Designerly Ways of Knowing by Nigel Cross. London: Springer-Verlag, April 2006) ISBN: 1846283000, 114 pages, 15 illustrations, $139.00 hardcover.

Abstract

Nigel Cross has been actively engaged with matters of design research and design pedagogy over the past four decades and is currently interested in design cognition—with the ways that designers, think, work, and know. In Cross’s most recent publication, Designerly Ways of Knowing (Springer-Verlag, London, 2006), the author makes the argument that designers’ behavioral and cognitive processes are unique. Based on this, Cross makes the claim that design can be separated from both scientific and artistic forms of knowledge, both of which have tended to engulf design within their own epistemological and pedagogical frameworks. The notion that there is a separate type of knowledge (and path to knowledge formations) specific to designers—and more generally to design activity—is crucial to Cross’ overall aim in his book. He seeks to make design part of a general educational scheme with its own subjective and intrinsic values, separate from the instrumental aims that have generally confined design to a regime of specialized and professional or vocational education. To make design an aspect of general education (i.e., for design education to develop specific skills in its students) rests upon the ability to define design-specific knowledge and behavioral patterns or tendencies, according to Cross. In order to elucidate these tendencies, Cross depends largely on the empirical study of both design students and professional designers engaged in specific design tasks. Cross recognizes four “core features of design ability” as: one, an ability to “resolve ill-defined problems”; two, a propensity to “adopt solution-focusing strategies”; three, the capacity to “employ abductive/ productive/appositional thinking,” (i.e. to reason from function to form, for example); and, four, an ability to “use non-verbal, graphic/spatial modeling media.”1 Although Cross spends a good deal of time reporting on his (and others’) research findings related to the cognitive and behavioral processes of both design students and accomplished professional designers, the thrust of the book relies on the fact that design ability (defined largely by the four “core features” listed above) is latent in everyone. Cross’s book is a compilation of essays and lectures which span approximately two decades. He draws on his own, and other concurrent, research and investigations in the fields of design and pedagogical research. Cross works to distinguish design “intelligence” from the paradigms of science, as well as those of the visual arts and humanities in order that design find broad acceptance as one of the major features of a general education. Cross counters the notion that design practice is a form of problem solving analogous to procedures employed in the sciences. He writes in chapter six of Designerly Ways of Knowing: In analyzing design cognition, it has been normal until relatively recently to use language and concepts from cognitive science studies of problem solving behavior. However, it has become clear that designing is not normal “problem solving.” We therefore need to establish appropriate concepts for the analysis and discussion of design cognition.2