiring knowledge and skill, and the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects.”5 Acraft is "an occupation or trade requiring manual dexterity or artistic skill.”6 These definitions stress a difference in training, suggesting that only professions require university study. That difference does not precisely hold anymore, since both arts and crafts are taught at the university level. Recalling David Maister’s definition of a professional as a "technician who cares,” we might ask, "Who benefits from the care that interior designers exercise in the course of their practice?” Clearly, the beneficiaries are those who use the settings that they design.

In defining the professional practice of interior design, the Foundation for Interior Design Education and Research (FIDER) provides the following outline of its scope:

• Analyzing client needs, goals, and life safety requirements

• Integrating findings with a knowledge of interior design

• Formulating preliminary design concepts that are aesthetic, appropriate, and functional, and in accordance with codes and standards

• Developing and presenting final design recommendations through appropriate presentation media

• Preparing working drawings and specifications for non-loadbearing interior construction, reflected ceiling plans, lighting, interior detailing, materials, finishes, space planning, furnishings, fixtures, and equipment in compliance with universal accessibility guidelines and all applicable codes

• Collaborating with professional services of other licensed practitioners in the technical areas of mechanical, electrical, and loadbearing design as required for regulatory approval

• Preparing and administering bids and contract documents as the client’s agent

• Reviewing and evaluating design solutions during implementation and upon completion7

While it is accurate as far as it goes, this definition misses the heart of the matter. The real subject of interior design is enclosed space—that is, the settings within buildings that house human activity. First and foremost, interior designers are concerned with how people experience these settings and how their design supports their different activities. These concerns form the core of the interior design profession’s specialized knowledge.

EDUCATING INTERIOR DESIGNERS

work and coursework—the former a remnant of the old apprenticeship system that once characterized both architecture and the arts and crafts. In addition to studio training in design and visualization, professional interior design programs typically provide a foundation in:

• Human factors

• Materials and systems

• Codes and regulations

• Contracts and business practices

Unlike architecture, most interior design programs do not address the engineering side of building construction—e.g., coursework in the static and dynamic analysis of structure. Interior design also differs from architecture (and interior decoration) in its concern for every aspect of the interior environments that people use every day.

The human experience in these settings is a broad topic that includes history and culture, psychology and physiology, organization theory, and benchmark data drawn from practice—together with lighting, color theory, acoustics, and ergonomics. These subjects need to be part of the professional interior designer’s education and training.

How do interior designers gain an understanding of client and user needs?

"By asking them” is a reasonable answer for smaller projects, but larger ones make use of social science research methods such as participant observation, network analysis, and surveys. Exposure to these methods through coursework in anthropology and sociology is helpful, especially as strategic consulting emerges as a specialty within the profession. (Strategic consulting seeks to align a client’s real estate and facilities strategies with its business plan. Typically, it helps the client define its real estate and facilities program and establish the quantitative and qualitative measures of its performance.)

Business clients expect their design teams to understand the strategic context of their projects. Coursework in business and economics can begin that process; immersion in the industry, by reading its journals and participating in its organizations, is the next step. Once designers reach a certain level of responsibility, management becomes part of their job description. Coursework in business and management can make this transition easier.

A Knowledge of Sustainable Design Principles

"Building ecology,” as the Europeans call it, needs to be part of interior designers’ knowledge. They should know how to design to conserve nonrenewable resources, minimize waste, reduce CO2 and SO2 levels, and support human health and performance.8,9

INTERIOR DESIGNERS AND SUSTAINABLE DESIGN

In tackling the problem of indoor air pollution in the 1980s, the interior design profession led the way in raising public awareness of the value of sustainable design.

As advocates for the user, interior designers have a special responsibility to understand sustainable design principles and evaluate their appropriateness for their projects. Sustainability also offers many opportunities to deliver added value for clients. As case studies by the Rocky Mountain Institute9 have shown, the resulting gains in building and human performance provide a reasonable (and even rapid) payback on the client’s investment,

especiallywhen these measures are used in combination. Here are some examples.

• Lockheed Building 157, Sunnyvale, California. Lockheed spent $2.0 million to add sustainable design features to this 600,000-ft2 office building that reduced its energy consumption and provided a higher-quality work environment. Control of ambient noise was also achieved. Lower energy costs alone would have repaid Lockheed’s investment in four years. Because the improved quality of the workplace reduced absenteeism by 15 percent, the investment was actually repaid in less than a year.

• West Bend Mutual Insur ance Headquarters, West Bend, Wisconsin. West Bend used a number of sustainable design features, including energy-efficient lighting and HVAC systems, roof, wall, and window insulation, and thermal storage. Utility rebates kept its cost within a "conventional” budget. The building is 40 percent more efficient than the one it replaced. It provides an "energy-responsive workplace” that gives users direct control of thermal comfort at their workstations. A stud y showed that the building achieved a 16 percent productivity gain over the old one. Apr oductivity gain of 5 percent (worth $650,000 in 1992 dollars) is attributable to the energy responsive workplace feature alone.

• NMB Headquarters, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. This 538,000-ft2 project exemplifies what Europeans call "integral planning”: designing the building and its systems holistically to reduce operating costs and increase quality and performance. About $700,000 in extra costs were incurred to optimize the building and its systems, but this provided $2.6 million a year in energy savings—and a payback of only three months. Employee absenteeism is down by 15 percent, too. Gensler’s experience reinforces the Rocky Mountain Institute’s findings. On office campus projects, they found that providing under-floor air supply and ambient lighting can reduce the cost of workplace "churn” (the need to shift workstations to accommodate changes in occupancy) from as much as $5.00/ft2 to less than $1.00/ft2. For an office campus in Northern California, these same features allowed them to redesign the entire workplace to accommodate a different set of users just six weeks before its opening—with no delays. By avoiding the cost of delay, the client essentially paid for the 10 percent higher cost of these features before the campus had even opened.

THE CULTURAL IMPACT OF INTERIOR DESIGN

Settings, the designed spaces within buildings, are "where the action is.”

When human or organizational change occurs, settings are where it takes place first. As my colleague Antony Harbour points out, the U.S. workplace has been dramatically transformed over the last 40 years, butU.S. commercial office buildings still have the same floor plans. The settings have changed much more than their containers. Although settings are more ephemeral than buildings, they have equal if not greater cultural impact.

Interior Designers and the Workplace Revolution

Because of the economic pressures of recession and globalization and technological developments such as bandwidth (the proliferation of electronic networks to convey voice and data communications on a global basis), the workplace has undergone profound change in the last decade. While technology is given credit for the productivity gains that have swept the U.S. economy in this period, interior designers who specialize in the workplace have had a major role in helping U.S. companies integrate new technologies and work processes. Alone among design professionals, they understood that these settings are the "connective tissue” that could make this happen. Interior design professionals understand that design fuels organizational change, regardless of the scale of its application. Think about where we work today. Behind the modern city, whether London, Tokyo, or New York, are nineteenth-century assumptions about work—that it occurs at specific times and in specific places, for example. Now people work "anywhere, anytime,” and there are compelling reasons, such as the problems of commuting, to distribute work geographically.

Not only the locus of work has changed in our culture; the mode of work has changed as well. In the last century the workforce moved from Frederick Taylor’s "scientific management” to ways of working that are increasingly open-ended, democratic, and individual/team-tailored. Along the way, the workplace changed, too. Taylorism was about efficiency (and uniformity).

What followed shifted the focus to effectiveness (and diversity). What’s the difference? As Peter Drucker explains, "Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing.”

The Modern movement, aping Taylor, took "Form follows function” as its credo. Today, though, we might amend this to "Form follows strategy.” If design firms are now involved in strategic consulting, it is because interior designers paved the way. Their ability to give form to strategy gave them an advantage over competing consultants, because they knew how to make strategy actionable.

Yet this focus on strategy does not entirely explain the impact that interior designers have had on the workplace. More than any other profession involved in the design of these settings, they have been able to use their knowledge of workplace culture to design work settings that genuinely support the people who use them. Interior designers make it their business to know how people actually inhabit and experience the built environment.

Their work—certainly the best of it—consistently reflects this understanding. The licensing controversy notwithstanding, interior designers today are valued members of building design teams precisely because they bring this knowledge to the table. Some of the most valuable research on the workplace in recent years has beendone by interior designers who specialize in work settings for corporate, financial, and professional service clients. Gensler’s Margo Grant and Chris Murray, for example, have done pioneering work documenting the changing strategic goals of these companies and how they play out in spatial terms.

Their benchmarking studies give Gensler and its clients a wealth of comparative data about facilities trends across the developed world’s economy.

Needless to say, this is a competitive advantage in the global marketplace.

As Peter Drucker points out, it used to be that the skills needed in business changed very slowly:

My ancestors were printers in Amsterdam from 1510 or so until 1750

and during that entire time they didn’t have to learn anything new.

All of the basic innovations in printing had been done . . . by the

early 16th century. Socrates was a stone mason. If he came back to

life and went to work in a stone yard, it would take him about six

hours to catch on. Neither the tools nor the products have changed.10

Today, however, we are in the midst of a period of remarkable technological innovation, equivalent in its impact to the cluster of spectacular breakthroughs that occurred in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Technological innovation is one reason that professions evolve. Social change, the evolution of "everyday life” and its values, is another. "Faster, cheaper, better!” is the catch phrase of the new economy. Every shaper of the built environment faces these related changes, as clients demand a new responsiveness.

Design professionals should rethink linear and segmented processes, reflecting nineteenth-century practices, and begin to envision how everyone engaged in designing and constructing the built environment should approach

their practice to achieve the speed, responsiveness, and innovation that clients require.

IMPLICATIONS OF BANDWIDTH: NEW TOOLS,

PROCESSES, AND PRACTICES

The bandwidth revolution has given interior designers an entirely new set of tools—not just for design, but also for collaboration. As is true for most innovations, their early applications were focused on existing practices.

Today, though, a new generation of designers is at work who grew up with these tools. As they move into the mainstream of practice, they will start to use them to reshape practice.

Bandwidth is transforming the production process: how furniture, furnishings, and equipment get from designer to manufacturer to end-user. It makes it possible both to speed the production process, by tying it more directly to purchasing, and to consolidate orders to secure larger production runs and better prices. And it creates a world market for these products that should increase their variety.

Bandwidth will also make it steadily easier for virtual teams to work collaboratively, to "construct” a virtual setting in three dimensions. This collaboration takes place not just between people, but between computers, too, so that in time fabrication will follow design without the need for detailed working drawings. As the process becomes more seamless (and more common), it will extend to other aspects of construction. At some point, "design/build” may really be a singleprocess. Currently, we are only halfway there. Alot of the infrastructure is in place, but the interface is still maddeningly primitive.

At the same time, we are trying to use the infrastructure to support traditional practice models. It may take a "push” from the outside, such as another oil shock that makes the price of airline tickets less affordable, to force designers to change their ways and embrace virtual collaboration wholeheartedly.

Thanks to bandwidth, manufacturing has gone from Henry Ford’s assembly line, with its uniform products, to Dell’s (and now Ford’s) "mass customization.”

Service industries have changed similarly. Across the economy, customers want the cost advantages of mass market mass production, along with the quality and performance of custom design.

DESIGNING IN FOUR DIMENSIONS

emand an increased level of responsiveness, knowledge workers demand "consonance” in the workplace. They approach potential employers looking for a "fit” with their values and lifestyles. In a buoyant economy, they can afford to be selective—and intolerant of "dissonance.”

The built environment gives form to consonance and provides its framework. To keep pace with social and technological changes, design professionals must learn to see that framework as one that changes with time and therefore design in four dimensions.

The current rate of technological change suggests that designers will face considerable pressure to practice with time in mind. Both the container and the contained—"structure and stuff,” as Stewart Brand put it in

How Buildings Learn—change over time, but at different rates of speed.11 The trends of mass customization and congruence suggest that settings will change frequently, which puts pressure on the rest to facilitate the change. This brings us back to sustainability, which also demands of "stuff” that its residual value be salvaged through recycling and reuse.

Designing in four dimensions means rethinking our conceptions of buildings. "There isn’t such a thing as a building,” Frank Duffy asserts. Buildings are just "layers of longevity of built components”—they exist in time. What matters for their designers is their "use through time.” Duffy finds the whole notion of timelessness to be "sterile” because it ignores time as the building’s fourth dimension—they exist in time, so they have to evolve to meet its changing demands.12

Also working from a "time-layered” perspective, Brand proposes a holistic approach to time-sensitive design.13 He identifies six components of buildings:

site, structure, skin, services, and space plan. While interior designers are focused on the last two, they have good reason to want to influence the rest: they all affect the building’s use through time. To exercise this influence effectively, of course, interior designers have to understand the characteristics of these components, and the possibilities of the other elements of the built environment. Interior designers do not have to be engineers, or vice versa, but both need to know enough about the others’ business so they can approach the building in a holistic or time-layered way. As Brand says:

Thinking about buildings in this time-laden way is very practical.

As a designer you avoid such classic mistakes as solving a five minute

problem with a fifty-year solution. It legitimizes the existence

of different design skills, all with their different agendas

defined by this time scale.14

To be responsive to the user in the building design process, interior designers need to have this broader knowledge of the building and its components. In the end, their ability to sway others in the design and delivery process will rest primarily on issues of use over time—issues that are primarily functional and strategic, and that constantly require new skills. profession. In 1999, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) put together a task force to review the question of licensing interior designers.

As Architectural Record’s Robert Ivy reported:

They found that interior designers seek to distinguish themselves

from less-qualified decorators, protect the right to practice, establish gender equity in a field dominated by men, and earn them respect of their fellow professionals.15 "The designers ’viewpoint is consistent,” Ivy added, citing his magazine’s April 1998 roundtable discussion with interior designers. "Despite their gains in the industry, they feel slighted or disparaged by architects. ”Yet, he says, "there are unavoidable differences between architects and interior designers”:

Architectural education is more rigorously focused on life safety, as well as structure, building science, and codes. By contrast, the AIA task force reported that in the 125 interior design programs currently available, education can vary from two to four years, and current testing for certification focused more on aesthetics than safety. The differences do not stop with pedagogy. Architects tend to engage the entire design problem, considering not only the contents of the interior, but the interior’s relation to the exterior envelope, its construction and building systems, and the natural and human made surroundings. A healthy building—light-filled, safe, and promoting human habitation—should be architects’ professional norm.

When we are operating at a high level of accomplishment, our work is holistic, integrating complex technical systems and social requirements into structures that engage the landscape, sustain their inhabitants inside and out, and enrich the community.16

Should interior designers be licensed? Here is Ivy’s answer:

Our own professional status reflects a public trust we have earned at high cost, and it should not be diluted. . . . Practice legislation may not be the panacea that interior designers seek, if it is achieved without commensurate, fundamental changes in [their] education and experience.17

However, interior designers can make a strong case that they should be accorded the distinctions and protections that are part of other design professions such as architecture. No less than architects, interior designers are engaged in "the entire design problem.” As advocates of the user, and as designers who are "fourth-dimension sensitive,” they are often the first ones in the building design process to point out how one or another of the building’s components makes it harder for its settings to evolve easily to meet new needs.

As designers’ interest in indoor air quality demonstrates, they are concerned with quality of life, too—with user performance, not just building performance.

ARCHITECTURE’S STRUGGLE TO BECOME A PROFESSION1

Interior designers who anguish about the time it is taking to secure state sanction for their profession’s title and practice should bear in mind that it took architects a lot longer. Arguments over who is and is not qualified to design buildings punctuate the history of the profession.

In the Middle Ages in Europe, the master masons were the building architects.

During the Renaissance in Italy, artist architects supplanted them. They were considered to be qualified as architects owing to their training in design. Architects such as Brunelleschi and Michelangelo took a strong interest in engineering and technology, too, as they strove to realize their ambitious building projects. With Vitruvius, they believed that architecture was a liberal art that combined theory and practice. Master masons, who apprenticed in the building trades, were disparaged because their training was purely practical.

Yet the Italian Renaissance also saw the emergence of the professional in Europe’s first true architect, Antonio Sangallo the Younger. Apprenticed to the artist-architect Bramante, Sangallo helped implement many of Bramante’s later buildings. In time, he established a studio that is recognizably the prototype for today’s architecture and design firms. The architectural historian James Ackerman has described him as "one of the few architects of his time who never wanted to be anything else.”

Four diverging traditions emerge from the Renaissance: artist-architects, trained in design; humanist-architects, trained in theory; architect-architects, focused on buildings and striving for a balance between theory and practice; and builder architects, focused on construction but still interested in designing buildings.

Artist-architects looked for patrons; architect- architects looked for clients. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we see this distinction played out between "gentleman” architects and the emerging profession. Thomas Jefferson counted architecture among his gentlemanly pursuits,

a trait he shared with others of his class. Lord Burlington, who did much to establish the architectural profession in England, was widely criticized by his peers for his "unwonted” interest in the pragmatics of building construction. When the Institute of British Architects was establishedin 1834, noblemen could become honorary members for a fee. (Significantly, all connection with the building trades was forbidden.) In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, English architects also faced competition from surveyors. In his Dictionary of 1755, Dr. Johnson gave essentially the same definition for the words "surveyor” and "architect.” In England, at least, the two professions remained closely aligned through much of the nineteenth century— with both designing buildings. Engineers designed buildings, too. In 1854, one of them even won the Institute of British Architects’ Gold Medal.

PROFESSIONAL ETHICS

Like other professionals, interior designers must contend with ethical issues. Indeed, the issues can be quite similar to those of allied and other learned professions. Liken architects, lawyers, and doctors, interior designers can also do bodily harm and create financial damage if they practice incompetently or unethically. They can also put people at risk by failing to be effective advocates of their interests. Here are some examples of these issues as they arise in interior design practice.

• Life safety. Designers sometimes bemoan codes and regulations, but these rules exist to establish a minimum standard of health and safety. Failure to meet code can delay a project, which damages the owner, and can also cause bodily harm.

• Confidentiality. Interior designers often have access to confidential business information— a planned acquisition, for example, or a new business plan or strategy. This knowledge is shared with interior designers only because it has a direct bearing on their work, and it is shared with them in confidence. Ethically, and often by contract, that confidence must be respected.

• Conflict of interest. Interior designers are their clients’ agents, so they have an obligation to avoid or disclose to them any potential conflicts of interest. (Disclosure means that you are prepared to end the conflict if the client so requests.) The appearance of conflict can be as problematic as the reality. Just as voters worry when politicians become too cozywith special interests, clients start to wonder when interior designers accept gifts or junkets from contractors and vendors. The occasional lunch, party, box of candy, or bottle of wine is no problem, but all-expenses-paid vacation trips and other costly"perks” cross the line. They create the appearance if not the reality that design decisions—specifying a product, for example—are being made to repay favors rather than to serve the interests of the client.

• User advocacy. Interior designers have a responsibility to users. If, in their judgment, a project’s requirements, though legal, compromise user comfort and performance unacceptably, they have an obligation to try to change them, or to resign from the project if the client is unwilling to make changes. Design professionals have a broader obligation to educate their clients on the value of design features that improve user quality of life and performance.

• Competency. Professional competence reflects ongoing mastery of the skills and knowledge demanded by professional practice. Professional certification or licensing formally requires a level of mastery that necessarily lags behind what design professionals actually need. For example, FIDER’s requirements do not yet specify that interior designers know the principles of sustainable design. That lag does not excuse professional interior designers from mastering these principles, or any new skills that may be necessary to maintain their professional competence. Interior design came into its own in the 1990s as settings came to be seen as strategic resources. The catch phrase "Place matters!”—so emblematic of the second half of the decade—turned out to be literally true. When people have real choice about when and where they spend their time, the quality of these settings—their ability to support people in their desired activities—becomes crucial, often the deciding point. A "place” can be part of the landscape or cityscape, a building or building complex, or an enclosed indoor or outdoor setting. The word implies a richness and wholeness that mocks the design professions’ efforts to carve it into parts.

The built environment today has immense range and diversity. Much development embraces multiple uses. The time dimension of buildings is changing, too, with more components expected (or needed) to be ephemeral rather than "permanent.” Already, many projects today feature hybrid teams that are organized around each project’s particular blend of uses and timeframes. These interdisciplinary teams are the future. They expose each profession to the others and give all of them a shared perspective about "place” that transcends each one’s necessarily narrower view. This shared viewpoint may eventually give rise to entirely new professions, which we may no longer be willing to categorize as "architecture” or "interior design.” In time, too, the division between design and construction may prove to be an artificial boundary, no longer justified by practice. Professions are conservative forces in society, constantly resisting pressures to change, yet constantly placed in situations where the need to change is obvious and imperative. New professions arise in part because old ones fail to adapt. Compared to architecture, interior design is still in its infancy—a profession that is just now marshalling its forces to secure the recognition to which it feels entitled. All this is taking place against the background of our entrepreneurial and bandwidth-driven era. How important is it, in this context, to secure the profession’s boundaries or win state sanction for its practice? If it helps strengthen the education and training of interior designers, and encourages them to meet their responsibilities as professionals, then it is probably well worthwhile.

Especially today, it is hard to predict the future of the interior design profession. One clear way to prepare for it, however, is to make the education of interior design professionals much more rigorous. This argues for a more comprehensive curriculum, as I have outlined previously, and for a four-year professional degree program at the undergraduate level. It also argues for learning, as Peter Senge calls it—not just maintaining skills, but actively learning from practice. Senge’s point, made admirably in his book, The Fifth Discipline,18 is that work itself is a learning experience of the first order. Our interactions with clients, colleagues, and other collaborators provide constant glimpses into an unfolding future. If we are attentive, we can understand some of what the future demands—and take steps to meet it appropriately. People who care about their careers, and who take their responsibilities as professionals seriously, need to make learning a constant priority.

Notes:

1 This brief account is drawn from Spiro Kostof (ed.), The Architect, Oxford University Press, New

York, 1977, pp. 98–194.

2 Maister, David H., True Professionalism, The Free Press, New York, 1997, pp. 15–16.

3 Maister, True Professionalism, p. 16.

4 Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Co., 1977, p. 919.

5 Webster’s, p. 63.

6 Webster’s, p. 265.

7 Foundation for Interior Design Education and Research (FIDER), "Definition of Interior

Design” (from FIDER’s website: http://www.fider.org/definition.htm).

8 Agood introduction to this topic is Diana Lopez Barnett and William D. Browning: A Primer

on Sustainable Building, Rocky Mountain Institute, Snowmass, CO, 1995.

9 Romm, Joseph J., and William D. Browning, Greening the Building and the Bottom Line, Rocky

Mountain Institute, Snowmass, CO, 1994.

10 Daly, James, "Sage Advice” (interview of Peter Drucker), Business 2.0, August 8, 2000.

11 Brand, Stewart, How Buildings Learn, Viking, New York, 1994, p. 13.

WHAT IS DESIGN?

designer87 — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 12:01:53 GMT

The very word ‘design’ is the first problem we must confront in this book since it is in everyday use and yet given quite specific and different meanings by particular groups of people. We might begin by noting that ‘design’ is both a noun and a verb and can refer either to the end product or to the process. Relatively recently the word ‘designer’ has even become an adjective rather than a noun.

Although on the one hand this can be seen to trivialise design tothe status of mere fashion, this adjectival use implies something that will be important to us in this book. It implies that not all design is equally valuable and that perhaps the work of some designers is regarded as more important. In this book we shall not be studying how design can offer us the fashion accessory. In fact we shall not be much concerned directly with the end products of design. This book is primarily about design as a process. We shall be concerned with how that process works, what we understand about it and do not, and how it is learned and performed by professionals and experts. We shall be interested in how the process can be supported with computers and by working in groups.

We shall be interested in how all the various stakeholders can make their voice heard. To some extent we can see design as a generic activity, and yet there appear to be real differences between the end products created by designers in various domains. One of the questions running throughout the book then will be the extent to which designers have common processes and the extent to which these might vary both between domains and between individuals.

A structural engineer may describe the process of calculating the dimensions of a beam in a building as design. In truth such a process is almost entirely mechanical. You apply several mathematical formulae and insert the appropriate values for various loads known to act on the beam and the required size results. It is quite understandable that an engineer might use the word design’ here since this process is quite different from the task of analysis’, by which the loads are properly determined. However, a fashion designer creating a new collection might be slightly puzzled by the engineer’s use of the word ‘design’. The engineer’s process seems to us to be relatively precise, systematic and even mechanical, whereas fashion design seems more imaginative, unpredictable and spontaneous. The engineer knows more or less what is required from the outset. In this case a beam that has the properties of being able to span the required distance and hold up the known loads. The fashion designer’s knowledge of what is required is likely to be much vaguer. The collection should attract attention and sell well and probably enhance the reputation of the design company. However, this information tells us much less about the nature of the end product of the design process than that available to the engineer designing a beam.

Actually both these descriptions are to some extent caricatures since good engineering requires considerable imagination and can often be unpredictable in its outcome, and good fashion is unlikely to be achieved without considerable technical knowledge. Many forms of design then, deal with both precise and vague ideas, call for systematic and chaotic thinking, need both imaginative thought and mechanical calculation. However, a group of design fields seem to lie near the middle of this spectrum of design activity. The three-dimensional and environmental design fields of architecture, interior design, product and industrial design, urban and landscape design, all require the designer to produce beautiful and also practically useful and well functioning end products. In most cases realising designs in these fields is likely to require very considerable technical knowledge and expertise, as well as being visually imaginative and ability to design. Designers in these fields generate objects or places which may have a major impact on the quality of life of many people. Mistakes can seriously inconvenience, may well be expensive and can even be dangerous. On the other hand, very good design can approach the power of art and music to lift the spirit and enrich our lives.

Architecture is one of the most centrally placed fields in this spectrum of design, and is probably the most frequently written about. Since the author is an architect, there will be many architectural examples in this book. However, this is not a book about architecture, or indeed about any of the products of design. It is abook about design problems, what makes them so special and how to understand them, and it is about the processes of design and how to learn, develop and practise them. Already here we have begun to concentrate on professional designers such as architects, fashion designers and engineers. But there is a paradox here about design. Design is now clearly a highly professional activity for some people, and the very best designers are greatly valued and we admire what they do enormously. And yet design is also an everyday activity that we all do. We design our own rooms, we decide how to arrange things on shelves or in storage systems, we design our own appearance every morning, we plant, cultivate and maintain our gardens, we select food and prepare our meals, we plan our holidays. All these everyday domestic jobs can be seen as design tasks or at least design-like tasks. When we are at work we are still designing by planning our time, arranging the desktops of our computers, arranging rooms for meetings, and so we could go on. We may not aggrandise these humble tasks with the word ‘design’, but they share many of the characteristics of professional design tasks. We can see, however, that these tasks vary in a number of ways that begin to give us some clues about the nature of designing. Some of these tasks are really a matter of selection and combination of predetermined items. In some cases we might also create these items. Occasionally we might create something so new and special that others may wish to copy what we have done. Professional designers are generally much more likely to do this. But professional designers also design for other people rather than just themselves. They have to learn to understand problems that other people may find it hard to describe and create good solutions for them. Such work requires more than just a ‘feeling for materials, forms, shapes or colours; it requires a wide range of skills. Today then professional designers are highly educated and trained.

Design Education

Design education in the form we know it today is a relatively recent phenomenon. That a designer needs formal instruction and periods of academic study and that this should be conducted in an educational institution are now commonly accepted ideas. The history of design education shows a progressive move from the workplace into the college and university studio. In a recent attempt to interpret the history of architectural education linked to establishment of the Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture, this change is interpreted as a series of political conspiracies (Crinson and Lubbock 1994). Certainly it is possible to argue that academically based design education lacks contact with the makers of things, but then as we shall see in the next chapter this reflects practice. The designers of today can no longer be trained to follow a set of procedures since the rate of change of the world in which they must work would soon leave them behind. We can no longer afford to immerse the student of architecture or product design in a few traditional crafts. Rather they must learn to appreciate and exploit new technology as it develops.

We are also seeing quite new design domains springing up as a result of technology. I have been lucky enough to spend some time working in the design faculty of a university entirely devoted to multi-media. Designers there learn to animate, to create web-sites, to design virtual worlds and to create new ways for people to relate to, and use, highly complex technology. Such design domains were unimaginable when the first edition of this book was published and yet today they are extremely popular with students. Even further along the spectrum of design fields we find the system designers and software designers who create the applications that we all use to write books, manipulate images and give lectures. Many contemporary products have in them hardware and software that are combined and integrated in a manner that makes the distinction increasingly irrelevant. Mobile phones, MP3 players and handheld personal computers are not only appearing, but converging and transforming into new kinds of devices. Such areas of design are changing our lives not only physically but socially. Until recently we would have thought of software and system designers as lying outside the scope of a book like this. However increasingly I am finding that people who work in those fields are seeing relevance in the ideas here and as a consequence are beginning to question the traditional ways in which such designers have been educated. In the twentieth century technology began to develop so quickly that, for the first time in our history, the change was palpable within a single lifetime. Design has always been connected with our contemporary intellectual endeavour including art, science and philosophy.

During that period we saw a change in design that was at the time thought to be more profound and fundamental than any of the stylistic periods that had preceded it. It was even known by its direct connection to the contemporary, ‘modernism’. This name implied that it provided a full stop at the end of design history and I was taught by tutors who genuinely believed that. This set of ideas has so profoundly influenced the way that we think about design that sometimes it is hard to disentangle. Only now are we beginning to see that it is possible for design to move on from modernism. We shall not here be primarily concerned with design as style, but nor can we think about process in isolation. Design education has recently emerged from a period of treating history as deserving academic study but making little connection with the present. Thankfully those notions of modernism as the last word in design have been largely rejected and the design student of today is expected not only to appreciate historical work in its own right but to use it to inform contemporary design.

Design education has some very common features that transcend countries and design domains. Design schools characteristically use both the physical and conceptual studio as their central educational device. Conceptually the studio is a process of learning by doing, in which students are set a series of design problems to solve. They thus learn how to design largely by doing it, rather than by studying it or analysing it. It seems almost impossible to learn design without actually doing it. However the ideas in this book may offer a complementary resource. One of the weaknesses of the traditional studio is that students, in paying so much attention to the end product of their labours, fail to reflect sufficiently on their process. Physically the studio is a place where students gather and work under the supervision of their tutors.

The studio is often assumed to replicate the offices of professional designers in the domain. However, one of the perennial problems here is that so much of the real professional world is very difficult to replicate in the college or university. In particular there is usually an absence of clients with real problems, doubts, budgets and time constraints. It is often difficult therefore for design students to develop a process which enables them to relate appropriately to the other stakeholders in design. Rather it is easier for them to develop very personally self-reflective processes aimed chiefly at satisfying themselves and possibly their tutors. Thus, the educational studio can easily become a place of fantasy removed from the needs of the real world in which the students will work when they graduate. Not only does this tend to distort the skill balance in the process, but also the sets of values which the students acquire.

Hubbard showed for example that town planners tend to acquire a different set of values about architecture to the public they represent and serve (Hubbard 1996). Similarly Wilson showed that architects use different evaluative systems to others about buildings (Wilson 1996). She also showed that this tendency is acquired during education. More disturbingly this work also revealed a strong correlation between preferences within each school of architecture and that these preferences are linked to style. Almost certainly design schools do not intend these effects so perhaps this indicates some significant problems with the studio concept of design education. Throughout this book we shall see how many influences a designer must be open to and how many arguments there are about their relative importance in practice.

Design education, like design itself, will probably always be controversial. Traditions have grown up which show structural variations not only between countries but also between the various design fields. The extent to which the various design fields share a common process is a matter for considerable debate. That designers educated in each of these fields tend to take a different view of problems is less contentious. Furniture designers will tell you that they can spot furniture designed by an architect as opposed to someone trained in furniture design. Some say that architects design furniture to sit in space and not obstruct it; others will tell you that architects simply do not understand the nature of the materials used in furniture and consequently assemble it as they would a building. It is now commonly accepted that the United Kingdom construction industry is too divided and confrontational and that the various consultants and contractors involved tend to be combative when the client would like them to be co-operative. A recent report suggested a solution to all this would be to educate them all through some kind of common university degree only allowing specialisation later (Bill 1990). Such an idea, while well meaning, is fundamentally flawed. It assumes that there is a pool of 18-year-old students with more or less blank minds and personalities who might be attracted to take such a degree. In fact we know the truth to be very different.

Very few students applying to university apply for courses in more than one area of the construction industry. Similarly, very few students apply to study more than one design field. Thus, although architecture and product design seem very closely related there is little contact between the fields. The internationally acclaimed British product designer Richard Seymour is not surprised by this. Although some architecture and some product designs look very close it is really the extreme end of the bow of the architecture tree rubbing up against a leaf at the extremity of the product design tree. We tend to think that they are very similar, but they are not. Fundamentally their roots are completely different. Lawson (1994) For Richard Seymour, the separation between these professions begins very early and crucially before the period of tertiary education which might be held responsible for the divide. His view is that these ‘roots’ are put down much earlier in life and that by the time we come to select our profession, the choice is effectively already made. Richard Seymour observes that most product designers come from a background of achievement in practical crafts like metalwork and woodwork. The product designer is used to working with physical entities and the nature of materials and experiences them through seeing and feeling.

The English system of upper school education may aggravate these difficulties since pupils must choose to study only about four subjects. The universities then demand particular subjects before granting admission to each degree. Thus you might well be offered a place to study for a degree in architecture even if you had not studied mathematics, but almost certainly the same university would not grant you a place to study civil engineering. So the specialisation of students has already begun at school. Whether it is the education system or the very nature of the students who select themselves, the atmosphere and social norms in the lecture theatres, studios and laboratories in the university departments of architecture, civil engineering and product design are different from the very beginning. The students speak differently, dress differently and have different images of themselves and the lives ahead of them. We must be cautious therefore in assuming that all design fields can be considered to share common ground.

What is certain is that design is a distinctive mental activity, and we shall progressively explore its characteristics through this book. However, we shall also discover that design can be extremely varied and we shall see that successful designers can employ quite different processes whatever their educational background.

Design Technologies

This chapter began with a brief look at some of the differences between the way fashion designers and civil engineers might design. Another very important difference between them is the technology they must understand and use to achieve their ends. Designers must not only decide what effects they wish to achieve, they must also know how to achieve them. So our civil engineer must understand the structural properties of concrete and steel, whereas our fashion designer must appreciate the characteristics of different fabrics.

Again this a simple caricature since both must know far more than this, but the point is made to demonstrate that their grasp of technology has to be relevant to their design field. Traditionally we tend to use the end products of design to differentiate between designers. Thus a client may go to one kind of designer for a bridge, another for a building, yet another for a chair and so on. Many designers dabble in fields other than those in which they were trained, such as the famous architect Mies van der Rohe who designed a chair for his German Pavilion at the Barcelona International Exhibition of 1929, which to this day appears in the lobbies of banks and hotels all over the world. Very few designers are actually trained in more than one field such as the highly acclaimed architect/engineer Santiago Calatrava. Some designers are even difficult to classify such as Philippe Starck who designs buildings, interiors, furniture and household items. It is interesting that some of the most famous inventions of modern times were made by people who had not been specifically trained to work in the field in which they made their contribution (Clegg 1969):

Invention Inventor

Safety razor Traveller in corks

Kodachrome films Musician
Ball-point pen Sculptor
Automatic telephone Undertaker
Parking meter Journalist
Pneumatic tyre Veterinary surgeon
Long-playing record Television engineer

Classifying design by its end product seems to be rather putting the cart before the horse, for the solution is something which is formed by the design process and has not existed in advance of it. The real reason for classifying design in this way has less to do with the design process but is instead a reflection of our increasingly specialised technologies. Engineers are different from architects not just because they may use a different design process but more importantly because they understand about different materials and requirements. Unfortunately this sort of specialisation can easily become a strait-jacket for designers, directing their mental processes towards a predefined goal. It is thus too easy for the architect to assume that the solution to a client’s problem is a new building. Often it is not! If we are not careful then design education might restrict rather than enhance the ability of the students to think creatively.

The cautionary tale of the scientist, the engineer, the architect and the church tower illustrates this phenomenon. These three were standing outside the church arguing about the height of the tower when a local shopkeeper who was passing by suggested a competition. He was very proud of a new barometer which he now stocked in his shop and in order to advertise it he offered a prize to the one who could most accurately discover the height of the tower using one of his barometers. The scientist carefully measured the barometric pressure at the foot of the tower and again at the top, and from the difference he calculated the height. The engineer, scorning this technique, climbed to the top, dropped the barometer and timed the period of its fall. However, it was the architect who, to the surprise of all, was the most accurate.

He simply went inside the church and offered the barometer to the verger in exchange for allowing him to examine the original drawings of the church!

Many design problems are equally amenable to such varied treatment but seldom do clients have the foresight of our shopkeeper. Let us briefly examine such a situation. Imagine that a railway company has for many years been offering catering facilities on selected trains and has now discovered that this part of the business is making a financial loss.

What should be done?

An advertising agency might suggest that they should design a completely new image with the food repackaged and differently advertised. An industrial designer might well suggest that the real problem is with the design of the buffet car. Perhaps if passengers were able to obtain and consume food in every coach they would buy more than if they had to walk down the train. An operations research consultant would probably concentrate on whether the buffet cars were on the right trains and so on. It is quite possible that none of our professional experts was right.

Perhaps the food was just not very appetising and too expensive?

In fact, probably all the experts have something to contribute in designing a solution. The danger is that each may be conditioned by their education and the design technology they understand. Design situations vary not just because the problems are dissimilar but also because designers habitually adopt different approaches. In this book we shall spend some time discussing both design problems and design approaches.

What does design involve?

Barnes Wallis is perhaps most famous for his wartime invention of the bouncing bomb immortalised in the film of the ‘dam-busters’.

However his career achievements went much further with a whole succession of innovative pieces of aviation design including aircraft, airships and many smaller items. However, at the age of sixteen, Barnes Wallis failed his London matriculation examination (Whitfield 1975). It seems likely that this was a result of undergoing a form of Armstrong’s heuristic education at Christ’s Hospital, which did little to prepare its pupils for such examinations but rather concentrated on teaching them to think. Barnes Wallis recalls ‘I knew nothing, except how to think, how to grapple with a problem and then go on grappling with it until you had solved it’.

Later Barnes Wallis was to complete his London University first degree in astonishingly quick time, taking only five months!

Later in life Barnes Wallis was quite prepared to take technical advice, but never accepted help with design itself: ‘If I wanted the answer to a question for which I could not do the mathematics I would go to someone who could . . . to that extent I would ask for advice and help . . . never a contribution to a solution’.

Even at an early age it was the quality of Barnes Wallis’ thinking and his approach to problems as much as his technical expertise which enabled him to produce so many original aeronautical designs. For many of the kinds of design we are considering, it is important not just to be technically competent but also to have a well developed aesthetic appreciation. Space, form and line, as well as colour and texture, are the very tools of the trade for the environmental, product or graphic designer. The end product of such design will always be visible to the user who may also move inside or pick up the designer’s artefact. The designer must understand our aesthetic experience, particularly of the visual world, and in this sense designers share territory with artists. For these reasons alone, and there are some others we shall come to later, designers also tend to work in a very visual way. Designers almost always draw, often paint and frequently construct models and prototypes.

The archetypal image of the designer is of someone sitting at a drawing board. But what is clear is that designers express their ideas and work in a very visual and graphical kind of way. It would be very hard indeed to become a good designer without developing the ability to draw well. Indeed designers’ drawings can often be very beautiful. Sometimes the drawings of designers become art objects in their own right and get exhibited. We must leave until later a discussion of why the practice of designing should not be considered as psychologically equivalent to the creation of art.

Suffice it now to say that design demands more than just aesthetic appreciation. How many critics of design, even those with the most penetrating perception, find it easier to design than to criticise ?

Perhaps there can be no exhaustive list of the areas of expertise needed by designers, although we shall attempt to get close to this by the end of the book. However, there is one more set of skills that designers need which we should at least introduce here. The vast majority of the artefacts we design are created for particular

groups of users. Designers must understand something of the nature of these users and their needs whether it is in terms of the ergonomics of chairs or the semiotics of graphics. Along with a recognition that the design process itself should be studied, design education has more recently included material from the behavioural and social sciences. Yet designers are no more social scientists than they are artists or technologists.

This lecture is not about science, art or technology, but the designer cannot escape the influences of these three very broad categories of intellectual endeavour. One of the essential difficulties and fascinations of designing is the need to embrace so many different kinds of thought and knowledge. Scientists may be able to do their job perfectly well without even the faintest notion of how artists think, and artists for their part certainly do not depend upon scientific method.

For designers life is not so simple, they must appreciate the nature of both art and science and in addition they must be able to design!

What then exactly is this activity of design?

That we must leave until the next chapter but we can already see that it involves a sophisticated mental process capable of manipulating many kinds of information, blending them all into a coherent set of ideas and finally generating some realisation of those ideas. Usually this realisation takes the form of a drawing but, as we have seen it could equally well be a new timetable. It is the process rather than the end product of design which chiefly interests us.

Design as a skill

Design is a highly complex and sophisticated skill. It is not a mystical ability given only to those with recondite powers but a skill which, for many, must be learnt and practised rather like the playing of a sport or a musical instrument. Consider then the following two passages:

Flex the knees slightly and, while your upper body inclines towards the ball, keep from bending over too much at the waist.

The arms are extended fully but naturally towards the ball without any great feeling of reaching out for the ball . . . start the club back with that left arm straight letting the right elbow fold itself against the body . . . the head should be held over the ball . . . the head is the fixed pivot about which the body and swing must function.

Lee Trevino (1972) I Can Help Your Game Keeping the lips gently closed, extend them a little towards the corners as when half smiling, care being taken not to turn them inwards at all during the process.

The ‘smile’, rather a sardonic one perhaps, should draw in the cheeks against the teeth at the sides and the muscular

action will produce a firmness of the lips towards the corners.

Now, on blowing across the embouchure towards its outer edge, the breadth will make a small opening in the middle of the lips and, when the jet of air thus formed strikes the outer edge the flute head will sound.

F. B. Chapman (1973) Flute Technique

These two passages come from lecturers about skills. Both are skills which I have spent a lifetime miserably failing to perfect; playing golf and playing the flute.

My well-thumbed copies of these books offer me a series of suggestions as to where I should direct my attention. Both authors concentrate on telling their readers how it feels to be doing it right. A few people may pick up a golf club and swing it naturally or make a beautiful sound on a flute. For them these books may be of little help, but for the vast majority, the skills must be acquired initially by attention to detail. It is in the very nature of highly developed skills that we can perform them unconsciously. The expert golfer is not thinking about the golf swing but about the golf course, the weather and the opponents.

To perform well the flautist must forget the techniques of embouchure and breath control and fingering systems, and concentrate on interpreting the music as the composer intended. You could not possibly give expression to music with your head full of Chapman’s advice about the lips. So it is with design. We probably work best when we think least about our technique.

Beginners however must first analyse and practise all the elements of their skill and we should remember that even the most talented of professional golfers or musicians still benefit from lessons all the way through their careers.

While we are used to the idea that physical skills like riding a bicycle, swimming and playing a musical instrument must be learned and practised, we are less ready to recognise that thinking might need similar attention as was suggested by the famous British philosopher Ryle (1949):

Thought is very much a matter of drills and skills.

Later the psychologist Bartlett (1958) echoed this sentiment:

Thinking should be treated as a complex and high level kind of skill. More recently there have been many writers who have exhorted their readers to practise this skill of thinking. One of the most notable, Edward de Bono (1968) summarises the message of such writers:

On the whole, it must be more important to be skilful in thinking than to be stuffed with facts.

Before we can properly study how designers think, we need to develop a better understanding of the nature of design and the characteristics of design problems and their solutions. The first two sections of this book will explore this territory before the third main section on design thinking. The lecturers as a whole is devoted to developing the idea that design thinking is a skill. Indeed it is a very complex and sophisticated skill, but still one which can be analysed, taken apart, developed and practised. In the end though, to get the best results, designers must perform like golfers and flautists.

They should forget all the stuff they have been taught about technique and just go out and do it!

References
- Bartlett, F. C. (1958). Thinking. London, George Allen and Unwin.
- Bill, P. Ed. (1990). Building towards 2001. London, National Contractors Group.
- Clegg, G. L. (1969). The Design of Design. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
- Crinson, M. and Lubbock, J. (1994). Architecture: Art or Profession? Manchester, Manchester University Press.
- de Bono, E. (1968). The Five Day Course in Thinking. Harmondsworth, Allen Lane.
- Hubbard, P. (1996). Conflicting interpretations of architecture: an empirical investigation. Journal of Environmental Psychology 16: 75–92.
- Lawson, B. R. (1994). Architects are losing out in the professional divide. The Architects’ Journal 199(16): 13–14.
- Ryle, G. (1949). The Concept of Mind. London, Hutchinson.
- Whitfield, P. R. (1975). Creativity in Industry. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
- Wilson, M. A. (1996). The socialization of architectural preference. Journal of Environmental Psychology 16: 33–44.