Thinking and Making by Jennifer Testamarck
I have seen, inspected, and eaten a lot of my favorite food, sushi, but if I were to write down a recipe for how to make a beautiful sushi roll, I could guarantee that it would fall apart or not taste very good. I have never made my own sushi, how can I know the process?
Bryan Lawson’s book How Designers Think, he explains how design education has changed from studying and analyzing successful design to actually doing making design.
“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.”
In our graduate design studio this year, we are thinking about our process a lot more and our resulting designs are something we can stand proudly beside and explain how we got the result. Lawson further points out that different disciplines have different processes and a successful design can result from collaboration with others who think differently. “The danger is that each [person] may be conditioned by their education and the design technology they understand.” This makes me think that the more different kinds of people I collaborate with , the more I can begin to learn different ways of approaching the same problem. If we all begin thinking about the design problem using different processes, then we can decide which solution or combination of solutions will achieve the best results.
Lawson also shares the importance to remember design is a skill. Not an ability, but a “highly complex and sophisticated skill” that we all need to practice in order to get good at design. If we will do, make, build, perform the skill we want to learn, we will gain much more success in our future careers as designers, than if we were to simply observe, analyze, and study technique. In our studio, we do a lot of hands on “making” and I feel what will separate us as masters level designers from others is our ability to understand our process and be well practiced in making a hundred different designs to develop our skills.
If we really wanted to teach ourselves how to make an excellent sushi roll, or design a successful project, we must first understand the process, look at the approach from different perspectives, and finally practice making design.
Book credits: How Designers Think, Bryan Lawson, 2006.