Designing by Knowing

During a design process, designers develop concepts. Concepts are the tentative solutions for one or more constraints of the problem at hand. Designers have to test several concepts, before finding a possible solution. The more alternatives the designer proposes, the bigger the chance that one variant will do. But even more important is that exploring and comparing several variants helps to get a grip on the problem and understand its full complexity. And the accumulation of this knowledge will bring the designer with each tentative closer to a good concept that integrates many or all constraints of the stated problem. In a specific case, we changed a classical studio assignment and asked architecture students to alternate explicitly divergent knowledge production with convergent designing. We did not adapt the project to expect groundbreaking new knowledge from young students. But we changed the assignment as a means to let go the focus on the end result of the design process and to get students concentrating on designing itself; the iterative design process where divergent en convergent phases are alternated; where ‘knowing by designing’ is alternated with ‘designing by knowing’.status: publishe