People are often still surprised by the claim that being a good designer does not mean analysing a given problem endlessly, but coming up with a solution that is appropriate, functional and, if possible, creative as well. Although analytical thinking belongs to the designer’s repertoire of necessary skills, it is precisely the ability to find a suitable solution and match it to the given problem that distinguishes the designer from the scientist.
The scientist is interested in explaining how a given thing or process really works. For such an inquiry science has the apparatus of controlled experimentation and the pair of deductive and inductive thinking. These methods serve the scientist to uncover regularities hidden at first sight. The scientist then tries to explain them in a rational, that is, logico-mathematical way, by describing how they work step by step. In other words, the result of scientific activity is in fact the creation of a comprehensive cookbook containing procedures for how things in the world work. And these recipes must ideally be so precise that anyone, provided they faithfully follow all the procedures and conditions, would be able to verify that the recipe works by arriving at the same result. If a recipe can be replicated exactly, it means, on the one hand, that it works, but it also reveals something deeper about how science looks at the world: if we always arrive at the same result, the recipe embodies something true about how the world works. Truth in science has been shaped by the mechanistic view of the world since the days of Newton, and this is so even today, when Newtonian physics, from which the mechanistic view stems, has been surpassed by more precise theories. By a mechanistic world we mean that the goal of science is to arrive at clearly defined recipes containing rules and procedures that we can follow explicitly and so arrive at the expected result. Science is analytical, and its ideal is to find the true facts and processes of the world.
In the case of design, it must be said right at the outset that it does not stand in opposition to science, because the design process of course requires an analytical part, above all in the initial phase of the process, which is often devoted to gathering requirements, goals, and technical, legal and other constraints. On the other hand, design is not a field that merely feeds parasitically on the established fields of the “hard” sciences or the humanities by using their methods and bringing nothing new. That is not the case. Designers are marked by something unique, namely the ability to knead out of a disparate and often contradictory list of requirements and constraints a final product which, in material or digital form, synthesises all of the above into a coherent, functional and often also aesthetically stimulating whole. This design synthesis, taking a heap of disparate things and creating a new whole out of it, is so fundamental to the whole field that design can hardly be imagined without it. At the same time, this ability is not limited by the subject to which designers apply it. That is also why in the last fifteen years we have seen the boom of design thinking in business, in healthcare, in schools and so on. It was the world-famous innovation studio IDEO which, with its human-centred design (Human-centered design, HCD), took design beyond the walls of the studios oriented towards the traditional design disciplines.
But design is not only and solely synthesis and the process that leads to it. Let us look at what exactly design synthesis presupposes. At the beginning of the process, one must be prepared for the fact that one faces a task for which there is no clearly defined brief, and not even a clearly defined final result. Of course, the client or the institution for which the designer creates something always defines in the project brief what result it expects. But design problems are rarely specified exhaustively; on the contrary, the expected result is often described in a vague and imprecise way: for example, in the style of “we want to improve the sales of our online shop” or “I need our services to evoke better user experiences in our customers”. These are thus not problems with a clearly given solution, of the kind we come across in science, mathematics or logic. The unclarity and ambivalence of design requires a person who is psychologically able to overcome the fear of uncertainty and ambivalence. Not everyone has such a psychological profile, and that is why design attracts above all people who, out of a chaotic state of things, like to create order, which is the preferred state of things.
If the fundamental process of design is the transformation of chaos into order, we must ask what helps designers to cope with this difficult task, which many people find intimidating. I think this question can also be put differently: what exactly separates an experienced designer from a novice, or rather, what skills, knowledge and form of experience must a designer have in order to be considered experienced?
A trivial answer would be to say that what separates an experienced designer from an amateur (or a non-designer) is that the experienced designer has simply been working in the field for longer. Such an answer, however superficial, contains a kernel of truth. Nevertheless, it cannot satisfy us. That is why we must ask differently: what does an experienced designer build up over the course of their work that at a certain point makes them an expert?
In the introduction we said that a designer does not solve problems by endless analysis, but rather proposes solutions. The designer is thus an expert in finding solutions to unclearly and vaguely defined problems. Even though design is a creative activity, every field inevitably develops certain boundaries and proven procedures that define the field itself. Let us call these proven procedures design patterns after the architectural theorist Christopher Alexander, who introduced this concept into the discourse of design and architecture theory. For in the course of their work every designer begins to notice that certain problems can be solved by means of a solution they applied to a seemingly different task in the past. Over time the designer notices more and more what problems have in common and finds that, to save time and creative energy, it pays to solve part of a problem automatically by applying ready-made solutions, and to devote the most time to what is truly new and demanding about the problem. The designer need not, however, draw ready-made solutions or design patterns only from their own repertoire. Every designer is part of a long genealogy of earlier designers who solved similar problems and also worked out their own patterns. We either find these patterns mentioned in some literary publication in which a designer resolved to describe explicitly their thinking and favourite solutions, or we can find them by closely studying the products, services and solutions in general that the designer worked on.
It is precisely because the knowledge of designers is implicitly made present and embodied in the materiality of their solutions that the teaching of design history is of enormous importance. This subject, often neglected at design universities, is in fact an archaeology of design patterns: it is a field that tries to express, describe and analyse explicitly how designers in the past solved their problems. Good teaching of design history thus gives the beginning designer a unique opportunity to learn from the greats of the past what forms the core of their future profession: finding solutions to problems.
The experienced designer thus differs from the novice in having built up, over their career, a set of frequently used design patterns, and in knowing well which problems they suit. This does not mean that patterns can always be mapped 1:1 onto problems. A designer often realises that a problem which at the beginning seemed similar to one they had already worked on turned out in the end to be something entirely different. Using a design pattern thus does not lead to the solution, but moves the designer closer to the final solution. A design pattern may not always lead to a finished house, but it can certainly be solid ground or scaffolding (the English word “scaffolding”, more commonly used in this sense, fits even better here) on which one can build. It is precisely this recycling and modification of design patterns that is, for most good designers, a personal process which eventually leads the designer to work out a particular set of patterns they like to use most. These then form what is usually called an aesthetic style.