A Different Kind of Black and White : Visual Thinking as Epistemic Development in Professional Education [1 ed.] 9781443890038, 9781443877091

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A Different Kind of Black and White

Freehand drawing is enjoying a widespread renaissance and one more interesting setting is in its role in fostering epistemic development – the practice of wise thinking skills in the management and resolution of complex problems such as those found in engineering and industrial design. This book explores how moral and ethical dimensions of thinking and decision-making can be helped to flourish across different ways of knowing, with a focus on visual intelligence. The connecting processes of perception are the primary way we make sense of the world, by creating and using systems of classification and boundaries. These systems influence the way we make choices, sometimes also inhibiting us from learning to see things differently. The author suggests that one way in which these boundaries can be dissolved, and our minds liberated, is to develop visual intelligence, through exploring relationships between metaphor and generative drawing, metaphor being a mental activity of thinking and imaginative leaps, while drawing is knowledge-making through the cooperation of hand and eye. Bringing these together flexes the mind to seek new ways of understanding, a feature of epistemic development. These ideas were developed in the setting of a postgraduate industrial design course for graduate engineers, Innovation Design Engineering, at the Royal College of Art, London when the author was the Senior Tutor on the course, the study resulting in a PhD from the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, in 2012. The book discusses approaches to epistemic development in relation to experiential learning, quoting from the students’ descriptions of their encounters with ways of knowing based on value judgments rather than the safety of facts, and the often alien activity of free-hand drawing, and what might be discovered from it. Chapters on prehistoric Cave Art and early medieval practices of the Art of Memory provide further reflections on what it means to draw, and what a drawing is. A chapter on the history of engineering education discusses the narrowing effects of the persistent prejudice that sees abstract and theoretical approaches to knowledge as superior to practical skill and experience. While the research was initially conducted within the domain of industrial design engineering, its concerns and recommendations are relevant to many other areas of professional practice. Different kinds of knowing are needed to engage with complex problems with conflicting social, economic and cultural criteria. Responsibility leads to the realisation that we are everywhere connected, and sometimes implicated, a starting point for the development of wisdom. These principles hint at a deeper role for the university especially for post-graduate education, beyond the narrow instrumentalist training agendas of current economic and government thinking, to a larger vision of the meaning of professional development. The book includes a wealth of teaching ideas applicable to undergraduate and postgraduate design and engineering education in pursuit of the aims described above.

A Different Kind of Black and White: Visual Thinking as Epistemic Development in Professional Education

By

Prue Bramwell-Davis

A Different Kind of Black and White: Visual Thinking as Epistemic Development in Professional Education By Prue Bramwell-Davis This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Prue Bramwell-Davis All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7709-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7709-1

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ................................................................................................ viii Pre-Script ..................................................................................................................xi Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 My Relationship with the Study .............................................................................. 10 Design as a political activity .............................................................................. 11 Visual thinking ................................................................................................... 12 Learning and epistemic development ................................................................. 15 The Local Setting .................................................................................................... 20 Describing the setting as a drama and its staging ............................................... 20 The Royal College of Art (RCA), London ......................................................... 21 Project-based learning ........................................................................................ 32 A Researcher’s Journey ........................................................................................... 38 The beginning and the first circle: development of a research question ............ 39 The second circle: development of the research process.................................... 42 Structures for the study ...................................................................................... 45 Research lenses: Design ............................................................................................................. 48 Bricolage as method in the management of multiple approaches in a research project ...................................................................................... 50 Notebook as process ........................................................................................... 61 Narrative Inquiry (NI) ........................................................................................ 67 Doing the interviews .......................................................................................... 70 Using the interviews/conversations .................................................................... 75 Mapping Interview Accounts about Learning and Drawing ................................... 79 Environment ....................................................................................................... 79 Students’ comments about drawing ................................................................... 80 Translating comments to the wrong type of data ............................................... 80 Transforming the field of comments .................................................................. 82

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Contents

Learning and Epistemic Development in Designing ............................................... 88 Learning designing ............................................................................................. 89 Projects and learning .......................................................................................... 97 Assessment ....................................................................................................... 105 Adult learners ................................................................................................... 109 Experience ........................................................................................................ 114 Experiential learning ........................................................................................ 115 CE/AC and Tacit Knowing .............................................................................. 119 Learning Seminars and Learning Styles Inventory Activities .......................... 126 Reflection ......................................................................................................... 128 Wisdom ............................................................................................................ 130 Engineering Education .......................................................................................... 140 Practical knowledge and theoretical knowledge .............................................. 142 Ways of knowing, kinds of knowledge ............................................................ 143 More information, and moving from simple to complex systems.................... 146 Employment and employers’ requirements in training .................................... 147 Curricular developments .................................................................................. 154 Some Renaissance precedents .......................................................................... 157 Visual and Conceptual Thinking ........................................................................... 172 Metaphor ............................................................................................................... 198 Drawing and the Drawer’s Story ........................................................................... 216 Drawing in IDE ................................................................................................ 221 Drawing and knowing ...................................................................................... 228 Representation .................................................................................................. 233 Originality and expression ............................................................................... 237 Prehistoric Cave Drawing and Painting ................................................................ 241 Overview .......................................................................................................... 241 Interpretation .................................................................................................... 242 The role of the surface ...................................................................................... 243 Mental images, images in the mind’s eye ........................................................ 246 Ars Memoriae and Illuminated Manuscripts ......................................................... 249 Interlude: Bridge ................................................................................................... 259

Contents

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Line........................................................................................................................ 267 Shadow .................................................................................................................. 277 Perspective............................................................................................................. 285 Frame ..................................................................................................................... 294 Space ..................................................................................................................... 303 Conclusions ........................................................................................................... 310 References ............................................................................................................. 317 Index ...................................................................................................................... 338

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

All images are by PBD unless otherwise stated. Figure 1. Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London, 2014 ........................................ 22 Figure 2. Cycles of qualitative research: Development of a research question, mapping a shift in ways of thinking about a subject ....................................................... 38 Figure 3. Meindeert Hobbema, 1689, The Avenue at Middleharnis, © National Gallery London Picture Library ..................................................................................... 43 Figure 4. Laurence Sterne, 1900, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. (1759-1766), London, Macmillan and Co. Ltd. Vol. 2, pp 61, 62 .............. 47 Figures 5, 6, 7. Bella Green, 2014, Working compositional drawings ................................. 56 Figure 8. Paul Gauguin, 1893, Femme Cueillant des Fruits et Oviri, woodcut on paper, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London............................................................. 58 Figure 9. Scott, K., 2014, Starting the plaited braid for Ugandan mat-making, Kampala, PhD Royal College of Art .............................................................................. 78 Figure 10. Michelangelo, 1524-1559, Staircase in the San Lorenzo Library, Florence, 2013 ............................................................................................................... 84 Figure 11. The completed model of design constraints, Lawson, Bryan, 1980, How Designers Think, © The Architectural Press Ltd, London, reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Books UK ................................................................. 99 Figure 12. Kolb and Fry Learning cycle, 1984 .................................................................. 117 Figure 13. Learning cycle with design-related activities, after Kolb, 1984 ....................... 119 Figure 14. Hieronymus Bosch, 1560, The Tribulations of St Anthony, © Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon, Portugal .................................................................. 137 Figure 15. Notebook processes compared.......................................................................... 139 Figure 16. Edan, Y. et al, 2008, Fig. 2, Layout of the process of fitting the basic knowledge that the engineering education establishment provides for its graduates to meet the consumer’s requirements, p. 199 .............................................. 141 Figures 17, 18, 19. Three cartoons, 1980, Professional Training in Mechanical Engineering for Chartered Engineers, London Institution of Mechanical Engineers, pp. 9, 12 ...................................................................................................... 150 Figure 20. Galileo Galilei, 1638, Cantilever beam and weight. Discorsi e dimonstrazioni matematiche, intorno a due nuove scienze, Leida, Appresso gli Elsevivii, 1638. Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, trans. Henry Crew, Alfonso de Salvio, New York, Macmillan, 1914 ......................................................... 157 Figure 21. Hans Rudolph Manuel Deutsch, Three men at a well-winder, woodcut, De Re Metallica, Basle, 1556, London, Mining Magazine, 1912, p. 162 ..................... 159 Figure 22. Derry, T.K. and Williams, T.I., 1960, Joiner and Turner at work, Low Countries c. 1600, woodcut, A Short History of Technology, London, Oxford University Press, p. 103 ................................................................................................ 160

List of Illustrations

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Figure 23. Olivier de Serres, 1671, The Perfect Use of Silkworms, and their benefits, William Stellenge, London. Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, New York, Da Capo Press, 1971 ................................................................................................................... 160 Figure 24. Carlo de Bonardis, 1695, Scientist undertaking an experiment, Bona Castellotti, Gamba et al. 1999/2000, p. 141 ................................................................. 166 Figure 25. Waddington, C.H. 1977, A simple hierarchy, p. 49 .......................................... 175 Figure 26. Alexander, C. 1964, A hierarchy of design concepts, p. 62 .............................. 176 Figure 27. Filippo Agricola (1776-1857), Study of the Laocoon, red chalk on paper © Victoria and Albert Museum, London ...................................................................... 180 Figure 28. Smets, G. 1989, after Pettinger et al. (1979) op.cit., Design Issues: Vol V, No. 2, Spring ................................................................................................................ 190 Figure 29. Peter I Bruegel the Elder, 1560, The Fall of Icarus, Museé des Beaux Arts, Brussels © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. Photo: J. Geleyns/Ro scan ............................................................................................................................... 203 Figure 30. Artist unknown, 18th/19th century, A Plan of the Road from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City adapted to the Pilgrim’s Progress, etching, ink on paper. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London ...................................................... 213 Figure 31. Ronald Searle, 1943, Man dying of Cholera, Thailand. © Ronald Searle Estate ............................................................................................................................ 229 Figure 32. Grass drawing, Lake Michigan shoreline, 2009 ............................................... 230 Figure 33. Thomas Bewick, 1797, Two cows grazing, wood engraving, History of British Birds. www.bewicksociety.org ......................................................................... 239 Figure 34. Suzanne Burke, Pulpit in St. Mary’s Forane Church, Champakulam, Kerala, India, 2012 ...................................................................................................... 252 Figure 35. Maker unknown, late 13th century, Page from a Gradual, with historiated initial R. Music for Easter Mass with image of Christ’s tomb and Christ in Majesty above, Arezzo, Italy, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London....................... 257 Figure 36. Penistone Country Park, North Yorkshire, 2013 .............................................. 260 Figure 37. Roman bridge over the river Afrin, Nebi Huri, Syria, 2009 ............................. 261 Figure 38. Andrew Emms, 2009, Rock Creek bridge from above, British Columbia ........ 262 Figure 39. Eric Sakowski/HighestBridges.com, 2009, Rock Creek bridge from below ..... 262 Figure 40. Field footbridge, Fordingbridge, Hampshire, 2013 ......................................... 264 Figure 41. Footbridge and ford, New Forest, Hampshire, 2013 ........................................ 264 Figure 42. Footbridge, Waterperry Gardens, Oxfordshire, 2013. ..................................... 265 Figure 43. Galata bridge, Istanbul, Turkey, 2009. © Gunold Brunbauer/ Dreamstime.com........................................................................................................... 266 Figure 44. Australian Imperial Forces badge, Fovant, Wiltshire, 2013 ............................ 268 Figure 45. Drawing with chalk on a near vertical surface using wooden revetments for stability, Fovant, Wiltshire, 2013 ............................................................................ 269 Figure 46. Camille Flammarion, 1888, A medieval cosmology, wood engraving .............. 271 Figure 47. Early twentieth century cigarette card illustrating the constellation of Scorpio, 2014 ............................................................................................................... 274 Figure 48. Rembrandt van Rijn, 1632, Philosophe en Meditation, © Musée du Louvre, Paris ................................................................................................................ 280 Figure 49. Sun-dried cod, Lofoten Islands, Demons from the deep, 2009 ......................... 281

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List of Illustrations

Figure 50. Fra Raffaello da Brescia, 1513-1537, Intarsia panel with various woods, Bologna, Italy, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London ............................................. 289 Figure 51. Beech avenue, Tollard Royal, Wiltshire, 2014.................................................. 291 Figure 52. Susanna and the Elders, tapestry, wool and silk with embroidery, Tournai, Belgium, circa 1500. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London..................... 297 Figure 53. Anonymous Self Portrait, Flammand or Hollandais, Italy 1620 – 1630, Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille, France ............................................................................. 299 Figure 54. Situated Self ...................................................................................................... 309

Only the Freewheeling Artist-Explorer, Non-Academic Scientist-Philosopher, Mechanic, Economist-Poet, Who has Never Waited For Patron-startering And accrediting of his Coordinate Capabilities, Holds The Prime Initiative Today. If Man is to Continue as a Successful Pattern Complex Function In Universal Evolution It will be because the Next Decades will have Witnessed The Artist-Scientist’s Spontaneous Seizure of the Prime Design Responsibility, And his Successful Conversion Of the Total Capability Of Tool-Augmented Man From Killingry To Livingry. R Buckminster Fuller 1966 Prime Design

INTRODUCTION

Engineers and designers have enormous social responsibility in our manufactured world, much of which is characterised by the generation and consumption of a limitless range of capital and consumer products underpinned and driven by a market economy. How should these players be educated in the values that enable them to take a responsible role in this process that produces such social and environmental challenges? This book explores the proposition that a rather unexpected subject – freehand drawing – can and should play a principal part in the education and professional development of engineers and designers. Its potential to foster the imagination and to promote reflection provides a sophisticated route to transformational learning, epistemic development and wisdom. Freehand drawing is also an experience that can bring the hidden and multidimensioned processes of learning into the open, bringing learning-to-learn to life, where more conventionally vocational subjects might be assumed to have obvious priority. I would like to suggest, as have others, that design education is a very good setting for developing such higher levels of learning and thinking, and that such lessons from design education are also applicable in many other fields. I might say that it is a many-linked chain that joins these ideas, but in fact it is more of a net. I have attempted to portray this multi-dimensional net and its strengths in several different ways. The study consists of a series of essays on what seemed to be the most salient subjects in a very varied landscape of academic disciplines, epistemological domains and cultures. Themes and arguments appear in different forms, an illustration of the interconnectedness of everything, itself one of the main ideas. The texts move between disciplines, finding common ground as well as juxtapositions, and attempting to go beyond the conventional separations between intellect and intuition, mind and senses.

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Introduction

The local setting and background of the study is the Industrial Design Engineering1 (IDE) joint course with Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine (ICSTM), at the Royal College of Art, London (RCA) during the time I was Senior Tutor between the years 1994 and 2004. Graduate engineers came to this post-graduate course to learn Industrial Design and to explore how to integrate its practices with their existing knowledge and experience in preparation for a more holistic professional design career. Different disciplines and different ways of knowing and learning necessarily shared company in such a cross-disciplinary course. Being able to integrate them had the potential to become a driver of transformational learning, a level of understanding where processes of learning can be experienced as well as their results. Accounts of their first-hand experiences by students on the course are set alongside and up against the essay texts in different places, to illuminate each other. While these inevitably produce a reading sequence, the intention is also to provide a figure and ground experience for the reader, the texts and voices in a process of conversation that will give more meaning to both. Comparing different kinds of experience, in this case of the voices of students, of myself, and the voices of academic text can produce a new field of ideas. Many professions now recognise that learning how to learn is an essential aspect of training for practitioners. Such learning enables them to work effectively in today’s rapidly changing knowledge environments, and in the interconnecting networks and systems of social, cultural and technological factors that are now the context of advanced professional practice. Since engineering and designing produce the environments we inhabit, and the objects and tools we use, it is these professions that structure much of the cultural and social as well as the physical worlds we live in. Professionalism in practice necessarily includes responsibility for the effects of this work. As awareness of these effects grows, so practice needs to be responsive to them, and should provoke education and training to adapt in their light. 1

Now called Innovation Design Engineering.

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Inevitably this cyclical process cannot run as smoothly and efficiently as it might since it consists of human beings and the histories of their cultural practices. As both are naturally resistant to change, there is a tendency for the epistemologies of different professional subject areas to stay thoroughly distinct, where there would be much benefit from the loosening of their boundaries. Industrial Design (sometimes called Product Design2) requires its professionals to be able to think in different ways, for instance imaginatively and abstractly, analytically and holistically, and to act creatively and responsibly in diverse cultural and social settings. The profession encompasses the innovation and design resolution of products and tools which primarily address the marketing agendas of commercial enterprise. While less typically so at the time of this project, industrial design also addresses the needs of particular constituencies such as the elderly and the disabled. More recently a recognition that all design should be user-centred has considerably broadened and deepened the complexity of issues taken on by the profession. The need for a responsible use of energy and materials has added sustainability issues to professional design’s criteria. All designers need to be able to balance creative thinking outside accepted ideas with evaluating and satisfying multiple constraints into a successful outcome that resolves a project’s goals and constraints in the best possible way. In mainstream undergraduate engineering education the tradition has been that students learn techniques in mathematics and information primarily in physics, to be applied to a range of technical problems. These problems are relatively well defined in the sense that they are not complicated by factors from the larger cultural, social or economic climate in which they are situated. They are similar to the ‘normal’ problems which are the mainstay of much professional engineering work (Vincenti 1990). Where they are significant in a larger context, these factors do not appear to impinge on the immediate work in hand. Both in training and later in work, however, much technical information is quickly out of date, and the engineer needs to be able to absorb new material, and manage new ways of learning. Also, 2

See JISCmail discussion group: PhD-Design.

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Introduction

engineering projects are always in fact situated in the inhabited world, where political and cultural attitudes affect how much engineers have to take into account the social effects of their work. Unlike in the past, at least in modern participatory democracies, professional engineers increasingly have to consider the wider effects of their work as constraints in the project brief. This management of complexity requires a range of thinking and social skills that goes beyond the computational. Nowadays engineers and designers receive much of their training within the university framework, sometimes with placements, working towards accepted standards of practice. The relevant professional associations are involved in this process, and also are responsible for further accreditation of individuals as part of continuing professional development. The above is a ‘short’ perspective on the instrumental aspect of learning for professional practice. There is however another, sometimes contradictory role for university education: its concern for the personal development of students, as individuals and as members of society, and for the generation of new knowledge and ideas that may challenge its paymasters. These concerns can go beyond and sometimes run counter to the conventional agendas of the subjects being studied. Epistemic development describes the kinds of learning involved in being able to rethink one’s understanding of knowing. In this setting it becomes a relevant set of ideas for exploring how to see learning as essential for participation and engagement in the world. Concepts of epistemic development take learning into the social arena, both as part of what learning is, and what it is for. While boundaries may be blurred between goals that are instrumental, professional or personal, it seems to me that to be able to respond to these requirements epistemic development needs to have a central place in university education for the professions, including that of both engineers and designers. As the Senior Tutor on the IDE course I worked with students who had had university training in Engineering, and who were now learning Industrial Design. My experience showed me that, despite much common ground in

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later professional practice, (which had been the reason for setting up the joint course in the first place), the aims, principles and conventions of training and education in these two domains were very different, reflecting the broader difference in the cultures of the professions. Hearing certain kinds of oftrepeated remarks from the new students I wondered if design was a setting that could foster development of more mature ways of thinking, where people move towards reasoning that addresses issues of knowing in the face of uncertainty, using reflective judgement and other kinds of thinking at a high level. It seemed that the kinds of knowing used in design were more complex than those in engineering at undergraduate level. In that context maths and physics seemingly constituted objective and factual knowing, whereas design was also based on value judgements and points of view, many embedded in cultural and social history, itself influencing how knowledge is made and evaluated. Different students had different experiences thinking and learning about what design consists of, what it demands. Coming from a background of engineering they came to realise, in the new setting, that they brought with them frames of mind that had formed the ways they thought about and understood knowledge in the world. Design skills and thinking challenged these ways of knowing at a profound level. Each had to find ways of accommodating and assimilating their experiences into different ways of thinking about what design could be, should be. I decided to research these issues further, and received a PhD (with commendation) in 2012 from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Bristol. This extended study reflects on how freehand drawing, an essential part of design thinking, could be a powerful activity for the shifts in learning described above. Sketch drawing involves visual thinking and perception. It uses open-minded processes of intuition and imagination, which can dissolve categories and boundaries around ideas, and show things in relationship rather than as separate entities. Imagination introduces uncertainty and its partner opportunity, and visual thinking then uses metaphoric processes to create new possible connections.

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Introduction

I set out to show that drawing is one of those activities where the interaction between the process and the product is so intimate and active that it can stimulate a heightened awareness. It can lead to an openness to reflection on experience and thus new learning. This may initially be a rather unfamiliar process, different from more conventional ideas of what learning is and how it takes place. Prior experience and habits may hamper engaging with such new processes, however high the motivation. Much has been written about drawing in different domains of practice and theory. Here it was a case of adults coming upon freehand drawing, not necessarily from choice, but because it is an essential skill in design. Drawing could be, and is, described in curriculum plans for design courses, often in terms of learning outcomes. I have, however, tried to go somewhat below the surface, to see how visual thinking can contribute to epistemic development, by exploring the metaphoric connection between concepts and practices used in drawing, and how we use those concepts in understanding and interacting with the world. Design has already been described as an activity that affects the lives of others. Designers almost always work with people from other disciplines, often taking a leadership role to coordinate contributions from diverse sources. Complex projects involve the resolution of briefs whose boundaries are always permeable and imperfect. In design training students can, and need, to acquire “the broadest base of decision making” 3 as they navigate the constraints of different kinds of project. By thinking of the furthest implications of their work, they come to realise the extent to which it entangles with and influences the lives and well-being of others. This became the stage on which the stories of epistemic development were enacted for, with and by the students in this study, leading to my contention that learning designing is a powerful way to learn to learn. Several authors have been particularly influential in this multi-faceted study. Some of their work may have been done what might be described as ‘a long time ago’, but because their work crosses between disciplines, as does the 3 The Information Machine (1958) Film by Charles and Ray Eames/IBM, discussed in My Relationship with the Study.

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study itself, their work is particularly relevant in the current climate of renewed interest in interdisciplinary perspectives. These authors include for example Bruner, exploring beyond the boundaries of cognitive psychology to what he termed cultural psychology; Arnheim whose work explores the territories between perception and visual practices; Schön, philosopher and social scientist, who explored the management of systems inside and outside design, and Bucciarelli who, as an engineer, uses anthropological methods to study engineering. I have also extensively discussed the work of Kolb and Fry, who in the context of experiential learning, developed concepts of learning as a cycle, where different ways of knowing are integrated through a dialectical process, a way of learning increasingly seen as applicable in many different domains. On the IDE course, moving the focus from teaching to learning so that students could become more aware of and take responsibility for their own learning was very relevant. Learning Cycle concepts provided a useful tool for approaching this perspective, which was new for many people, but also recognisable once it was opened up. I have alluded to epistemic development as a dynamic process, even as a drama. However, development models tend to use other metaphors, usually associated with movement - journeys, routes and paths, involving stages, transitions and bridges, for example. Without trying to map a rigid pathway between engineering and design my approach has been to translate these into visual images for further exploration. I may do this in my mind’s eye, in the physical environment as I move through it, or by drawing or looking at pictures. This process involves thinking in visual ways: where are these bridges and paths situated? From what, or whose point of view are they seen - above, below, in plan, in elevation? Are they seen from the viewpoint of a traveller, a pilgrim, or a detached observer outside the frame? How are they lit? Is the viewpoint static or moving or multiple? Are the journeyers purposeful and hasty, or dawdling while absorbing their surroundings, or being dragged unwillingly with not much view of what’s round the next corner? (Bramwell-Davis 2007) I have found this a powerful process for exploring otherwise abstract propositions and concepts such as learning.

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Introduction

I have taken this use of metaphor into the exploration of more specific connections between visual and other kinds of thinking that are more directly connected to the challenges of epistemic development. To lead me back to my focus on the students’ experience of drawing I have devised and developed a scheme of terms which have meaning in the making of visual work, and which also describe concepts used in the struggle to change or open up our ways of thinking, see things in a new light: in short - learn. As well as being explored from these two points of view, mine and the students’, these concepts are illustrated with excerpts from the interviews to bring their usage back into the central focus of the students’ experience on the stage of epistemic development. This study approaches its subject from many points of view. However, designing makes one realise everything is connected. Innovations change the cultural, social and physical ecologies they are introduced into - whether this is a suddenly desirable new washing machine, or a more obviously debatable hydro-electric barrage. In 2011 a Chinese teenager secretly sold one of his kidneys to buy an iconic Apple product, itself only affordable in Western markets because of the low cost of labour producing it in China. We are everywhere implicated, threaded into the network of designing and consuming. Connectedness, however, can bring its own problems in the context of a research project about people’s experiences. As mentioned above, my own experience of doing the research was drawn into the project as it developed, as I saw that there was a certain mirroring of my struggle to believe in the validity of qualitative approaches and some of the dilemmas experienced by the students, where the certainties of engineering were challenged by the perspectives of art and design. Whilst this connection is there, it is also limited, not least by the difficulties involved in describing experience itself, one’s own or another’s. I have explored experience through the lenses of stories and images of how we interact with and in the environment we inhabit.

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Drawing constructs one such lens, and a multi-facetted one. What it offers is different from, but related to other more abstract languages we use to connect with experience of the world. It is a metaphorical medium that can also provide a high degree of precision and structuring. As a tool of epistemic development drawing has unique features, and it is these that I have attempted to highlight. Seeing drawing in this way showed me that my ideas about enactment and drama as metaphors for the students’ experience were about the experienced spaces of imagination, problem-solving, insight, and growth. It has been difficult to find a suitable structure for presenting a set of ideas all interconnected. Nonetheless the germ of the work is this experience is realising the connection; realising the connection is the experience of learning.

MY RELATIONSHIP WITH THE STUDY

A long way into this study I came to realise that I too had to rethink my views on what constitutes knowledge. I had embarked on the study as an objective account, to provide answers evidenced by data from interviews. Whilst I was necessarily some kind of participant observer, my presence in the project would not affect it beyond providing some more focused observations about ‘the researched’. At a certain point, however, it was clear I did not have the kind of data necessary for that model of research project, and that a different approach could in fact make more useful propositions. I came to see that I could more effectively explore epistemic development using ideas founded in my own professional training and practice as a designer, educator and visual thinker. I had initially experienced difficulty in accepting that this way of working and its insights, however authentic, could constitute worthwhile knowledge. I then recognised that, ironically, this mirrored the struggles I was proposing that the students underwent in seeing value in the new ways of knowing for them presented by visual and design thinking. This reflecting and reflexive feature could provide a pointer to where further, more thorough enquiry in the study could be pursued, at the same time as providing a monitor to control the wilder chains of associations of ideas so easily stimulated by this multidisciplinary approach. To a certain extent this project has grown out of my personal background and interests. I see now that its genesis was some 40 years ago when I was an industrial design student at Hornsey College of Art (HCA) in London between 1965 and 1969, a course which included completing an Ordinary National Certificate in Mechanical Engineering, attended as a sandwich course at a local technical college. Several strands of the project emerged at this time - the political role of design, visual thinking, the importance of

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learning to learn, and how design itself can be a powerful site for holistic learning.

Design as a political activity I was much influenced by ideas about the purpose of design that were current at the time. Not much more than a decade earlier the 1951 Festival of Britain had heralded the idea that design could contribute to the reinvigoration of the post-war economies. Design was a necessary aspect of the producing of goods for home, work and all aspects of daily living. It was not difficult to see that design necessarily had a political dimension. Beyond utility, and the need for design for hospitals, schools and the work place, design as a partner to new consumer product development had been well established in the pre-war economies of affluent societies in Europe and the USA. Consumerism, as an essential dimension of capitalist societies, already had its critics in Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen for example. The use of design, it seemed, could be interpreted as advancing, avoiding or impeding different social agendas. Authors from widely differing fields threw light onto the processes and effects of designing, presenting the ethical dilemmas in product design work. Vance Packard’s (1957) book The Hidden Persuaders linked product advertising and politics, and his (1961) The Waste Makers started to discuss issues later to be called ‘sustainability’. Rachel Carson’s (1962) Silent Spring exposed the real workings of ecological systems, as she showed the wide-ranging effects of chemical pesticides beyond their intended targets. Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World was published in 19711. Later, in 1973 Ernst Schumacher’s book Small is Beautiful exposed the inequalities between rich and poor resulting from mainstream development economics, and provided another platform for a critique of the role of design. Cybernetics was a growing field, and its feedback model for how systems work, originally conceived for engineering and mathematical use, was 1

33 years later Boradkar’s (2004) review of ‘Citizen Designer: Perspectives on Design Responsibility’, in the journal Design Issues reports that the design profession still faces these dilemmas but has made little progress in dealing with them.

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My Relationship with the Study

increasingly seen as applicable to the workings of human and social interactions as well as any applied science. Norbert Wiener’s (1950) ‘The Human Use of Human Beings’ was required reading on my course, as was Osborn’s (1957) Applied Imagination, on the teachability of creative thinking. Wiener’s book set the agenda for the use of cybernetics as a model to propose more humane ways of seeing and facilitating the relationship between workers and technology, people and society, with everywhere the central role of learning, from feedback, in this cyclical process. An apparently mechanistic model provided a powerful diagnostic tool that could promote more humanistic ways for people to interact with all their environments. There was a central role for design at the level of the systems involved, at the interface between people and objects and tools used in everyday and specialised activities, and in all kinds of communication between people and the worlds around them. This concept went on to play a fundamental role in my design teaching, particularly in the area of human factors (ergonomics and psychoergonomics). I introduced this aspect of design onto the IDE course during the period under consideration in this study, and it became a particularly critical site for stretching ideas about design’s potential for improving quality of life beyond immediate consumerism. Frascara (2007) juxtaposes design as philosophy with the urgent need for design’s professional skills to be used in solving obvious problems in society. This reflects my own view: we partake in the world where there are many problems and so we should engage with them. People can do this in many ways but designers have very relevant tools. As a course designer I struggled with the conundrum of impressing this value judgement on others, and resolved it by diverting my design educator skills to providing contexts where students would be better able to make up their own minds from the broadest base of information. It is obviously a continuing issue for the design education community.

Visual thinking The Coldstream Report of 1960 proposed that Art and Design Education should move into the university sector. This could be achieved by moving its primarily crafts-based trainings into activities more in line with

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undergraduate liberal arts courses. Many traditional studio practices, such as drawing from life and nature were diluted, or entirely removed. In a parallel debate, however, visual thinking was increasingly recognised as central to any design activity. In 1944 Gyorgy Kepes, a Hungarian designer and artist, published in the USA a book called The Language of Vision. It was the first in a series of books published until 1974 by Studio Vista called ‘The Vision and Value Series’. The books aimed to bring ideas from the Gestalt school of psychology and the principles of the pre-war Bauhaus school of design in Germany up to date, and to expose them to a wider audience, not only in art and design education, but as part of a broader social and political agenda for rebuilding international society at the end of the war. The books contained papers by a wide range of social thinkers and theorists, artists and designers, psychologists and philosophers. The series was very influential, not only in broader debates and proposals for art education in the 1960s and beyond, but on me personally at the time. Amongst other subjects, chapters in the books explored and propounded the central role of the sense of vision not only in understanding the world, but also affecting it through design. As Samuel Hayakawa (1944:10) says in the Foreword to the first book Language of Vision: “To cease looking at things atomistically in visual experience and to see relatedness means, among other things, to lose in our social experience, as Mr Kepes argues, the deluded self-importance of absolute ‘individualism’ in favor of social relatedness and interdependence. When we structuralize the primary impacts of experience differently, we shall structuralize the world differently.” Kepes himself, in the Preface, sharpens the focus: “Visual language thus must absorb the dynamic idioms of the visual imagery to mobilize the creative imagination for positive social action, and direct it toward positive social goals.” (1944:14) Rudolf Arnheim, a psychologist whose work centred on perception, art and art education, was the author of a chapter called Visual Thinking in Kepes’ 1965 book in the series The Education of Vision. Here Arnheim describes problems arising from the traditional Western intellectual tradition which

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My Relationship with the Study

assumed that verbal reasoning functioned without recourse to interaction with perceptions from the senses. His argument, in the Gestalt tradition, is that understanding of the world is a holistic activity, and that visual thinking is an essential and integral component of knowledge, whether we know it or not. By 1969 when Arnheim’s book of the same title Visual Thinking was published, he was asserting that this kind of knowledge resounds to the deepest levels of our relationship with the world. At the very end of the book, under the heading ‘The burden of it all’ he says: “It is not a good strategy, however, to label perceptual sensitivity as artistic or aesthetic, because this means removing it to a privileged domain. Visual thinking calls, more broadly, for the ability to see visual shapes as images of the patterns of forces that underlie our existence – the functioning of minds, of bodies or machines, the structures of societies or ideas” (1969:315).

In 1961 volume 1 of Paul Klee’s notebooks, The Thinking Eye was published in English for the first time. Klee had assembled these pedagogical notebooks while teaching at the Bauhaus before the war, and was exploring the same ground as Arnheim, but from the perspective and experience of an artist. Their two points of view - from visual working on paper and canvas, and from observing how people perceive and understand the world, strongly reinforced each other in making the case for the potential for visual thinking as a significant kind of intelligence. These books, amongst others in similar vein, were all in common use in design courses. In 1983 Gardner, the developmental psychologist, proposed spatial (using visual imagery) ability as one of his seven intelligences in his unfolding theory of multiple intelligences. During the 1970s and 1980s I taught undergraduate design students in Product Design and Graphic Design. I had also worked for several development agencies as a designer and researcher, and for the World Health Organisation on a teaching simulation for training in the ‘cold chain’ management of vaccine distribution. I was part of the team that provided this training in Equador and Liberia, where I assisted in the establishment of the ‘chain’ itself. Later I did research for the Oxfam Public Affairs Unit.

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Much influenced by the ideas of Paolo Freire and Ivan Illich and others, I saw that design thinking in this context involved a powerful set of ideas that could influence personal, social and political development, because its processes suit the identification and meeting of needs, and they involve learning from experience. A course in South-East Asian Anthropology that I undertook at the Western Australian Institute of Technology showed me that both design and learning are culturally framed, and ignoring this has been the root of many time- and money-wasting design and technology aid initiatives. At that time many developing cultures and societies were not familiar with the now nearly ubiquitous visual language of photography, film and television. People in some cultures not used to Western imagery and media experienced difficulties interpreting photos, diagrams and drawings from Western development sources. Graphicacy (Fugelsang 1973) became for a while a sub-discipline of design for development, and was useful for me in my work. Later when I was teaching on a Master’s course in Graphic Design I was able to concentrate attention on concepts of deconstruction as applied to visual images, particularly advertisements. This process involves exploring the use of visual and verbal analogy and metaphor, which was later to resurface in a project I taught on the IDE course as a way to explore visual thinking, and is a central feature of this study. (See Visual and conceptual thinking, and Metaphor)

Learning and epistemic development Lifelong learning and learning to learn are concepts now becoming recognised as an essential feature of the educational curriculum. Learning to learn was a core subject within the syllabus of the Industrial Design course I undertook at Hornsey in the late 1960’s. Its inclusion in the course was set against a background of discussion already proposing this idea at that time. In the 1960’s learning to learn was being promoted by thinkers such as the polymath Buckminster Fuller, the designer and engineer. He recognised that, in the face of exponentially increasing amounts of information in every sphere of knowledge, learning to meet the challenges of the future had to shift from acquiring facts to being able to manage information in intelligent

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My Relationship with the Study

ways. The theme of his geodesic dome building for the USA at the 1967 International and Universal Exposition, or Expo 67, at Montreal, Canada, was Creative America. It appeared two years after he had inaugurated the international movement, the World Design Science Decade. Ten years earlier, in 1958, the pioneering multi-disciplinary husband and wife design team of Charles and Ray Eames had produced a film for the IBM Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair called The Information Machine. This brilliantly economic animated film celebrated human-beings’ innate capacity for sorting things out by design, through perception, pattern understanding and problem-solving. It proposed the successful meeting of future challenges through productive partnership of such human beings with the growing information handling capacities of IBM computers. The hero of the film was a woman. In 1961 the Eames’s designed an exhibition for learning about mathematics: Mathematica, for the opening of the new Science wing at the California Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles. Such was its popularity it stayed there for 36 years, and then went on to tour other museums all round the USA. To underpin my growing interest in design as a way of thinking, in 1985 I undertook the post-graduate Diploma in Teaching and Design in Higher Education, at the Centre for Staff development in Higher Education at London University’s Institute of Education (being the first design tutor to do this professional training). Education and training were shown as having many goals, from personal development to vocational training. Sometimes more instrumental goals could eclipse personal development on a narrow training course, sometimes personal fulfilment could be nurtured at the expense of attention to employability. Elegant and effective course design needs to accommodate both, and frequently does not. Education’s constant dilemma became very apparent. Universities and other educational institutions (colleges of further and higher education) are in constant danger of losing their roles as the sources of unentailed knowledge and being the guardians and nurturers of it, in the face of satisfying the more instrumental demands of funders from industry and the state, which are easier to measure.

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I was particularly struck by the ideas of William Perry, Head of the Bureau of Study Counsel at Harvard, who, in the late 1960’s, in observation of his students’ attitudes towards reading, had devised a scheme of stages in the appreciation of the contingency of knowledge. Perry saw these stages as markers in the personal development and maturation of his young adult students (Perry 1970). The model started with the holding of a view that all real knowledge is objectively true, and comes from authoritative sources. Through various stages the model culminated with the realisation that knowing is a complex marriage between understanding its relative, perspectival nature, and taking responsibility for right action against that background in a pluralist world. This last stage, admitted by Perry to be nearly unattainable, had some features in common with ideas about fulfilment and realisation described in various esoteric and eastern philosophies I had been exploring at the same time. So a linking thread central to this study is the idea of connectedness between people and their actions, based on how we construct our understanding of the world of sense and thought, and what we do as a result of this. Perry’s ideas also related to the work of Carl Rogers, the American psychologist. In 1961 Rogers had written On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy in which he elaborated his concept of the ‘fully functioning person’. The emphasis was on those features which enabled people to fulfil their own potential. The concepts were further developed in his book Freedom to Learn: a View of what Education might become (1969). This was later partly rewritten for the 2nd edition (1983), when Rogers was able to report that research now supported his original contention that humanistic teaching led to fuller learning. Three of the goals of this book which Rogers described were particularly relevant to me as a design educator. One was “its aim toward a participatory mode of decisionmaking in all aspects of learning in which students, teachers and administrators each have a part”. Here was a hint of a description of learning about how to behave in a multi-perspectival world. A second goal was “its aim toward uncovering the excitement in intellectual and emotional

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My Relationship with the Study

discovery, which leads students to become life-long learners.” A third goal was “even more deeply, it aims towards an awareness that, for all of us, the good life is within, not something which is dependent on outside sources.” This last goal held no contradictions for someone focused on design for quality of life for all. Both Perry’s and Rogers’s ideas were widely influential in the building of educational ideas about personal development. However it later came to be seen that Perry’s work was situated in a very particular political and cultural framework in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s, where it was assumed that the “self-actualisation” (Rogers 1969) of the individual should be uncritically the prime aim in life and education. While this is arguably an aim in life, individuals’ roles and aspirations are set in societal structures and cultural and community contexts, where “self-actualisation” takes on many more nuanced meanings. Education has a prime role in enabling people to live and fulfil themselves as social as well as individual beings. Perry’s ideas also influenced the Reflective Judgement Model developed by Kitchener and King (1981), King having been an assistant in Perry’s programme at Harvard. At the outset of my study, almost the reason for doing it, was the idea that Perry’s model seemed of immediate relevance to me as I compared statements of students in Perry’s study with those of the IDE students as they started to experience an art-school based design course. During a design project early in the course one student remarked: BN: Where we come from we all knew we had the right answer when we had the same answer, here it’s all different.

Of a History of Design lecture in the post-modern idiom another said in some bewilderment: LN: I don’t know what to do with this lecture. It’s difficult to take useable notes. Is this just someone’s personal opinion?

It seemed I had the opportunity to explore in some way a Perry-like developmental progress as an assumed aspect of post-graduate professional education.

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However there was something of a paradox about ‘personal development’ as described above. Those models seemed to have been developed in a social, political and economic context which had not been acknowledged as influencing the values proposed for that education. The prescriptive aspect of this is problematic if the aim is for the learner to become autonomous, especially as it is increasingly seen in the modern world that values of societies can be very different. I am indebted to Guy Claxton for helping me to see that the frameworks of epistemic development would be more appropriate for considering the issues of higher learning aims on the IDE course. (It is also the term used by Kitchener and King). There were two perspectives for exploring this further. The first was to see the purpose of education being for a person to reach his or her full potential in the society they are part of, regardless of any transient assessment in that society of what kinds of roles are valued, for example, bankers or care-workers, mothers or soldiers. The second aspect was to consider the professional role of the designer. The educational task here is to support the development of qualities beyond the relevant vocational skills so that the professional undertakes his or her work in full consciousness of the effect it has on the farthest reaches of society’s concerns, and is committed to having a positive impact on that. For me a key feature that emerges from these different perspectives is that higher learning is not whole if it does not include moral and ethical dimensions. Where actions in the world affect oneself and other people, there choices can be made that affect the well-being of all.

THE LOCAL SETTING

“Of course all settings are natural – that is, places where everyday experiences take place….the site is constituted through the researcher’s interpretive practices.” (Denzin and Lincoln 2008:16) As researchers, we come to each inquiry field living our stories. Our participants also enter the inquiry field in the midst of living their stories….Their institutions and their communities, their landscapes in the broadest sense, are also in the midst of stories.” (Clandinin and Connelly 2000:63, 64)

Describing the setting as a drama and its staging As hinted by the quotation above, a site in this sense is a stage made up of physical and metaphysical, temporal, emotional, intellectual elements of the lives of the participants, including the researcher. A refraction shows it to be made up of the relationships of the people involved, their various goals and intentions, and how they acted out those roles within the unfolding story or drama of their time at the RCA. The analogy of a drama is useful to me for thinking about learning, as I am seeing it as an activity that takes place not only in the mind and body of the learner, but as part of the learner’s interaction with the circumstances, dynamics and environment around him or her. I am also highlighting a view of learning which sees it as a process of making choices between habitual and untried ways of working in and knowing the world, and in this dramatic scenario these choices were sometimes a significant issue. In the metaphor of a drama one might expect to see the research study, the course and the college as a stage with props providing a setting where the drama could unfold as acted out by the cast, wearing the costumes and playing the roles of researcher, students, tutors and others. Instead, I see the physical surroundings, the culture of the institution, the timetabling and other structures of college life all being part of the drama. They embodied

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decisions (architectural, pedagogical, political, financial) that had resulted from long battles between competing ideas, visions, prejudices and traditions, and were continuously the subject of edgy critical debate at one level or another. This was the setting that the students had unwittingly moved into, and to which they would each add their own personal stories and heroic struggles. The Royal College of Art (RCA), London Why do I need to describe the setting of this project? Because any project about people is particular to its time and place; because my involvement in it requires that I identify myself, and because this setting, its cultures and its espoused purposes may not be familiar to some readers. The RCA is the only wholly postgraduate college of Art and Design in the world. A large part of the college5 is sited on part of the land opposite Kensington Gardens in central London which was developed after the Great Exhibition of 18516, to house the various institutions of arts, sciences and manufacturing that were part of Prince Albert’s continuing vision of the purpose of the exhibition. The RCA was incorporated as a university giving its own degrees in 1967. It offers two-years Master’s degrees in some 23 different major disciplines, including Industrial Design7 and Innovation Design Engineering (ex-Industrial Design Engineering)8. At the time of this study the courses were all housed in several large buildings bordering Kensington Gardens, except Sculpture, which was already at Battersea, in south London. The main building had been purpose designed and built in 1963, and was arranged so that each course or department occupied about half a floor of the building, some more, some less. Within these enclaves were studio spaces with individual dedicated student workstations, offices, tutorial and seminar spaces and workshops

5

As the college expands so new space is needed, and several departments are located in Battersea, in south London, in more recent purpose built accommodation. 6 Also known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition 7 Now Design Products 8 Now Innovation Design Engineering

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The Local Setting

Figure 1. Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London, 2014.

relevant to the different disciplines: lathes, milling machines, weaving looms, knitting machines, engraving presses, pottery wheels and kilns, metal working equipment for jewellery and silversmithing, letterpress printing equipment, darkrooms, silkscreen printing platforms, dyebaths, drafting and printing equipment, and so on, many facing onto the magnificent trees and spaces of Kensington Gardens. Formal teaching and usage of these studios and workshops was nominally from about 9am to 7pm, with lecture theatres and exhibition spaces being used into the evening hours; but studio-based work continued until the building closed about 10pm, or later in the build-up to end of year shows, and the eight storeys of the main building blazed into the night sky like the powerhouses of invention imagined by early nineteenth century painters of the industrial revolution. The IDE department occupied the western end of the 3rd floor. One side faced Kensington Gardens with mature plane trees filling the curtain windows; the opposite side faced south towards the old friend and enemy

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Imperial College. In the summer months the hot sun rendered that part of the studio almost unusable. The department was accessible by 88 steps leading up from the back entrance, or more normally by the goods lift which stopped outside the department. Entirely normal to the inhabitants, this entrance was a bit disconcerting to visiting dignitaries, but was better than trying to use the more respectable front lifts, which were frequently out of action, and required walking through the electronics-strewn entrails of the Interaction Design Department. Unlike some other departments IDE was not on the way to anywhere else, and so could remain unseen by people not intent on a visit.9 Inside IDE there was an open studio area to accommodate the annual intake of approximately 18 students, so there were about 36 MA students in this space, roughly divided into the two years. There were also various seminar rooms, offices and tutor rooms adjacent. The allocation of a space that could be used as a small lecture area (as well as space for work reviews or seminars) reflected the curricular needs of the department. College-wide lectures in art and design history and other cultural subjects took place in lecture theatres in the basement. Because, however, IDE students had had little or no experience of art or design history, the use of this departmental space by invited lecturers enabled a more intimate and focused exploration of design history or design issues than was the norm in the more impersonal, even threatening spaces of the bigger lecture theatre. It was also used for work reviews, examinations, and other seminar subjects not covered by the central system, and specialist events. The IDE students arrived at the RCA to a find a studio space with a sea of white-topped workstations. These consisted of a desk 1m x 2m for each person, with storage above and below, which were their personal base of work for the year ahead. Places for 1st year students were allocated by staff at the beginning of the year, with an attempt to mingle gender, and country and university of provenance. The workstations were separated by a 9

At the time of this study security arrangements were not as tight as they are today, with electronic passes coded for access to particular parts of the building, to preclude the ease with which, otherwise, design work captured on a mobile phone can be, and frequently has been in a workshop on the other side of the world within minutes of being captured.

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The Local Setting

labyrinth of alleyways for access for the students themselves, and tutors working at different students’ desks. These desks started off as blank canvasses, and rapidly accumulated the necessary reference accompaniments of design work – growing upwards towards the ceiling and downwards to the floor as regular bower-birds’ nests of objects and papers and models to attract both creative behaviour and creative encounters. These layouts had social and performative effect – people striking up friendships or antipathies with those they were stuck next to for the rest of the year. The social management of noise, food, work, storage and tutorial discussion about work in hand all had to be managed by the inhabitants of the spaces and those they interacted with. This kind of arrangement was a natural setting in which to see the two halves of relational learning as described by Ashton-Warner (1963), learning from and with one’s peers rather than from a formally designated authority, and learning to learn with one’s colleagues. Some layout arrangements were felicitous, leading to professional partnerships after graduation, others less so, a student finding his or her immediate surroundings oppressive and counter-productive. Students were expected to treat the studio as their primary place of work, where visiting tutors would work with students between about 9.30am and 7pm. While late hours were nothing new, it was a shift in practice for the engineers to realize that there was this one site where all sorts of different kinds of learning were expected to take place the length of the day. Here they could as it were build a simulacrum of their learning selves, rather than having it fragmented into lectures and lecture notes, workshops and work books, examination halls and bedsitter discussions. Of course the timetable and the formal spaces were not the only spaces of learning, the canteen being a natural extension, sometimes more peaceful than the studio for group discussions. There was a permeable boundary, the course spilling out into the rest of life, just as sites as design opportunities and problems were drawn into studio practice and culture, leaking footprints of materials, photos, occasionally drawings. The distinctiveness of each department, each with its own discrete home territory had several effects in those days before email and the internet

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homogenised communication. Visiting was a deliberate and socially significant activity for staff and students alike. Senior staff acting as examination or validation moderators on other courses would be exposed to the full blast of a different culture, not unlike visiting some exotic new country, quickly adopting the traveller’s advice of keeping quiet while seeing wondrous new things. During this period, before cyberspace could blur real experience, there were formalised efforts by some departments to promote cultural tourism in the interests of possibly interdisciplinary work. IDE students reported that a visit to the Painting Department met with the reaction that “by definition where you’re from would mean we’d have nothing in common”. Visits from History of Design students to IDE resulted in comments about how unexpectedly interesting the work in the studio actually was. I was warned by the professor of Printmaking that IDE should not try to produce work for sale to support the student fund, an enterprise very successfully carried out by his department, as it would lower the tone of this practice. Textiles and Architecture were departments with very welldefined common ground with IDE, but little collaboration took place. Interdisciplinary work was an obvious goal and yet surprisingly difficult to achieve. Two very different kinds of enthusiasm produced contrary energies about the desirability, and yet practical difficulty of doing joint projects. There is always a tension between preferring isolation in order to pursue work in depth, with the inevitable loss of challenging fresh ideas, and doing multi-perspectival projects with the loss of follow-up in depth. Professors and other curriculum planners could cite the shortness of time students had to pursue their own specialism.10 The IDE department felt those tensions, not least because the students had the understandable reputation of being able to sort out the technical issues involved in getting an imaginative concept to become real and functioning, even if they felt they had less to offer on other aspects of design. The students were very aware of how engineers were conventionally regarded. In this post-graduate art-school environment, some were anxious that they had not had art-school training, and only a few had an undergraduate degree that included any product design as taught in art 10

This was before the arrival of email, and communications were laborious and slow. Students often had no idea what others were doing in different departments. Now interdisciplinary work is much more common in the RCA.

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The Local Setting

schools, whereas all the other RCA students were already graduates in their own or similar disciplines. In this ‘exposed’ environment students were attempting to open up to new learning experiences. Students taken onto an Industrial Design undergraduate training would generally have ‘A’ levels in Art, Design, or Design and Technology, and other humanities subjects. There was not normally a requirement for any engineering knowledge, as it was assumed that once in professional practice designers would work alongside people with technical expertise. In the late 1970’s many practitioners, both designers and engineers, started to see this as unsatisfactory, and a scheme was launched between the RCA and the adjacent Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine (ICSTM) to enable graduate engineers to study alongside design students. The idea was that they could learn from each other, and both be able to extend their capabilities - engineers learning design skills of creative thinking, developing products for particular markets and users, and designers learning to incorporate technical constraints into design project development. In 1981 a separate course was set up at the RCA, exclusively for an engineering graduate intake, called Industrial Design Engineering. It had a formal connection with ICSTM, being described as a joint course, although all the studio-based work and most other teaching took place at the RCA.11 Students for the IDE course came from university engineering courses considered academically eligible by Imperial College, and on graduation, they received the Diploma of Imperial College as well as the Master of Design (MDes) from the RCA. In the face of much opposition from the design professions, this was changed for all the design courses at the RCA to MA, because it was thought by some that the unheard-of qualification of MDes did not have the same status as MA, and was counter-productive in

11

At the time of my interviews with students for this study (1997 – 2004) the relationship of the course with Imperial College had uneasy aspects, reflecting a deeper ‘two cultures’ (Snow 1959) divide about knowledge in the sciences and in the humanities. A split-site experiment in the mid 1990’s with a dedicated room or ‘studio’ in Imperial College, Department of Mechanical Engineering, was very unpopular - with the students who had by definition chosen to come and work in an art school, and with the staff who had to spend a lot of time yo-yoing between the campuses looking for students to have tutorials with. The current relationship is more productive.

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attracting overseas students. It also reflected a tension, which has recently reemerged in research circles, about whether design studies can have quite the same intellectual sophistication as humanities subjects. All the Master’s courses were nominally of two years/6 terms duration, although with the year starting in October and students graduating in early July, the formal course engagement was three months less than the full two years. The curricula on all the courses were organised slightly differently, reflecting the fact that students were working towards a career as an artist, craftsmaker or designer, either self-employed or working for a company. The conventional art-school model of project-based learning was the norm, and it was also the practice in IDE, but it needed more subtlety of construction for students who on the one hand had little or no design background, and yet were mature and highly motivated to deal with challenging work, and were being expected to work at a postgraduate level. I joined this course as a visiting or part-time tutor in 1991, later becoming a contracted tutor, and then several years later the Senior Tutor in the Department. In 1994 I was asked to redesign the IDE course from scratch by the incoming new Professor of the Department, David Carter. This I did, in collaboration with the existing Senior Tutor, John Drane. It felt like an opportunity for a substantially fresh start. The course had been loosely organised, although following the idea that by students doing different projects, guided by and learning from the example of more experienced people, they would hopefully come to some autonomous awareness of the myriad skills and extensive knowledge involved in designing. Whilst this master/apprentice teaching model was derogatorially later described as ‘sitting by Nellie’ (Swann 2002), at its best it has a Socratic character. It does however need tutors who are interested in the dynamics of learning, not just imparting information, however enthusiastically. The process was also particularly difficult for engineering students who had previously learnt in a much more passive way, through lecture-based teaching and reiteration of material through assignments and exams to prove that the material had been ingested and absorbed.

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The Local Setting NG: I guess I saw my first degree as a means to an end, and I worked quite hard for a couple of years, the last two years of my degree, because I wanted to come here, I wanted to be here, but I never really saw what I was doing as anything other than that. Some of it was quite interesting of course, but I guess the way I started to learn my work was very much kind of like ‘I need to know it’ and then I can just move it out, it was like a big churning process, kind of like right digest and finish with it and bring a bit more and digest - so it’s quite linear. PBD: Yes, and is it true to say that you didn’t see yourself as ‘on stage’ you weren’t part of it. No, not at all, it was kind of I just did this... It was out there.. Out there, yes, so I didn’t really feel comfortable about what I was doing. So what was that way that you were working that you didn’t want to work? Oh just learning, how do you describe it? It’s almost like there’s this little truck that you have on a railway line with coal in it and just laden full of stuff and you have to do something with this stuff, to get out the coal before you can move on, and it felt like that. Excellent analogy! Shovelling coal out of a cart! Where do you shovel the coal into? It didn’t really matter, it went into a black hole really, some pit somewhere. But it didn’t get productively burned? No it didn’t. Continuing with that analogy it was wasted really, so that whole journey was just a waste of time and a lot of effort. How long did that horrible period last and what happened at the end of it - if there was an end of it, did it transform into something? I didn’t realise when it started, I think I realised when I was in the midst of it, but because I felt knew what was going on I felt I had that edge, that I wasn’t going to end up falling into the pit with the rest of the coal, and when I came here I didn’t realise I was working like that and I couldn’t continue working like that if I wanted to do what I really enjoy which is some of things we’ve been doing on this course. I don’t know I felt things beginning to fall into place really last term when I was feeling a lot more relaxed about what I could do, what my capabilities and limitations were.

In the interviews and in tutorial discussion I heard from students about what were called projects on some engineering courses, which generally had a poor reputation because they consisted of work where it was known there was a right, or at least preferred answer, so they were more like exercises. EL (when applying for the course): “The hardest thing is to find some kind of design need; it’s easy if you’re just given a project. This however (a

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swimming pool cleaner) was what engineering was really about – an integrated design project.”

The design projects in the art-school setting were different – students expected to set their own brief, with the expectation of varying responses within its constraints to reflect the creative thinking and resolution of the individual student – a new learning experience. My colleague, John Drane, was a highly respected industrial designer, a humanist who understood education as a holistic process. We broadened and formalised the curriculum considerably. The course structure became a series of periods of work. Most included design projects, which were focused on practising different aspects of design. Other activities explored a broadening context for design and its products and effects. As the first year progressed each period of work was meant to incorporate the fields of the earlier work. The projects naturally became more complex, in the sense that considerations about users, manufacturing, and the social, economic and cultural contexts of the product proposal were more open to interpretation. Problems became increasingly ‘wicked’12 and design solutions varied according to how the criteria and constraints in the brief were defined. The learning aims for each period of work were discussed, and students had to propose their own design brief within this framework. The idea was to encourage a critique of existing products, and to promote observation and analysis of areas of need and/or opportunity. Many students were bursting with ideas for improving things, some however found this freedom and responsibility a problem. The different emphases – visual/spatial and haptic thinking, the innovative use of materials, manufacturing, user-centred and futures thinking and technologies also provided an opportunity for students to sense areas of work they were particularly attracted to. Because it is a necessary skill to make design sketching more effective, we introduced teaching of freehand drawing, and made it studio-based to emphasise its centrality to design work. I taught visual thinking and 12

Rittel and Webber (1973)

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The Local Setting

perception studies to open up an understanding of visual thinking. To marry this process with three-dimensional work, (conventionally restricted to model-making skills) we introduced two abstract sculptural projects. One of these explored how metaphor, omnipresent in our thinking, though often unacknowledged, is also present to visual perception, and is a key aspect of how objects are interpreted and understood. My long-standing commitment to the idea that design had social consequences found a receptive audience. Ergonomics was still by and large an adjunct to design rather than fully integrated into it, and we were able to make user-centred design and ethnographic research methods integrated elements of the course. Usercentred design is now mainstream in design courses, but at the time was still unusual. In a post-graduate intellectual environment it seemed natural to introduce training in ethnographic research skills. Society is so evidently in need of substantial rather than superficial design interventions by design tourists on away-days to other peoples’ lives, and IDE was the first course anywhere to do this. Later the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the RCA grew out of this initiative with most of its early research associates being IDE graduates. The second year of the course was spent on a major and a minor project, derived from interests aroused during first year work, and preferably though not always extensively researched over the summer break. This was a very intensive period of work. All the RCA courses had, in 1969, been reduced from three years to two, for economic reasons, and the general feeling was that the middle, unconstrained year had been a serious loss. IN: “Just as you get used to being here in the first year all sorts of opportunities and experiences open out to you. Hardly have you got used to this when suddenly, all too soon the shutters clang down and you are on the skids to the final exam.”

The timetable for the two year course was a battlefield where apparently essential but competing subjects vied for space and running order. These struggles were generally resolved in the middle-ground of manufacturing and marketing, but more open-ended work often had to be fought for. Under the surface the tectonic plates of facts and ideas, rigour and imagination endlessly ground against each other, and caused more than ripples on the

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surface. These were often given extra frisson by further underlying tensions about professional design experience being the only really necessary teaching qualification. The planning of this timetable, as the manifestation of the aims and values of the joint department was revisited annually, based on feedback from students, visiting designers and examiners, as well as reaction to the annual graduating public degree show, and the stubbornness of the staff members about getting what they saw as their essential subjects prioritised. Thus, although the work was apparently project-based, some of the ‘consumption’ model of learning lurked in the background, integration being left to the workings out of the unfolding design process itself. Periods of work were run by individual tutors, full-time or part-time, drawing in other tutors to work with them. Thus one might sometimes be in charge of a project, and sometimes be working in another tutor’s project structure. Full-time senior staff could work as tutors on projects run by visiting staff. Perceived different priorities in a work period often led to the constituent tutors working even harder and more hours than they normally did. Largely of benefit to students, this could also cause unproductive confusion to those who were most cue-conscious. The RCA culture of focusing on making, and learning through making, maintains the original idea of the Great Exhibition of 1851 of developing arts, crafts and design practices as part of the national economic project.13 It is extremely valued at the RCA, evidenced by workshops taking up almost 50% of the building, whose square-metre rental value is amongst the highest in the world. Significant learning takes place in the workshops with the highly trained and experienced technical staff, where the boundaries between demonstration and teaching roles are diffuse. Many IDE students had moved towards engineering after growing up making things at home or at school, and had then been dismayed at the lack 13 This approach has been the model for most of art and design education, although recently increasingly compromised by the expense of such workshop space, compared to its more attractive use by increased numbers of fee-paying students using no large pieces of equipment.

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of hands-on work in academic engineering courses, a legacy from the social history of engineering education (see Engineering education). Other students, although interested in creative design work had made the decision to do an engineering training before a design one. It was felt to be a safer course of action than thinking about the rigours of an engineering course after a design degree (these instincts perhaps contributing substance to the tectonic plates referred to above). Several of the students who always knew they wanted to be designers told me they had chosen to do an engineering degree and then a design degree rather than the other way around, because design was simpler and could be fitted into the complex knowing of engineering. It turned out that design is complex in a different way. These influences of course stretched back a long way to the choice of subjects to be followed at school, where in the English education system at least, choices for ‘A’ level in Maths, Physics and Chemistry could mean that any humanities subjects would have been dropped in the early teens. Ironically, despite the undergraduate training of the students, the IDE design tutors found they had to teach a very full curriculum of manufacturing and materials, and in some cases dynamics and statics of structures, as these had not been taught in any practical context on the engineering degrees. The atelier system of teaching, however, does involve working one-to-one with students, which produces a high staff-to-student ratio, and is therefore expensive to run. There has been steady pressure in the sector to reduce this ratio, with the inevitable loss in some colleges of close contact with tutors, or access to making. There is much criticism of the effects of this, and belatedly there is now a forum14 for consideration of pedagogical issues in the sector, and training for tutors involved in it.

Project-based learning Project-based learning is the norm in design education, and this was the case at the RCA, the complexity of projects reflecting the level of the students’ 14

Centre for Learning and Teaching in Art and Design (CLTAD), University of the Arts, London. http://www.arts.ac.uk/about-ual/departments/centre-for-learning-and-teaching-in-artand-design/

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experience, and the expectations of the master’s level criteria. (These were articulated in course documents, moderated across the college by a system of internal moderating examiners, and referenced periodically by the QAA). Project-based learning has recently spread from art and design into other disciplines. Eraut (1994:120) notes: “It is now well established that knowledge which does not get used in practice is rapidly consigned to cold storage.” This development has taken longer than it should because art and design teaching has, until recently, been almost entirely untheorised and not written about, its practitioners mostly being practising artists, craftsmen and women, and designers. Apart from maintaining they did not have time to write, these practitioners, working within the framework of the traditional atelier system of passing on skills and knowledge, were not familiar with the culture and activities of educational theory, research and publishing. Each of these practices has its own distinct culture, and the choice of professors at the RCA to head each department reflects debate on the visions and perspectives of that profession, as professors are always eminent practitioners in their own field. (This emerged as an important issue in the workings of the Research Assessment Exercise during the 2000s, when eminent practitioners were unwilling and/or unable to produce the kind of critical writing about their work that would enable it to be considered by the RAE, regardless of how well it was esteemed in the wider world of local and international culture). This was of little interest to students, and professors and tutors as strong characters naturally became role-models, either positively or negatively, and this was no less the case in IDE. Some of the concepts of situated learning (Lave and Wenger 1991) are present in project-based learning in design, as it takes place in an environment and context of practice that attempts to mimic professional practice. This is even more the case during the semi-live projects of the final year. Another feature of situated learning draws attention to how knowledge is co-constructed amongst people in various relationships beyond those of conventional teaching. Engineering students were already used to teamworking, though without any teaching input about group dynamics this had often meant a rough and tumble experience for the participants.

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The successful resolution of product design work needs different kinds of expertise, and therefore usually working with people from other disciplines. In design training this often gets translated into ‘team projects’, also rarely supported by any input about how groups work. This can be an aspect of design training where learning from experience is not as effective as it could be, or perhaps is with the more malleable minds of young children, who have yet to acquire the crusts of personality or social behaviour of adulthood. In IDE there were many informal groupings, and this was encouraged as reflecting the way most designers would work in professional practice. Tutors might or might not be involved, often in roles that were not formally didactic, or evaluating, and this was an unexpected way to recognise opportunities for learning. PBD: So just going back to this thing of where the imagination is…the third possibility is that it might be coming from some energy which only arises though joint activities? MG: Yes, that would be true. Teamwork’s an interesting area though isn’t it? Working with other people. Seeing the product being… synergy producing more than the sum of the two or three people involved. Have you seen any examples where something has come up as a result of people working together in however informal a way? Yes, the last project I reached a bit of a plateau, kind of a bit stuck at the concept generation phase and I sat down with DL and we just started sketching out ideas and suddenly that idea branched out and I got hundreds of ideas. D’s good at that, that’s one of his strengths. He is good at that, and also generous with it. He’s fantastically generous and has helped me out on more than one occasion. There is this sort of model that it’s my product from within me, but maybe it’s not about that idea? No I don’t think it is, as much as anything D gave me a bit of confidence in my own ideas, so it’s a combination of some of his ideas, some of my ideas and then giving me the confidence to go and pursue some of them.

Tacit knowledge (Polyani 1958) is recognised as an important feature of design skill (Cross 2006, Frayling 2011). As distinct from explicit knowledge it consists of skills and understandings that have been learnt and integrated below the surface of articulate awareness. Its concepts (sometimes called “know-how”) are often used to describe craft-based knowledge,

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whether in wielding a surgeon’s knife or a woodcarver’s adze. It is also part of the “knowing-how” in more cerebral aspects of any project management that have become apparently instinctive. Previously defined by its unteachableness, tacit knowing is increasingly being seen as a possible outcome in a teaching and learning environment that promotes experiential learning, and favours activities using the senses, and especially in the artschool setting, those of sight and touch, sometimes synaesthetically. Unselfconscious children may not notice this particular dimension of learning as different, but for adults more used to abstract and intellectual sites, the play of experiment and feedback through hand and eye will not immediately be given the same acknowledgment and attention. The phrase “playing-around” with materials was often used by IDE students at the start of the course in a derogatory way to distance engagement, rather than to try out the opportunities of taking a childlike, rather than childish approach to experimentation. Assessment of the design project work led to further difficulties for the engineers. Much of their previous university work had received numerical marks, with not much questioning about what the numbers, limits and intervals meant beyond pass and fail, and grade. Design evaluation however is infinitely multi-faceted. The work is normally reviewed viva voce in a ‘crit’ or work review – a live presentation by the student to a panel of tutors, with other students present. The work, in the form of models and drawings – sketch, technical, presentation – is discussed and notes made. Students receive feedback on the spot which they are too nervous to take in. This is later usually augmented in the studio, with or without written notes. A constant complaint from all learners, including design students, is about not getting enough feedback. This was exponentially more the case with the IDE students who were not only wanting to know how they had done, but also about the criteria that were being used. Given that the students on this post-graduate course were adults I thought it appropriate to shift the emphasis from teaching to learning, and to engage the students in the management of this learning. Having identified the subjects and skills of industrial design in earlier jobs, and discussed the levels of them for this MA course for students who had not done a

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preparatory BA, I wanted to devise learning activities that could be explored and fully engaged with by these mature students. I also wanted greater involvement with processes of learning, assessment and work evaluation. This would be while they were learning to navigate an environment where it would become clear in a potentially very disorienting, even undermining, manner that their previous engineering culture was in fact not the only way of construing knowledge and meaning in the world. Unique at the time, I introduced a scheme of individual profiling, based on features of learning suggested by the students themselves, that I had used in previous undergraduate design teaching. This provided an effective mechanism for students to engage in a discussion about their learning. It filled an often unacknowledged gap in the crit system where the intention is to evaluate the student’s working processes through the medium of their project work, but often the opinions about the objects themselves can occlude aspects of the educational agenda. Full-time tutors on the IDE course had formally allocated pastoral roles as well as their vocational roles as designers. These tutors were all men, apart from me. (In a year’s intake of 18 students there was an average ratio from 1997 – 2004 of one woman to four men). At the time of this research I had become the Senior Tutor, second in charge to the new Professor, John Drane, and a practising design educator rather than a product designer. Of the other female tutors on the course one, an artist, taught the intensive visual studies and drawing period at the start of the first year, and the other taught ethnography as part of research for user-centred design. Thus the two cultures divide also became gendered. I experienced this as an internal personal struggle, sometimes feeling a bit inadequate about the more technical aspects of the work despite my background training, which had included engineering. My role as someone who knew about learning, including ideas about how to facilitate and support it, was the softer domain, attractive for times when students wanted to explore conceptually, or for pastoral concerns; less so when a deadline was approaching. The interview conversations reflect this relationship well.

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In the wider college environment pedagogy was of little interest, as the atelier system was thought to work well enough with a very high employment rate for the graduates. A visiting team from the CSDHE (Centre for Staff Development in Higher Education at London University) in 1996 who tried to run a seminar about how assessment could be made a more effective tool for learning than the conventional project crit process were given a flea in the ear by the reluctantly attending professors, being told they had nothing useful to offer to an institution at this level. Set in the middle of all this chorus of different energies was the individual struggle of each student to fulfil his or her dream, alternately enduring and rising to the challenge of the noisy battlefield of design education at the Royal College of Art.

A RESEAR RCHER’S JOURNEY Y

Figure 2. Cycles of qualitative q reesearch: Devvelopment of a research question, q mapping a shift in wayys of thinking about a a subjecct.

When a PhD is turnned into a bo ook it is cusstomary to lessen the weeight of academic craftsmannship by sum mmarising w what was originally o a lengthy discussioon of reseaarch method dology. Herre I have retained r a detailed discussioon of my research r pro ocess becausse what I did d in a reaal sense represennts my centrral argumentt. My strugggle to recog gnise an appropriate research process was itself an example oof epistemic development. The processees and methhods I adop pted have a resonance with the naature of knowleddge and meanning created by drawing. There allso proved too be useful parallels p betw ween my research processses and design aactivities. In design the answers are not known in advance and the

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journey to find them involves both learning and finding out. So it was in this study. I found the exploration of possible research approaches to be a creative process that proved fundamental to the development of the project and my relationship to it.

The beginning and the first cycle: development of a research question The point at the centre of the diagram represents a dawning realisation that one is involved with something that repays further enquiry. Different approaches arise as the enquiry takes shape. In this case I decided to register the project as a doctoral degree, and so the project entered the structures, cultures and processes of qualitative research in a department of education at a particular university. I brought with me some ideas of what I thought a research degree was. At work, at the Royal College of Art, research degrees in art and design, by practice and by thesis, were being explored within the qualitative frameworks of the Humanities and Social Sciences. As my course, Industrial Design Engineering, was a joint course with Imperial College, I was aware of the fundamentally different approach to the generation of new knowledge represented by research projects in the pure and applied sciences and technology. I was influenced more than I realised by a view that qualitative research was a poor relation of research using well-established quantitative methods (Denzin and Lincoln 2000). My question was about how engineering graduates learned to think and know things differently through their exposure to the processes and values of Industrial Design. I had a way to gather information through interviews with the students, and I had a model of ‘personal development’ that seemed an appropriate frame of reference and instrument, that developed by Perry (1970) as described in My relationship with the study. As I read further about ‘personal development’, I realised there were problems in using Perry’s undergraduate-based research (based in an English

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department in the USA), in a postgraduate art and design setting in the UK, nearly 40 years later. Initially the idea of interviewing IDE students and assigning accounts of their experiences in the new value-laden world of design to some kind of Perry-like scale had appeared sufficiently plausible that it led me to undertake a series of taped interviews between individual students and myself. It soon became clear to me, however, that even if statements by IDE students could be mapped in some way onto Perry’s scheme, or a related one, notions of ‘progress’ as implied quite openly in these schemes would only reveal that some students had progressed and some had not. There would not be a connection to the more complex map of how learners reacted to moving between radically differently defined knowledge and practice worlds. I was left with a yes/no kind of enquiry, where the data derived from the interviews was going to do all the work. This was the first iteration of the inner circle of the diagram above. The second iteration started as I began to consider if drawing could become the focus for exploring the development of learning and thinking skills, as learning to read critically had been the site in Perry’s work. Drawing had complicating features, but at the same time tied the enquiry firmly back into the activities and thinking involved in designing. I saw that, for the students, practising freehand drawing involved learning to trust and see value in the results of constantly changing speculative thinking processes, rather than relying on the repeatable and objective procedures of maths, physics and chemistry. Given the necessity for interpretive activities on the surface of the drawn page, I could parallel generative freehand drawing with personally engaged thinking, involving an increasing openness to the creation of ideas and knowledge beyond the safeties of mathematical procedures and the conventions of engineering drawing. I decided to move sideways from ‘personal development’ to focus instead ‘epistemic development’, as used in the work of Kitchener and King (1981), who built on Perry’s work. This opened up a different literature, and opportunities to find other ways to describe changes in ways of learning without the assumptions about ‘progression’ in terms of ‘personal development’.

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As I moved on from Perry’s ‘stages’ I had to look for new ways to describe approaches and attitudes towards freehand drawing and what its activities involved. This developed into a set of terms that occurred both as concepts used in image-making, and also in the management of complex thinking. The proposition that started to unfold was that epistemic development could be found in and supported by the dynamic interplay of visual and metaphorical thinking in the context of design activities. This enabled a research question to emerge about the different ways that the activities involved in freehand drawing might stimulate and promote epistemic development in this particular context. The enquiry moved from using an existing model of ladder-like personal development related to coming to terms with the relativism of knowledge, to identifying a collection of critical experiences and challenges to these experiences, revealed through reactions to the course, including freehand drawing, denoting a broader palette of learning and attitudes towards knowledge. This was the second iteration of the inner circle. The research processes and methods I then went on to use developed from exploring and consolidating this proposition. PBD……The researcher’s story… Overwhelming image of a snout, a hoover, a proboscis travelling over existing ground, terrain, texture, leaves and stones - searching (the Dark Riders sniffing) - but for something already known - a yes/no process…. Another image - the elephant’s trunk checking through touch what the environment consists of, an orienteering/orientation process - but it’s still about checking what’s out there - it’s before interacting with it anyway. The relationship is largely passive, but in control; there’s no sense of being unsure, insecure, lost, it’s more about curiosity; could later become acquisitive - a juicy morsel - in which case the searching organ has a preset menu of what’s good/bad, useful/not useful…. So firstly the researcher sets out to report facts of the terrain - there is a terrain that is reportable What’s with the hoover idea? It’s not such a good analogy! - The vacuum takes into itself indiscriminately (apart from the size of the orifice) and does nothing with the ingested matter - doesn’t interact with it, but does keep it from others - the air which is the medium for the energy flow carries, drops, is filtered and returns to the ambient. It has no story. What’s in the bag depends on the direction of the driver - disembodied from the hoover.

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A Researcher’s Journey Hoovering up information that might be useful later is a recognisable problem, there’s too much of it. This is the sucking-up aspect of researching. I don’t yet have the sense of researcher as building something, maybe because I think of research as informing a constructive process like design, not that research is the constructive process, except in limited ways like editing information to construct a version of a story….3/8/2006

The second circle: development of the research process Although cracks had been appearing for some time in the project model I was trying to work on, the impulse for movement outwards to the demands of the second circle of the diagram only came at the upgrade exam. It was pointed out to me that in the PhD process my own involvement in the project could not be ignored. I was a designer of the course, an academic as well as pastoral tutor, and an examiner. I was an active part of the community some of whose members I was enquiring about, and it was clear that the interviews had been conducted as conversations on subjects of mutual interest, rather than as some kind of more objective survey, with rigorous consistency of questions to each participant My deep-seated, if unexamined, attitude towards ‘valid’ research meant that I had consistently ignored important hints that the approach must change, several of these even being embedded in courses I taught. The first hint referred to ideas about the centrality of experience in processes of learning. I introduced the students to Kolb’s ‘Learning Cycle’ (1984) and its relationship to design processes (see Learning and epistemic development in designing), but did not go so far as to consider the appropriateness of the different kinds of thinking to my own research processes. The second hint was the concept of ‘tame’ or ‘wicked’ problems (Rittel and Webber 1973) which formed part of studio discussions on the writing of design briefs (see Local setting), but I did not at this stage compare the open-endedness of some design briefs with the openness of the terrain of my project. Next right from the start of the study I had consistently sensed it took the form of a drama - a struggle enacted on a stage, and I saw myself not in the stalls, but well inside the proscenium arch, even if I was not clear what role I was playing. Finally, the frontispiece illustration for my Upgrade submission consisted of a visual collage indicating how some images describe thinking

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processes. This included part of a painting by the seventeenth century Dutch artist Hobbema called ‘The Avenue at Middleharnis’, a favourite of mine since childhood. We had had a reproduction of it on the dining room wall. Central to the picture is the avenue, whose exaggerated perspective gives the illusion of the scene coming out of the frame to include the viewer. By the time I had used this image for the Upgrade exam I was exploring the idea of aspects of thinking that are also integral to visual image making. I was wondering if the metaphorical ‘bridge’ formed by these associations was going to be the way I would link sophisticated verbal thinking with visual thinking as encountered through drawing. The illustration for the Upgrade was neat, but I had not thought to apply its meaning to myself in the project.

Figure 3. Meindeert Hobbema, 1689, The Avenue at Middleharnis, © National Gallery London Picture Library.

The main quality of the second circle is its openness - to its own features, and to those beyond it. Previously assumed boundaries and structures of the project fall away. Any question dissolves in a tangled web of ideas, concepts and methods, or defines and redefines itself according to what are seen to be

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the important threads and connections. Figure and ground appear, change places, and then disappear. In the end I found that the only way to work here, to identify the significant junctions and pathways, was to commit to decisions based on my own judgement, and to try and ensure that that judgement was well-honed. The necessary insight shifts from skill with basic tools to do the work, to exploring and exploiting how the tools create and form the work they do. The analogy is relevant partly because it connects the enquiry to its site in design and making, but also because it connects to the original meanings of bricolage, now used as a term in research methods, discussed below. In order to use these research tools in a sophisticated way the user (researcher, craftsperson, designer) has to incorporate her own personal experience into the learnt processes, drawing on and increasing a fund of what is often tacit knowledge. Finding ways to bring tacit knowledge to the surface and share it is a central issue in the teaching of design and craft, and also in research that uses these kinds of approach (see Learning and epistemic development in designing). Moustakas’s (1990:11) work on Heuristic research, which contributed some of the background to Grounded Theory, further confirmed that I could and should acknowledge my place, and the place of my thinking in the development of my research process: “From the beginning and throughout an investigation, heuristic research involves self-search, self-dialogue, and self-discovery; the research question and the methodology flow out of inner awareness, meaning and inspiration. When I consider an issue, problem, or question I enter into it fully.”

However, the engagement needs to be critical. Such reflective processes have to be approached with an informed awareness that the mechanisms of perception are not necessarily truth-telling. All too frequently the perceptual dynamics of similarity and proximity, and those of functional fixity can undermine productive thinking, a problem in research design as in any other kind of design.

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Heuristics, techniques of thinking based on acknowledging the importance of personal experience in discovery and problem-solving, comes from the same Greek root Ǽ‫ބ‬ȡȓıțȦ as does another word well-known in design mythologies – Eureka! Psychologists however have long known, and designers are well-advised to remember, that the phenomenon refers to the physical experience of the revelation, not the quality of the idea revealed. In the work of the second circle the contingency of knowledge, the storying of experience, and the different ways we understand the world all have to be accommodated, and creativity used to recognise and build the developing enquiry. The lens of Narrative Inquiry (see below) proposes that personal involvement is not just part of the approach and content, but constructs them. I envied John Steinbeck’s robust attitude towards the problems of knowledge in his account of the journey he made with Ed Ricketts in 1940 as marine biologists to the Sea of Cortez in the southern Gulf of California: “We had a game we playfully called speculative metaphysics. It was a sport consisting of lopping off a piece of observed reality and letting it move up through the speculative process like a tree growing tall and bushy. We observed with pleasure how the branches of thought grew away from the trunk of external reality. We believed, as we must, that the laws of thought parallel the laws of things…..(We would not) say, “This thought is the only thought,” but rather, this is a thought, perhaps well or ill-formed, but a thought which is a real thing in nature.” Once a theme was established we subjected observable nature to it.” (1958:xlv)

Structures for the study The subjects of the study all seemed to connect to or be parts or subsets of each other, and this made perceiving a good structure difficult, and produced a real block in writing. It seemed that the field of the project consisted of atomised elements with an infinite number of connecting strings for which I could not find a sequential equivalent for a written account. Another way to see this is to accept Moustakas’s perspective. As Hiles (2002:5) notes

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A Researcher’s Journey “It is not you who chooses the research question, but the research question chooses you – invariably the research question is deeply personal in origin….Moustakas emphasises that heuristic enquiry is basically a process of discovery of inner knowing…It (requires) ‘..a passionate, disciplined commitment to remain with a question intensely and continuously until it is illuminated or answered.’ Moustakas, 1990, p. 15).”

This, Hiles describes as tacit knowing (2002:5). My very concentrated practice of keeping and repeatedly folding back into notebooks throughout the project (see below) has confirmed this. The study acquired a deep level of engagement, both in coming up with propositions and in evaluating them. Repeated thoughts and concerns were internalised and transformed; new connections were made using tools from the metaphoric dimensions of memory, imagination and intuition. All the same, the problem of delineating a field was a continuing problem, as hinted at in Borges’s stories about infinite libraries, and in the philosophical stance described by the Buddhist idea of the interpenetration of all phenomena in the god Indra’s Net. There a jewel at every intersection reflects the contents of all the other jewels.1 I saw that London’s Tate Modern catalogue (2007) for the retrospective exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’s lifetime body of work abandoned chronology in favour of a thematic approach constructed alphabetically. While the problem might temporarily be about how to connect all the pieces, the project itself was about the process of connection as a defining feature of experience and learning. PBD……Thinking styles and learning styles interact; learning involves change between old and new thinking - stages, bridges, journeys; metaphorical linking creates new ideas; creativity and visual thinking are part of designing; drawing requires and enhances visual thinking; drawing is central to designing; representation in drawing is always partial; designing requires understanding of the worlds of other people; describing the experiences of others is a philosophical problem; experience and interaction with others are foundations of learning; visual thinking works metaphorically and is a fundamental way of understanding; thinking styles and learning styles interact………2009 1

I am grateful to Yeseung Lee for telling me about Indra’s Net.

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This topological entity nevertheless had to take linear form. I was reminded of Laurence Sterne’s novel ‘The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’ (1759 - 1769), where he attempts to describe graphically how his narratives have unfolded in the book. This he does, for each volume, by drawing a basically straight horizontal line, each of these then diverted by large or small rounded curves or sharp, angled spikes indicating the flow of the subject matter away from what he proposes as an ‘ideal’ straight line narrative.

Figure 4. Laurence Sterne, 1900, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. (1759-1766), London, Macmillan and Co. Ltd. Vol. 2, pp 61, 62.

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Rather than this linear idea, I sensed the structure of the study as a drama, in two halves. Throughout the piece there are the continuous, and varied voices of the students’ accounts. These are played against other voices: of academic and other kinds of text, including my own. In the middle is an Interlude: ‘Bridge’. Far from being an interval to escape the performance, it points back to the themes underlying the sections of the first half, and forward to the outcomes beyond. It illustrates my exploratory and critical use of a particular metaphor, and stands as an example of the process and content of generative visual thinking and connection to the world around us that should be at the heart of epistemic development in design training.

Research Lenses: Design Doubts about the limited, contingent nature of the work in this study brought into the open anxieties about how the substance and originality, plausibility and usefulness of the arguments and their outcomes would be judged. I turned again to how Design, as another contingent and constrained activity, is received and evaluated against real-world criteria. The comparison drew me to think about casting the whole project in the mould of a typical design project or design process cycle. While there is no more a typical design project than there is a typical research project, there are some useful shared features. Design work ranges across a spectrum of products, both hardware and software. At one end of a scale products may respond to predominantly objective criteria, or they may be artefacts that primarily express the ideas, tastes and priorities of the designer. In any situation the iterative processes of design development involve many different kinds of thinking - generative, analytical, subjective, objective, lateral, vertical, whether these iterations follow formal feedback systems, or internal conversations on the way to the resolution of the original proposition. Setting up and doing a research project is also a design activity, and will need all these different kinds of thinking. When one starts a research project the methods can initially be seen as sets of instructions - how to do something. Comparing this to a schematic model

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of how to do Design (as seen in many handbooks) I could quickly see how inadequate a description of the process of research this view is. If however one casts researching and designing in the cyclical process of Kolb’s Reflective Learning Model, the link is more visible as the model resembles the iterative processes of both design and research.2 Additionally, as Richardson (2000:925) notes in her discussion of writing as producing rather than reporting knowledge: “Language is a constitutive force, creating a particular view of reality and of the Self. Producing “things” always involves value – what to produce, what to name the productions, and what the relationship between the producers and the named things will be.” One of designing’s most important activities is interacting with the materials and artefacts of the project, whether these are physical such as in textiles, graphics, and three-dimensional work, or more abstract entities such as systems and spaces. This interaction may consist of physical explorations and speculations, making enquiry conversations between sensory information and memory, hand and eye, or pursuing the same process through symbolic representations such as drawings, models, diagrams or figures of speech. One might see ‘methods’ in thesis-based research as artefacts in this way - they have to be explored by the hands and fingers of the mind in the same creative questioning, probing, testing, assessing and identifying way (Pallasmaa 2000). A more personal, physical aspect of enquiry and design must necessarily vary from person to person, particularly in those kinds of research projects where there are differences in approach and outcome because of the researcher’s explicit involvement. Part of my research journey had been to move from a seemingly objective approach, to one that enquired into, worked with and built on my own creative and analytical thinking and ideas. The project had initially been largely verbal and conceptual - question, talk, discuss, read - in iterative cycles. Another feature of my second circle of research process was that it sought other ways of knowing, for example based in the senses, such as seeing, touch, hearing, using intuition and 2

This is not to confuse research projects as such with the necessary research work within any design project - a process of becoming informed about areas of the design brief not already known to the designer or design team.

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imagination, accessing one’s tacit knowing through mirroring processes such a freewriting and drawing. Hopefully the working processes of the implicated researcher will reveal her strengths and weaknesses, so that an opportunity can arise for learning, and for involving other approaches to the research practice. In my case I started out with an approach quite like the objective design methods of the 1960’s, which I wore as a slightly ill-fitting uniform. I then moved to an approach that acknowledged and celebrated intuitive work, mirroring my second design training in the 1990’s as a constructed textiles designer. I started to be able to exploit a natural fluency in visual thinking, and then this greatly influenced the direction taken by the project (see Visual and conceptual thinking)

Bricolage as a tool in the management of multiple approaches in a research project I had at least two pressing issues in my second circle. The first was about how to deal with the multi-disciplinarity of the field (or territories) of my enquiry – education, engineering, design, visual thinking, in the physical and cultural space of the IDE department. The second was that the subjects were a quite heterogeneous group of people, and that there was no virtue in thinking of any kind of aggregating of the unique experiences of their individual lived lives. One way to make sense of these issues was to turn to what Denzin and Lincoln (2000) describe as “blurred-genre approaches”. Such approaches attempt to respond to an increasing acknowledgement of the complexity of interconnections within issues and subjects in present-day social science and cultural research. They refer to Flick (1998) who suggests triangulation, and to Richardson (2000) who prefers crystallization. I see that both these metaphors refer back to engineering and science. Using them seemed dangerous in that the concept of connection that both metaphors were striving to express could be crowded out by other dominant features of each idea. Triangulation is used for the most exact of measurements, not just ‘mapping’. Crystalisation has a sense of inflexibility; crystals can be

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described mathematically, human behaviour cannot. Another approach Denzin and Lincoln (2000:4) suggest is that of bricolage, a concept they borrow from Levi-Strauss (1966) via Geertz (1988). “Calling for ‘thick description’ of particular events, rituals and customs, Geertz suggested that all anthropological writings are interpretations of interpretations.” (Denzin and Lincoln 2008:24) This I felt held more promise, not least because many of bricolage’s approaches and values resonate with design practices. As far as the dictionary (Larousse 1995) is concerned bricoler’s meanings include: ‘having to be ingenious with what’s to hand, improvising’. This sounds creative, but ‘making do’ sounds a bit reductive; there’s also ‘tinkering’, which can go either way. The word refers to ‘home improvements’, but also ‘producing shoddy3 work’. The bricoleur is ‘good with his or her hands’, an odd job expert or handyman, but also a dilletante. Denzin and Lincoln describe different approaches to research by picking up on Levi-Strauss’ distinction between two types of scientific knowledge. He contrasts the cultural approaches of the engineer (scientist, physicist) with his tools “conceived and procured for the purposes of the project” and the approach of the bricoleur who happily puts to new use ready-to-hand objects and tools. This distinction does not seem so useful as I explore bricolage as a way of thinking and a research approach, which stresses that such tools and materials can be open to new meanings, if they are not viewed as bound to any particular purpose. Instead they are in touch with all projects they have been used in before, and bring that richness with them. The difference between finding and invention in creative practice – of research, and of visual work becomes blurrred. Carruthers (1998:12) in her study of medieval monastic thought consolidates the connection with her observations about the nature of creativity in classical culture. Both ‘invent’ and ‘inventory’ come from a common Latin root invenire, to come upon, discover, find out as well as devise and contrive. “Having “inventory” is a requirement for “invention.” Not only does this statement assume that one 3

shoddy, the name for a perfectly respectable fabric of interlocked fibres, is also a useful metaphor –taking here, as is often the case with textiles terms, a pejorative slant: to denote poor quality.

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cannot create (“invent”) without a memory store (“inventory”) to invent from and with, but it also assumes one’s memory-store is effectively “inventoried.”“ A judgment that the results of ‘making-do’ might not be as good as those arrived at in some more ordered way forgets all the creative ingenuity and open-mindedness of the enquirer (or problem-solver) who has to go behind and beyond existing categories and classification to see things in a new light, and to grasp the potential for alternative uses, roles, functions. In other words to learn rather than perform. “The interpretive bricoleur produces a bricolage – that is, a pieced together set of representations that is fitted to the specifics of a complex situation.” (Denzin and Lincoln 2008:5) It thus becomes a way of thinking that aims to handle and embrace the real interconnectedness of everything. The bricoleur is crafty in her ability to transform the ready-to-hand for a particular purpose, rather than having dedicated tools and procedures. Research methods are seen to be actively constructed, not “passively received as ‘correct’ universally applicable methodologies” (Kincheloe 2005:324).4 Kincheloe (2005:327) elaborates: “Levi-Strauss (1966), in his delineation of the bricolage, maintained that the concept originated in an understanding of the complexity and unpredictability of the cultural domain….Such a ‘literacy of complexity’ understands the intersecting roles and social locations of all human beings and the multiple layers of interpretations of self, contexts, and social actors involved in rigorous research (Dicks and Mason 1998)” Bricolage signifies and requires interdisciplinarity, the recognition that the complexity of the lived life must be reflected in all questions about it. Its principles acknowledge that in its aim to get nearer the real nature of things, one may use methods from many different disciplines, for the iterative process of deciphering and deciding the significant content and argument of a research project and finding ways to do it.

4

Denzin and Lincoln’s original usage was taken up by several writers, especially Joe Kincheloe, scholar in critical pedagogy and founder of the Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy at McGill University.

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Writers on bricolage are at pains to stress that far from it being superficial by its nature, at a time when boundaries between traditional disciplines dissolve, there is a need for new kinds of rigour. Integrity and advances in scholarship can be assured by “an elastic conversation about the ways such a bricolage can be rigorously developed.” (Kincheloe 2001:683) There is an obvious waryness about bricolage as a research approach, as there is about Heuristics, even though heuristic elements are present in all enquiry. This may perhaps be because they both acknowledge that the outcomes of work may be less than the optimal assumed for more objective ‘monological’ methods. Kincheloe (2001:683) suggests that bricolage as he discusses it “recognises the dialectical nature of (the) disciplinary and interdisciplanry relationship, and calls for a synergistic interaction between the two concepts.” Bricolage’s mercurial aspect and longer perspective would imply a position not of logic or heuristic, but working in an informed freedom that uses both. In this it resembles design work which involves the skilful mingling of hard information from, say, physics or market research, with the insights of intuition and personal experience, at the right time. If my own experience of design work for this study and its research methods was to be an integral part of the work, I saw it had to be a cyclical process of enquiry that questioned using different frames of reference, and recognised that new connections could be forged in unexpected ways. It also had to be a constant struggle to remain engaged with, not a once and for all step. Kincheloe suggests that bricolage is a lifetime process of knowledge making, echoing the agenda of epistemic development. “Focussing on webs of relationships instead of simply things-in-themselves, the bricoleur constructs the object of study in a more complex framework.” (2001:323), bringing to mind Lawson’s (1980) three-dimensional ‘box’ of design constraints which are present for resolution in any design project (see Learning and Epistemic Development in designing). Bricolage accepts the implications of ‘wicked’ design situations with no single deducible or correct answer, that necessarily need different approaches for different features. Remembering one of the original meanings of the word bricolage as ‘home improvements’ one can quickly see that the intelligent workman’s approach will be to use appropriate methods and tools

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that are to hand for different parts of a project.5 A single approach would inevitably limit the effectiveness of the work. Bricolage’s more opportunistic connotations of appropriating techniques from different ways of being in the world should not be forgotten. With this in mind, I deliberately introduced Baudelaire’s (1863)6 ideas about the flaneur in a project in IDE using ethnographic methods to find out about the lives of other people. It helped in facing up to “the complexity and heterogeneity of all human experience” (Kincheloe 2005:681), such that ‘flanning’ became an accepted term for doing the more subtle, (sometimes laid back) aspects of user research. Buchli (2011:19) writing about bricolage as a feature of post-modernism proposes that the bricoleur is concerned with “inventive displacement, rather than inventive novelty”, quoting Levi-Strauss (1966:19): “It might be said that the engineer questions the universe, while the bricoleur addresses himself to a collection of oddments left over from human endeavour… The engineer is always trying to make his way out and go beyond constraints imposed by a particular state of civilisation while the ‘bricoleur’ by inclination or necessity always remains within them.” Kincheloe however has a different take. He identifies common ground between the ‘inventor’ and the bricoleur. Inventors create ‘design documents’ using “a fictive imagination to produce something that (does) not yet exist; the bricoleur does the same thing in a different ontological and epistemological domain. Both the inventor and the bricoleur are future oriented as they explore the realm of possibility” (2005:346), contrary to the view that the bricoleur works only in the present and the past. Both use scenario-building to explore gaps and deficiencies in what seems to be the status quo. What resonates with my own attitude towards design accountability is that research 5

Arkhipov (2006) has assembled an astonishing collection of objects and tools made in Russia before the recent advent of a consumer-oriented manufacturing economy, such as tv aerials made of forks, door mats from bottle tops, a mushroom basket from a punctured football, etc. – all the ideas showing the genius of bricolage as a design problem-solving process, if without the higher end values of aesthetics that accompany commercial design, and escaping the glutinous clutches of design-art kitsch with more cunning witty-gritty conjunctions. 6 Charles Baudelaire: Le peintre de la vie moderne, article first published in Le Figaro, Paris, 1863. The Painter of Modern Life (1964) New York, Da Capo Press.

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bricoleurs “bring to the surface the ideological devices that have erased the lived worlds and perspectives of those living at the margins of power… (as) they make a variety of previously repressed features of the social world visible,” opening the potential for design outside the narrow dictates of conventional consumerism. As bricolage is present and taken for granted in many parts of design practice, the effects of this naturalisation in a context that also has to be rigorous and answerable may reflect back to more acceptance of its concepts in other domains. I am interested in how visual and other design practices can be plied into the thinking practices of research, extending and strengthening them. Some of the ways research bricolage is being explored bring to mind taken-forgranted visual practices in art and design. Several examples show this at work. A common approach to ideas generation in several design fields is the use of ‘mood boards’, the gathering together of diverse objects and images, from other functions, other contexts, their new relationships working as visual and haptic stimulation. In this process hunch, an alert but unfocussed attention, like Keats’ ‘diligent indolence’7 has indicated that these trinkets for the imagination have some potential attraction for the as yet undefined magnetic field of an idea. A creative rhythm starts of perceptions contributing to the definition of the emerging concept, which in turn alerts attention to new and relevant stimuli, a two-way relationship of enquiry. Qualitative research practice has borrowed a concept from painting and drawing practice to spotlight this way of working. Pentimento, from the Italian ‘repentance’, refers to an artist’s practice of refining and altering a composition while working on it. This is why Denzin and Lincoln (2000:4), in their overview of blurred-genre approaches to qualitative research, ally it with ‘montage’, another visual practice where “images, sounds and understandings are blending together, overlapping, forming a composite, a new creation.”

7

John Keats to John Reynolds, 19th February 1818

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Pentimenti can sometimes be seen as layers of work in a finished piece, and also nowadays below the visible surface by using x-ray technology, often to establish authenticity. But there seems to be some distance between this rather forensic perspective, and recognising the way that artists actually work exploring and developing ideas, in a dialogue between what is drawn and seen, and the developing idea in the mind and the mind’s eye.

Figures 5, 6, 7. Bella Green, 2014, Working compositional drawings. “The process starts with a quick ‘thumbnail’ sketch, playing with formats, and then, in a larger drawing, moves to observing one object or scene. The drawing process leads the direction and my focus is on markmaking and tonal composition. ‘Surprises and accidents’, as in this case a wet fingermark on charcoal dust which suggested the first fishlike shapes, are noticed, incorporated and followed.”

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This kind of practice occurs naturally in some kinds of sketching, where layers of attempts to close with an idea build up on the page, before an apparently satisfactory version of the form is found. Renaissance masters refer to the craft of seeing new things in provisional drawing strokes (abbozzi) as an essential part of creative drawing. Gombrich (1966:213) credits Leonardo with this development in drawing practice, a moving away from the earlier tradition of using drawing for patterns, ‘similes’ and formulas, towards it being a radical tool of visual invention. A famous passage by Leonardo, quoted by Brothers (2008), describes this process: “I have seen clouds and stains (macchie) on walls which have given rise to beautiful inventions of different things; although these stains were completely lacking the perfection of any part, yet they did not lack perfection in their movements or other actions.”8 As Brothers (2008:13) notes the word “macchia” has a dual meaning – a ‘stain’ or other suggestive form such as a cloud found in nature, and ‘sketch’ as Vasari later elaborates, in the sense of a ‘primo pensiero’ or first thought. This process of painstakingly working back into something that would otherwise allow ideas to be structured in a more uni-directional way is seen in other domains of enquiry. Kincheloe (2005:324) highlights it as an important principle of research bricolage. Noting how social theory affects observations of the world he says: “such theory provides the framework that highlights or erases what might be observed.” This working with layers is essentially a creative practice. Developing ideas about qualitative research thinking, (and how it uses the concepts of bricolage) can come from exploring the analogy of pentimento even further. An epistemological perspective is that an idea that is a taken-for-granted part of working towards a satisfactory outcome in one domain has to be explicitly carved out in another. The analogy goes further, however, when the development of pentimento is seen in an art-historical context, and the distinction between drawing as copying to avoid ambiguity, and drawing as invention mirrors two stereotyped views of research.

8

Leonardo, ed. McMahon 1956, vol.2, fol. 62r, para. 261.

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Levi-Stauss’ proposal about different kinds of scientific knowledge combined with Kincheloe’s (2005: 344) observation that the basis of the bricolage is “learning from the juxtaposition of divergent ideas and ways of seeing,… (where) the whole is greater than the sum of the parts” can be seen in the philosophy and approach used by the painter Gauguin. The approach

Figure 8. Paul Gauguin, 1893, Femme Cueillant des Fruits et Oviri, woodcut on paper, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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he used to making a series of woodcuts for a publication, Noa Noa9, which would explain his approach to his Tahitian paintings, illustrates many of the positive features of the bricoleur’s approach. Woodcuts where a white line image is graved out of a black background are traditionally made with specialist tools. Gauguin, however, shifts his perception from the ‘unseen’ ‘ground’ of the black background, treating it instead literally and metaphorically as the darkness of the night and the spirit world, so important in Tahitian life. The sharp incisor is replaced with tools-at-hand – chisels, razor blades, needles and sandpaper are used to coax various textures from the surface of the wood, bringing out sinuous forms that merge with and emerge from the shadowy background. At the same time the patterns made by the tool marks introduce a level of abstraction that contrasts and plays with the more realistic imagery. A deliberate recognition of the interplay of process and product exemplifies the values espoused by bricolage as research approach, and in turn by this connection we see the levels of complexity built into the work of visual representation. This last example highlights the idea of how the ready-to-hand can be seen as a tool, for thinking as much as for a practical job. Tools may be designed and developed by expert craftsmen for focussed tasks, and there are also the tools one naturally uses from the ready-to-hand as prosthetics to solve problems such as winkling out, undoing, easing and joining. As tools for thinking these extend to models, drawings, diagrams, for discriminating, classifying, speculating, evaluating etc. The designer-craftsman David Pye wrote in detail about using hand-tools for what he called the workmanship of risk – handmade work (1964, 1968). He identifies several features of this work which extended my thinking about research bricolage as a skilled activity, rather than a well-regulated automatic procedure with consistent materials (the workmanship of certainty). I take as an analogy with individually focussed research his celebration of the ‘adventitious diversity’ in work done with natural materials, both their natural characteristics and their interaction with the environment. He observes that many tools are ‘partly self-jigging’, meaning 9

Eventually published in Paris nearly two decades after Gauguin’s death by his youngest son, Pola.

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that a prior engagement/encounter with the shape and surface of the work guides the tool in its next or continuing engagement – an adze on a flat plane, a nail being driven into a plank. Managing this process involves focussed attention and experience. Tools of thinking need the same care in use as they guide ideas, but in this analogy to ensure that the thinker follows the tool while it does sweet work, but does not get stuck in a groove that has outlived its usefulness. I had a sense of my approach being two-dimensional, a management of complicated nets and networks. One way to incorporate depth into such a model is to become archaeological, turning back through others’, but more particularly one’s own work, sifting for significant content not previously noticed. Reading widely, and yet noticing the recurrence of certain authors and certain ideas in different contexts helped to reveal the important centres of gravity of my project. The key element, not just in reading but in deliberate reflective activities in my surroundings, was Pasteur’s (1854) well-known dictum of creativity “Chance favours (only) the prepared mind”. Ann Wroe’s (2007) biography of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley divided his life into the elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water, because this reflected the way he was. Wroe’s insight opened up a connection to the way I had been working: “He (Shelley) laid false trails, perhaps unwittingly, rewriting old material in new notebooks or hiding his ‘scraps’ in the middle of blank pages, where later verses would grow in a thicket around them” (2007:83). I firstly realised that there was a how I was working, beyond the conventional processes, and that they were important to me, and then secondly that I too was using notebooks as a growing medium as Wroe alludes to them. I came to see that ‘the way I was working’ was a part of the matter of the work, and that after a certain amount of time familiarising myself with the ideas of the project I could trust my own choices as to what emphasis to give to different aspects and then how they connected to form the conceptual structure of the thesis.

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Notebook as process I had been keeping thoughts and ideas in a series of note/sketchbooks, stretching over the years. This was a development of a long-established practice, somewhat formalised when we were issued with a Filofax10 notebook on the ID course at Hornsey in 1965 and told to use it as a system of information management. The notebooks for this study took over because they were of larger format and light in weight. In an increasingly densely thicketed way they have inconsistently recorded and reflected ideas from books, exhibitions, events, seminars, and environments that seemed to have some, not necessarily identified relevance for this study. They were some kind of mirror, shifting between reference and structure.11 Having a notebook as a companion is a widespread activity, perhaps a place of some personal control in an environment of information bombardment. Notebooks tend to be hand-written and hand-drawn, a physically engaging process as well as a conceptual one. Because they are entirely normal as part of academic and creative practice it was initially hard to see the activity in terms as formal as a method. However as I started to notice the persistent recurrence of certain themes in the disparate ideas from myriad sources, I moved to recognising and creating connections between them. I realised that all these ‘interesting’ ideas that had constantly threatened to undo the project 10 Originally invented and designed by the US company Lefax in the early years of the twentieth century for engineers to carry around technical information in manageable form. 11 Simon Schama, reviewing The Infinity of Lists by Umberto Eco warns of the dangers of this sort of practice. "It seems to me that the two impulses that lead us to make, and dwell within, lists are at odds with each other. One is the ‘reality effect’ of massively agglomerated detail: the illusion of panoramic omniscience augmented by thick texture. For example when historian Fernand Braudel guides us minutely through the shift of tides, the perils of each riparian bay and estuary in his study of the Mediterranean, we travel over the surface of the 16th century sea in a way inaccessible from a more stringently analytical description. But the other impulse, much exercised in the Renaissance encyclopaedists in picture and in text, is mystical, a relation from broad sampling: so a trip through the welter of detail (say an elegiacally stocked botanical garden or a menagerie) might yield an epiphany of cosmic "Wow". The harmonic connection ties the discrepancies of the world together with a single ribbon of meaning. OK this may not happen when you peruse a bulb catalogue, or the Yellow Pages, or the Two Hundred vampire movies, but don’t say that I - or Plato - didn’t warn you that it does.” Financial Times 24/12/2009

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by their centrifugal force, were not just that, but formed a dense felt of relevant concepts and insights lending structure and substance to my propositions. A list of ideas primarily ‘out there’ had become an interacting network ‘in here’. This was formally recognised as a productive way to work when I went back and numbered all the pages in the most recent notebooks, so I had an address for any idea which could then be lifted out and collated with others on a similar theme.12 Then I did a ‘critical audit’ of the recent notebooks, page by page, so I could insert relevant ideas into what had become the reliable skeleton of the project. To extend the analogy, muscles appeared in a process of active creative connection and construction, and were then taughtened to try and curtail my natural tendency to the obesity of interesting but superfluous ideas.13 The time lapse between related ideas revealed how they changed and developed. It became thinking and knowing using several perspectives: when I originally wrote a note, when I collated it into the setting I might use it in, and then when actually threading it into the text by going back to the notebook page and reconsidering what I was thinking, and deciding what to finally take it for. I started to notice the metaphorically generative aspects of themes crossing between visual and other kinds of thinking. The notebooks had moved from being a tool to a process to a method, a method that provided a ground for being able to discriminate which connections were going to be used for the project, so that they could then be mapped as pathways, or even arteries.

12

The philosopher John Locke used this process of notebook work, and introduced the practice of assembling an index at the back while the notebook was in the making. As soon as I learned this I started the practice; there is something different about it from software referencing systems. (Johnson 2010 p. 84) 13 As in research, this is an important sub-discipline in any design work, the writing of the brief in full acknowledgment of its boundaries as constraints and criteria that must define any project. Echoing this, in studio discussions I used Charles Eames’s sharp statement: “The best you can do between now and Tuesday is a kind of best you can do” to bring some recognition of the realities of commercial design, and its sometimes otherwise inexplicable shortcomings. (Eames Demetrios (2001:173) An Eames Primer, New York, Universe Publishing)

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Visual and metaphorical thinking could be used to move the notes on. An example refers to a note made on 1/6/2002: “trying to carve out the spaces of my work between already existing fields, seen also in terms of their disciplinary approaches….” This was a great anxiety at the time, looking as I was at the ‘common ground’ as well as distinct spaces of the disciplinary territories of education, design, engineering. I had the strong mental image of corralled stockades, or counties on a map, with an insecure space where my project might reside outside these boundaries. Much later, on returning to this note, I drew this image and saw what my mind’s eye had left out (see discussion of this phenomenon in Visual and conceptual knowing). There was a muddle between whether the other ‘disciplinary territories’ were touching each other as in a jigsaw, or whether they were corrals which had open spaces and routes between and around them. This insight immediately opened up the possibilities about the shape and territory of my project, not at all necessarily defined by the lowering presence of the picket fences, which themselves were of course only made of poles which could be opened out to communicate with the spaces around them, or turned into a set of flexible hurdles as in a sheep drove. And because the making of the notes was part of thinking and being in the world, they were made as part of lived experience. PBD: BB Notebook, page 19 (21/8/2007): “If connection is one of the terms for drawing and thinking – it functions perceptually, conceptually and grammatically.” Later in biro: “is it a coincidence that I wrote this in her room on the day that Mum later died? As this recedes in time it has quotes around it as a past framed event. Connection isn’t a ‘term’ it’s the fact of things, so it is no coincidence; but time’s distancing enables me to take ownership of this as an idea, rather than being emotionally arrested by it, and reeling away with slight horror.”

Using my notebooks took on some of the approach I had adopted for close reading of what I thought of as more authoritative texts: PBD: Dwelling in a text, stretching about in it like in a bed under a duvet – the paragraphs and sentences stretch, give, resist, change shape, alert sensation on parts of the body, in the mind: I stretch and wriggle enjoying the feel of the bedclothes, resisting and giving, embracing and questioning. The ideas in the text are obvious and slight, and then dense and yet fleeting and difficult to catch – is there something there or not, what’s the point of that

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A Researcher’s Journey allusory turn of phrase, where does it go, take me? What’s this new breath of the new paragraph, what’s the turn or move that’s been made, that I have made? 1/3/2010.

Working this way is a process of reflection-in-action, as Schon (1983) describes working with drawing to think about a design development problem. It deliberately folds myself into the process of the work. The sense of interiorisation of one’s own ideas, their creative and critical ownership has to be grown into, and it changes the status of the notebook as an extension, an externalisation of the self, much as Cain (2010) discusses how the concepts of enactive cognition (Varela, Thompson and Rosch, 1991) enable a drawing to be seen as a metaphysical extension of the self. This connects directly to what I see in Foucault’s (1997:208)14 discussion in his essay Self Writing (Ecriture de Soi) on the ancient tradition of hupomnemata. In the context of an oral teaching tradition where written texts were relatively rare, and writing down thoughts a singular activity, classical and early Christian writers practised a certain kind of writing as a potentially powerful tool for “a training of the self by oneself” called hupomnemata. These “constituted a material record of things, read, heard, or thought, thus offering them up as a kind of accumulated treasure for subsequent rereading and meditation” (1997:209) and “conversing with oneself.” (1997:210) Carruthers’ (1990:30-31) descriptions of the highly trained memories of premedieval scholars (see Ars Memoriae and Illuminated Manuscripts) throws the distinctiveness of the practice of the hupomnemata into relief. “All these early writers are agreed that writing on the memory is the only writing truly valuable for one’s education, literary style, reasoning ability, moral judgment, and (later) salvation, for in memorizing one writes upon a surface one has always with one… Writing something down cannot change in any significant way our mental representation of it, for it is the mental representation that gives birth to the written form, not vice versa.”

It has perhaps something more in common with an observation made by Paul Valéry (1960:36) on hearing Degas talk about Ingres and drawing: 14

In Foucault, M. (1984) Le Souci de soi. Paris, Gallimard.

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“There is a tremendous difference between seeing a thing without a pencil in your hand and seeing it while drawing it…Even the most familiar object changes altogether if you set about drawing it…the act of drawing a given object endows the eye with a power of command which must be sustained by the will…the end and the means of this willed seeing is the drawing itself.”

Both writing and drawing are established as potential consciousness-raising activities, beyond mere recording. So, for the hupomnemata these thoughts “must not be simply placed in a sort of memory cabinet, but deeply lodged in the soul, ‘planted in it,’ says Seneca, and they must form part of ourselves” (Foucault 1997:210). This integrating process closely paralleled my reflective practice in using the notebooks. Foucault goes on to explore an apparent paradox: “how could one be brought together with oneself with the help of a timeless discourse accepted almost everywhere?” (1997:211, 212). One way is because “the writing of the hupomnemata is also (and must remain) a regular and deliberate practice of the disparate.” Hadot (1995:210) discussing this essay emphasises that “when one writes or notes something down, it is not an alien thought one is making one’s own. Rather, one is utilizing formulae considered as apt to actualize what is already present within the reason of the person writing, and bringing it to life.” Foucault says (1997:212) “The notebook is governed by two principles, which one might call ‘the local truth of the precept’ and ‘its circumstantial use value.’” This calls to mind Kolb’s (1984) discussion of learning as the result of the juxtaposition of the results of reflection and experimentation in a present moment. As Foucault says, integration of the ideas and material thought about “is not implemented in the art of composing an ensemble; it must be established in the writer himself, as a result of the hupomnemata, of their construction (and hence the very act of writing) and of their consultation (and hence in their reading and their rereading)” (1997:213) I have used the word integration; Foucault goes on to describe Seneca’s preferred and rich metaphor of digestion and transformation of what has

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been absorbed. This becomes a powerful description of the process of critical reflection as research process, knowledge making and learning. Wojecki (2004:40) used this process of reflective notebooks in his thesis exploring being a white teacher in aboriginal Australia. His notebooks and notebook-making “create a structure whereby the individual conducts exercises in transformative learning from these texts…The practice of writing and composing hupomnemata becomes a textual and intellectual practice.” Rabinow (2000), in an introduction to a compilation of Foucault’s work which includes his essay Self Writing, proposes that the meaning of his phrase: ‘se deprendre de soi-meme’15 might best be understood as a form of continual “self-bricolage” and is a way to understand his ideas about how to shape the ethical self. Rabinow notes that “the bricoleur’s work on discarded and anonymous materials, reshaped and ‘customized’ in a new way seems apposite.” While this analogy is discussed in the context of how Foucault views personal development, it is interesting to note how intelligent interaction with the materials to hand – physical, intellectual or emotional, is a natural human index of applied intelligence in all fields of endeavour, in this case applicable both to research and to design. The notebook process affirmed my previously tenuous sense of being grounded in my personal involvement in my project, and enabled me at last to take confident ownership of it. Moustakas (1990:13) hints at how difficult it may be to recognise that the circle is not complete without the presence of the researcher in this kind of work: “Whatever the effect, (of the dawning of awareness), the heuristic process requires a return to the self, a recognition of self-awareness, and a valuing of one’s own experience. The heuristic process challenges me to rely on my own resources, and to gather within myself the full scope of my observations, thoughts, feelings, senses, and intuitions; to accept as authentic and valid whatever will open new channels for clarifying a topic, question, problem or puzzlement.”

15

“to release oneself from oneself” (1997:xxxvii)

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Narrative Inquiry (NI) Narrative Inquiry’s emphasis on the storying of experience provided an entirely different perspective to the project. Bruner (1987:694) describes how deeply storytelling is embedded in our lives: “Eventually the culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes that guide the self-telling of life narratives achieve the power to structure perceptual experience, to organize memory, to segment and purpose-build the very ‘events’ of a life. In the end we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives.”

Clandinin and Rosiek (2007:39) point out that, as one way that we fill our world with meaning, stories are an old practice; what is new is the idea of narrative methodologies, as a way to think about experience in a research context. The authors adopt a Deweyan perspective on experience that is transactional. Experience they say: “is a changing stream that is characterized by continuous interaction of human thought with our personal, social and material environment….The regulative ideal for inquiry is to generate a new relation between a human being and her environment – her life, community, world – one that ‘makes possible a new way of dealing with them, and thus eventually creates a new kind of experienced objects, not more real than those which preceded but more significant, and less overwhelming and oppressive.’ (Dewey 1981 Vol. 4 p.175)”

The interactive nature of experience means that there is an emphasis on continuity, as experiences grow out of other experiences, even if at the same time it is always more than we can know or represent. In the interviews I did the students and I were exploring the contrasts between their current experiences of learning, and how it had been for them before. A Narrative Inquiry approach became relevant since “life story interviews involve the conveying of meaningful experiences from the past, the present and the future that are still living within the teller of the story in a familiar and recognizable story form.” (Atkinson 2007:238)

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I had spun a proposition to myself and others about this research study, that I saw the students as on an epistemic journey between different ways of knowing, with a ‘bridge’ forming an important part of the journey. Not only had they become uncomfortably aware that knowledge could be constructed in ways other than their engineering training had proposed, but in order to practise the complexities of designing they had to integrate these new ways of thinking into themselves and their understanding of themselves. This imperative produced a ‘trouble’, the fundamental requirement for any kind of story (Burke 1945 in Bruner 1987, Bruner 1990, Frank 1995). The trouble seemed to me to be the kind of struggle that is central to learning to understand and engage with the world in a different way, encountered by anyone facing epistemic development, as for example famously exemplified in Bunyan’s Pilgim’s Progress16. I realised that it was essential not to project the journey metaphor onto the accounts the students gave of their experiences. Using my own methodology of looking around me for concrete examples of the metaphorical term, and then allowing myself to perceive what did and did not work about the metaphor, I was able to move on with the idea of the bridge, if not entirely abandon the “journey” idea. (see Interlude: Bridge). Such reflection however strongly reinforced the realisation of my own role, and journey in the project, described above. I saw that NI could make more substance of the many parallels between what I took as the students’ journeys and my own research experience. As NI methodologies cast light on how stories highlight what is seen, known and shared, they are useful for emphasising the importance of what Dewey (1981 Vol. 1 p. 40) calls “the things of ordinary experience.” I did not want the quotidian landscape of college and studio and domestic life to get lost in what I had originally conceived of as a grander narrative. In side-stepping the epic for the ordinary and more real lived experiences I enquired about in the interviews, NI values supported my presentation of such particular experiences in the study, rather than retreating into generalisations that could only be shallow. 16

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, first published London 1678. (2008) Penguin Classics, London, Penguin Books.

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Connelly and Clandinin’s (2006:479,480) identification of three ‘commonplaces’: temporality, spatiality and place, as the necessary conceptual framework for NI describe what I have previously referred to as the drama and staging of this study. Dewey’s emphasis on continuity, at the same time as things being in transition, can be seen in ‘temporality’ as the students in the study were reflecting on their past and present experiences, as was I. The notion of spatiality includes both the social conditions that form each individual’s context, and the relationship between the participants and the inquirer, part of Dewey’s notion of interaction. “Inquirers are always in an inquiry relationship with participants’ lives. We cannot subtract ourselves from relationship.” This became very clear during the process of doing the interviews, and then working with the transcripts, as described below. The third commonplace, place itself, was equally important, as the RCA studio environment played a very significant role in the students’ experience of the IDE course. Underpinning this is the important research principle that “all events occur in some place.” (Clandinin and Rosiek 2007:70) The bridge metaphor that plays an important part in this study encompasses the temporal, social and spatial sites of all these experiences. The difference between storytelling and NI as methodology is highlighted by Taleb’s (2007) warning in his book The Black Swan about how we try to construct sense from the information we are surrounded by. He points out the ‘narrative fallacy’ that tends to make causal links out of correlated events. NI’s concerns are exactly about why we might be trying to make those causal links. Seeing my own research journey as a story brought to bear other insights, including its particularity, which led me to adopt a more modest agenda for what I might find out in the study. The heroic but empty yes/no answers could give way to something more like critical but truthful observation. Narrative’s roles in story-telling also alerted me to the possibilities inherent in different kinds of writing for telling more truthful tales. I have used several different voices in my text to explore different aspects of the enquiry. Freewriting has been an important process for surfacing and foregrounding my first-hand experience; its perceptions have then provided a foil for more objective accounting, and because of its imaginative character, using it also

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provided many connections between verbal and visual thinking, which are part of the ground of the project.

Doing the interviews I interviewed 34 students over a period of 7 years from 1997 to 2004, when I left the department and was not able to conduct any more. In 2011 I interviewed a practising designer who had undertaken the course between 1977 and 1980. Some of these interviews took place before the project was registered, then some before drawing had become the central site of the enquiry, and all but the last of them before I had engaged with what I have described as the second circle of my own research process (above). The student interviews took place against a background of the speed of time passing as they went through the eighteen months of the course, as well as the limitations of my own time available for the project. This meant that in many cases I acted on a hunch when trying to capture records of student experiences, for example who to interview and about what, and who to ask if they would be prepared to write a diary. Earlier interviews record comments about drawing as part of a broader agenda of experience of the IDE course. Later interviews, once drawing had become more central to the study, are more focused on it in various ways. Although I had had some experience of interviewing (for selection of students and teaching staff) before I started this project (and had even taught it to lecturers at the University of London IofE/CSDHE17 in the 1980’s) I was not familiar with the literature on developments of ideas about social science research interviews in the intervening 10 years before I started interviewing students in my department as part of this project. When I saw in the early transcripts how much of the page was taken up with my talking, I initially assumed this was bad interviewing. My objectivist fantasy initially prevented me from realising that something more like a

17

University of London Institute of Education/Centre for Staff Development in Higher Education

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conversation could still be subject to stringent interpretation.18 I was unclear how these texts could reveal reliable and valid information, truthful and useful insights. Richardson (1996:89) distinguishes interviews from conversations: “A common source (of data types) is the research interview (often combined with some form of participant observation). This commitment leads grounded theorists who use interviews to view them as a ‘directed conversation’ and not as a closely controlled, monitored and measured pseudo-experiment. (see for example, Lofland and Lofland 1983; Mishler 1986)” There is still however a fine line between sloppy technique, and the proposition that how ‘respondents’ talk (and are facilitated to do so) is inextricably bound up in the content of what is being talked about. Kvale (1996:159) takes the point further: “The interview is a conversation in which the data arise in an interpersonal relationship, co-authored and co-produced by interviewer and interviewee.” The form of the conversations enabled the students to ruminate, reflect and talk about things in a discursive way which went beyond the immediate questions, even if this set up difficulties for me as the researcher trying to make sense of the material afterwards. Boulton and Hammersley’s (1996:285) discussion of Ethnosemantics was useful: “Ethnosemantics is directed towards producing a detailed account of the array of concepts used by a particular group of people to make sense of their environment. Much qualitative research takes this as part of its focus: qualitative researchers often place great emphasis on the importance of understanding the perspectives of the people they are studying. However, normally they seek to do this simply by listening to the categories that people use in informal talk or interviews, rather than by using the rather more structured elicitation devices favoured by ethnosemanticists. Equally important, they generally do not restrict themselves to the description of people’s perspectives, being also concerned with the causes and consequences of these.” 18

This would not however be Conversational Analysis as I was still primarily interested in what the students were saying, however it happened, rather than the dynamics of the conversational turns. See Gubrium and Holstein 2000.

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While I prefer to describe these interchanges (usually an hour or so long) as conversations, and can relate them to theoretical frameworks (Robson 2002, Richardson 1996) I can also see flaws. In some places students did not understand what I was saying and I did not notice. In others I interrupted them, so they did not develop their own thinking. In yet others students are perhaps saying what they think I want to hear. “But in an interpersonal situation there will always be factors, however neutral the interviewer wants to be” (Kvale 1996:192). Connolly and Clandinin (2006:482) identify several key considerations they see as crucial to Narrative Inquiry, and to the habit of thinking narratively. They identify two different, often complementary ways people talk about their experiences: telling and living, where “the difference between telling and living is often a difference between life as lived in the past (telling) and life as it unfolds (living).” Our discussions usually took this form. They notice the difficulty for narrative researchers of remaining disengaged in studies that involve ‘living’ accounts, finding themselves “intimately intertwined with the living under study, and, as a result, with the field texts that form the basis of the written research text.” They also notice how this can enhance relationships between researcher and participant. I was fully aware that my multiple roles of personal tutor, design tutor, and examiner would undermine any pretence of neutrality, but I was confident that we could nonetheless discuss things in such a way that the students would be able to talk openly about their experiences as learners, not least because I openly talked about continuously learning myself. (The interviews took place after I had run workshops on experiential learning). In fact, it became apparent to me and was affirmed by the students after we had agreed to stop the interview and turned the recorder off, or even some days later, that not only the way we talked, but that we had talked at all was having a “waking up” effect on how we both thought about styles of thinking and learning. Benjamin, in The Storyteller (1999:84), proposes that the best stories happen where the different worlds of storytellers overlap, or interpenetrate, and this was perhaps the case here, for us as storyteller and listener alike.

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The interchange had become an embedded element in the epistemic development of both student and interviewer. A reflective process of thinking about thinking was triggered by our discussion, in amongst all the other myriad demands of department, studio and project life. Then we did what storytelling does, we passed the story on – into our own learning awareness, and I at least passed what I had experienced into my own teaching practice. As Chase (2005:656) says in the context of the analytic lenses of Narrative Inquiry “Narrative is retrospective meaning making – the shaping or ordering of past experience.” While I still did not fully take on board that my involvement also meant being implicated in the research process itself, I did see myself as a colearner with the students. I saw our interchanges in the light of Rogers’ views on interpersonal learning (Rogers 1970 in Baker, Jensen and Kolb 2002:44). His work on trying to understand group dynamics led him to believe that real learning could only be achieved if every member of the group was an equal co-researcher, rather than as it was in the older model of expert and learner. Baker, Jensen and Kolb describe the idea of conversations working inside out and outside in, quoting Gadamer (1989: 62): “When one enters into dialogue with another person and then is carried along further by the dialogue, it is no longer the will of the individual person, holding itself back or exposing itself, that is determinative. Rather, the law of statement and counterstatement in the end plays them into each other. Hence, when a dialogue has succeeded, one is subsequently fulfilled by it, as we say” (2002:104).

There were further ways the process of the interviews was not neutral. The physical setting was carefully chosen for privacy and quiet - but they were conducted in my own office, or that of the Professor, after normal working hours in the evening. Despite the relaxed social atmosphere, and the willingness of the students to participate, these spaces had meanings for us, and they were different meanings. The tapes made it clear that one or both of us often got very animated, even excited about what was being talked about,

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and sometimes the tape recorder was turned off in the middle of an account when something particularly sensitive came up. I did not interview all the students in any particular cohort. My choice of students to interview was triggered by reading or thinking about some aspect of my enquiry I thought he or she would have something to speak about from his or her experience, or by hearing a potent remark by a student in a project discussion. I usually tried to set up the interview as quickly as possible, but pressure of work - theirs and mine - sometimes meant that opportunities were lost. However, as I was talking with different people about different things I was not particularly looking for comparability of responses as discussed by Patton (1980). I also realised that although I was able to do more than one interview with a few people (after a gap of about a year) this was not planned to be a ‘before and after’ study. Most of the interview tapes were transcribed by the departmental administrator who was discreet. Because this was done on a freelance basis, there were gaps of at least a month between the interviews and receiving the transcripts, and then usually a further gap until I read them. Initially I brought a sense of ‘mining’ to the transcripts - that the ideas were to be found in the scripts if only I could recognise them. I had no sense of the myriad ways they could be analysed, yielding different results, as well as results which spoke about very different aspects of the interchange (Riessman 2008, Boulton and Hammersley 1996). In exploring the first transcript I went through three iterations before coming to rest with what seemed the right connectedness between learning and drawing (see Mapping interview accounts about learning and drawing). At the same time I had been reading widely in the subjects of learning, creativity and drawing. This meant that sometimes what I read informed the direction of an interview, or informed what I read in other documentary sources such as the diaries or the application form statements. Other times what I read revealed a different perspective on what I had just cast in stone through an interview, or used for marking up a text.

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Using the interviews/conversations Whether one can describe another’s experience is surely a philosophical question as well as a research problem. According to Charmaz (2000:527) “Writers use linear logic….yet experience is not necessarily linear.” Experience is hard to pin down, as poets and artists know. Bruner (1987) proposes that “we seem to have no other way of describing ‘lived time’ save in the form of a narrative.” When someone tells you his or her life “It is always a cognitive achievement rather than a through-the-clear-crystal recital of something universally given. In the end it is a narrative achievement. There is no such thing psychologically as life itself.” Marton and Booth’s (1997) concepts of Phenomenography complement NI’s frameworks for how the interview accounts are used in this study. As I have described above, under Narrative Inquiry, language is no longer seen as a transparent medium that can be used to describe experience, one’s own or more particularly that of someone else, and kinds of stories may be needed both to structure and to interpret experience. Marton proposed ‘phenomenography’ when he was considering how to bring differing descriptions of experience into an educational research framework. “Phenomenography is a qualitative research methodology, within the interpretivist paradigm, that investigates the qualitatively different ways in which people experience something or think about something.” (Marton 1981). The approach is directed at exploring and articulating both the student’s experience of learning, and the teacher’s experience of teaching (Marton, Hounsell, and Entwistle 1997). This seems important although there has been criticism of the term and its concepts (Richardson 1999). It seems strange now to realise that the adult learner’s voice has not been an integral part of educational research until recently. This may be more understandable if research is about children (or even dumb beasts). With adults such a resource is now seen to be an integral part of enquiry. Sections of different students’ transcripts appear throughout most of the text of the book, rather than being looked at individually as whole accounts.

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(Name initials have been anonymised). My usage thus breaks up the sequential integrity of the students’ thoughts but also of mine. In deciding how to use the transcripts I was highly attuned to the danger that this could become opportunistic plundering, or bending descriptions by selective editing. I had to ensure that stories did not lose their viability, for example where there had been a long account.19 This was the case, for example, with several which depicted what Bauman (2008) describes as the stories of “exiles”, much of whose behaviour consists of rule-breaking, and then efforts to fit in by adopting the rules of the new home. This related to the idea of the ‘journey’ of epistemic development, mainly evoking issues of cue-consciousness and other aspects of shallow learning. Instead, however, I have adopted what Marton and Booth (1997:120) describe as a second-order perspective in a phenomenographic approach. “Whereas the people whose experiences we are studying are oriented towards the world they are experiencing, we as researchers are oriented towards the various ways in which they experience some aspect of the world. Here then is an obvious asymmetry….We have to look at the statements, arts and artefacts to find out what ways of experiencing particular aspects of the world they reflect…such a search has to be carried out in the light of other things we know about people’s ways of experiencing the world.”

Bruner in McAdams, Josselson and Lieblich (2001:xii) emphasises the same idea from the point of view of Narrative Inquiry: “Narrative modes of knowing privilege the particulars of lived experience rather than constructs about variables and classes. Meaning is not inherent in an act or experience, but is constructed through social discourse. Meaning is generated by the linkages the participant makes between aspects of the life he or she is living and his or her understandings of these aspects. The role of the researcher is then to connect this understanding with some form of conceptual interpretation, which is meaning constructed at another level of analysis.”

19

In the interview quotations in the text of this study I have used several stops to indicate pauses in what one or other of us was saying: ….. Where there is a text break I have used interrupted stops: … …

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On the basis of my reflection on the students’ accounts of experience, not only from these transcripts, but from 10 years of tutorials, work reviews, applications and examinations, I have chosen and produced the contextual work of the study as a ground to try and further explicate their ways of experiencing and learning. Of course these choices of what to bring to bear in the research design were also made reflecting my understandings from my own personal and professional standpoints. I reflect on the accounts of their experience as I explore the work of different thinkers and different disciplines. I produce my own text in order to provide another reflective space to throw a different light on their accounts, as I choose where to place and juxtapose them in my writing. This created a very slow, large-scale iterative process. The relationship between my writing and the students’ accounts evokes an initially tempting metaphor, that of a woven cloth, with the warp and the weft as my writing and the students’ voices. Because of the way the process worked however a different textile structure is more apt, that of the mat made of multistranded braiding, where different colours can either be deliberately incorporated to create pattern, or pattern can be seen in the inevitable textural and textual variation in such a craft-made object. Therefore I am not judging the ‘rightness’ of the accounts as Bruner warns (1987:694), nor have I been tempted by the “interpretive omnipotence of the ethnographer” (Richardson 2000:928), but I have tried to find a way to present their accounts and my texts so that they are the right partners in producing a truthful figure/ground account of the difficulties of higher level learning, in this particular setting.

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Figure 9. Scott, K., 2014, Starting the plaited braid for Ugandan mat-making, Kampala, PhD Royal College of Art.

MAPPING INTERVIEW ACCOUNTS ABOUT LEARNING AND DRAWING

Environment I was trying to find ways to describe students’ work and their approaches. The setting was influential in how I was able to proceed. On a daily basis I was in the studio with students and tutors in the hurly-burly of the work of the course. This was a space full of interactions – between students, students and tutors, individually and in groups all working on different things, designing, making models, drawing and not drawing, a thick soup of excitement and buzz, insecurity and companionship and rivalry, time management and panic, enthusiasm and boredom, incomprehension, inspiration and dogged tasks. In this space, one of whose dimensions was teaching and learning, both socratic and didactic, I was also, without disturbing the main business, trying to pick up clues about the students’ experiences of freehand drawing. I was considering how I could work with these to further the proposition that drawing and ways of thinking were intertwined, and could affect each other’s development. Initially I was also thinking about whether I could ‘mine’ some features that might lend themselves to scales, or other kinds of measurement, though this was later dropped. I was constructing hypotheses, thinking of ways to systematise comments into data, coming up with overarching concepts where everyone and everything could be mapped in some way. I was reflecting, modifying, discarding, a combination of a discovery and a design process. I started looking for this ‘evidence’ in comments students made about drawing.

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Students’ comments about drawing It was not my aim to explore relationships between drawing ability and design skill, although the overlap came up in discussion with students. Much has been written about this subject and some of the ideas involved contributed to the background of this study, as described in Drawing and the Drawer’s story. I was more interested in students’ experiences of and in freehand and sketch drawing. Their thoughts were about such subjects as: whether some people could see “form” and some could not, regardless of drawing’s possible role in sensitising one’s perception; whether drawing played a significant role in generating ideas or not; whether some people had imagination and others not, or whether it was something one could learn; wondering if being dyslexic affected the relationship between drawing and designing; whether drawing was necessary at all if one had enough intellectual insight into a design problem; whether stylised presentation drawings were all that was needed, and, towards the end of the interview period, whether all sketch development work could be done on computer.

Translating comments to the wrong type of data These experiences had to be observable or described, thus raising the issues that phenomenographic approaches try to meet. Initially I tried to clump, classify, order, produce patterns and evidence out of the things students said in interviews, studio discussions, and in comments in tutorials. I considered one cohort near the end of their two years in some depth, and saw possible clusters of behaviour around drawing. For example: - Moving from seeing drawing as a rule-based activity (e.g. getting better at ‘rendering’) to one of an open process that is productive to the imagination, and sustains involvement in ‘play’. - Tolerance of ambiguity in the sense of being more or less open to alternative interpretations of the marks on the page; (e.g. turning drawings upside down, or working on each others’ drawings). - Using drawing to “talk to oneself”, or having a conversation with the drawing.

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- Moving from feeling one must stay in control, to letting go and playing being seen as valid activities. - Experiencing the difference between childish and childlike. - Moving from the sense one cannot draw, to dissolving that judgement. - Trusting that getting involved with drawing is a worthwhile process. - Being able to discuss work with others through drawing, or not; - Developing the role of speculation through drawing, rather than sticking with the previous certainties of engineering drawing. - Feeling comfortable about having/using sketchbooks as opposed to notebooks, or using drawing or notes primarily in such a notebook, as a natural extension of oneself. - Moving from ideas that drawings are only of objects, to the sense that drawings can be of ideas, with semi-symbolic use of forms. - Thinking that drawing has no connection to visual sensitivity, to seeing that it can have. LS: “I only thought the drawing course was useful because it exposed me to different media.”

- Relationships between quantitative thinking and the use of objects, and qualitative thinking and users of objects, and the relationship with geometrical types of drawings. - Being amenable to using different media. (Some people were initially wedded to one medium, often biro, others were more adventurous). RY: “I see my biro as a reassuring drawing tool, for drawing things and for moods and feelings”. NO: “I see printmaking as a different vector from logical/lateral ways of thinking, but I had a lot of difficulty with the drawing programme as I couldn’t see the goal of it.”

- Preferring not to draw in an exploratory way, seeing working in 3D as better, but using drawing for finished things, or sometimes not even that. - The process of drawing things flat, two-dimensionally or diagrammatically having an influence on being able to see things three-dimensionally and perhaps spatially.

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- Relationships between image reading and image making. - Getting something finished in a finite amount of time, rather than feeling that passing time is of no account. I saw that these could be turned into dynamically opposing pairs of comments, a student’s observation calling up its opposite, in what could have become some kind of Repertory Grid (Kelly 1955) of constructs about the experience of drawing. As a research method this would have been difficult to realise in the time available, and, more importantly, I could not see the outcome of this going beyond possibly marking differences over time. It was another mapping approach but my research focus was not on mapping ‘improvements’.

Transforming the field of comments My aim was to try and get at the productive aspects of the overlaps and relationships between drawing, designing and thinking, all within an overarching framework of learning. Rather than this being about teaching drawing, I wanted to get beneath the surface of what it might be like in the context of this course to approach and take on drawing. It was clear that while some of the ‘dimensions’ above seemed to refer to a rather superficial approach to drawing, most of them were connected to a web of far more complex ideas about relating to the world in personal, social and cultural ways, including attitudes towards learning. I moved away from scale-based ‘evaluations’ as multi-faceted ‘aspects’ emerged as a more accurate, and more modest appraisal of the evidence available. I continued to see the transcripts as data in the sense that our conversations were landscapes which I would approach as a hunter looking for tracks, or for the footprints of forms, hidden until a shift of vision revealed their patterns. Some features would be more obvious than others, such as fairly straightforward comments about drawing, whereas other accounts referring to aspects of epistemic development would be harder to notice and interpret. I then decided to explore these connectivities by going into one interview in depth. This turned into a three-stage excavation, the revisits to the script and

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the tape separated and interrupted by some months with other work, and examining other transcripts. Interacting with the interviews in this way I finally realised that the process was not one of complete detachment. The intervals provided a different perspective for each consideration, allowing different meanings to come out of the conversation. I was a source both within the conversation, and as the interpreter (Riessman 1993, 2008). I started by looking for features of learning in descriptions of drawing. The ‘deep’ excavation of the one interview had produced lists of learning aspects that were generalisable beyond drawing. For example: -

Quality of time involved. Learning from experience or not learning, embedding experience. Usefulness, motivation, enjoying it for its own sake. Concentration, practice, evaluation, recognising proficiency.

As different kinds of learning – skills, knowledge and attitudes, and the conditions for learning – social, cultural, environmental emerged, I saw these also applied to drawing. Then, as the uncovering progressed my view shifted, and I started to see that terms which were part of the physical and perceptual processes of drawing also referred to learning, for example: frames of reference, perspective and point of view, sharp focus and ambiguity, boundaries and relationships. As learning is a feature of thinking, these observations parallel descriptions of how drawing can illustrate concepts and processes that go far beyond the physicality of what is depicted, or how it is achieved. Shortly after I had finished this analysis work I heard a discussion by Patrick Lynch about a drawing by Michelangelo.1 The sketch drawing showed the articulated staircase for the Medici Library at San Lorenzo, Florence, and several other things. Lynch dwelt on the curving form of the staircase juxtaposed with an arm, bending to articulate the space around it. I saw in the drawing exactly what he meant. His observations were later developed in the publication from the conference (2005:8,11). “(Michelangelo’s) drawings of spaces also show people doing certain things there, and this is 1

Conference: Drawing – the Process. September 2003. Kingston University.

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what enables us to read in his working methods the innate relationship between thinking and doing, and drawing and seeing”, and in the note to this passage: “the example of Michelangelo suggests not only that what and how you draw something affects what you draw, but also what you think and perhaps, more importantly, how you think.” This last comment, that the way you draw can affect the way you think, supported my proposal from the final interview analysis that the link between drawing languages, and multisensory learning-as-thinking could be active in both directions. It moved my proposal one step on from the already established idea that there is a metaphorical bridge between a drawing and how someone looks at it, for example as discussed by Rawson (1969:26): “The marks made by the point in any drawing he looks at become part of the spectator’s world of phenomena. His analogizing faculty sets to work on the marks, their patterns and arrangement. They evoke analogous forms from his unconscious fund…….The main bulk of the marks ……..will ‘qualify’ them by investing them with analogous forms from quite other fields of experience.”

Figure 10. Michelangelo, 1524-1559, Staircase in the San Lorenzo Library, Florence, 2013.

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I realised I had to move out of the abstract, teacher-centred descriptions of learning and drawing, useful though they might be for teaching drawing. One way to do this was to allow drawing itself, and drawings to have their voice. PBD: “I am not entirely autonomous, and I only know this because, when I am released by my surface-worker and I’m alone, I get a new life: handled and looked at and then put away, or perhaps thrown away, commented on by all sorts of people down the years. So it’s not so much the drawing’s story, as a drawing’s story, just like any other individual person or animal or thing really! Today, I’m feeling quite analytical about myself, rather than the itchy-feely impressions I’ve had about feeling drawn by someone or something on something - usually I feel it’s good quality, slightly off-white paper, but I’ll travel anywhere! I’ll have to start somewhere, so I think I’m going to imagine becoming a drawing of a snake which could perhaps be a rope. So this is my first joke because I know this is a philosophical story, but I’m certainly not going to be a mere illustration to serve beside a whole lot of words. (How could I know before it starts what the drawing’s meant to be of…well, because I’ve started off in the mind of the drawer; even if she’s not sure what the drawing’s going to look like, she’s got some conversation going about doing the drawing around the thoughts she’s having, so in a way I’m a projection, like a lot other things people interact with outside themselves). My drawer’s hand is resting on the paper - or at least the side of the hand - I can feel it is just resting, there’s some contact made - the tool is poised a few millimetres above my surface, and I don’t know what it is going to do, so I feel a kiss coming on, which may be delicate, or practically like a stab. Not that I am passive just because I am lying flat, as it were, waiting. I know I affect that approaching touch, if the drawer is half-conscious that is. So I exist before the first physical contact, somewhere; it doesn’t matter much where at the moment. Here it comes. It’s a brush pen with a fine little tippy point on it; the drawer doesn’t really know how to use it, damn! 2009

This free-written piece, by an emerging drawing, seemed to confirm that there was voice in the elements of drawing, which could seamlessly connect drawing with thinking and feeling, with personal narrative, and thus with learning and change. Several years earlier I had had a personal experience of this opportunity at a drawing workshop, but I had been arrested by my emotional responses. I had

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not noticed that the process of doing the drawings also provided the ground for questioning these responses, which, through reflection, could have resulted in new ways of seeing and transforming an old story. PBD: We went into a church, and were asked to draw what we felt about the church, to choose some feature and explore it in abstract drawing using texture – as though this was quite a normal thing to do – joining feelings, abstract forms and textural marks to explore a personal story evoked by what we saw, that drawing was a reasonable way to explore and express such stories. I should have kept it light, sometimes you get a bit of a warning, but I didn’t. I looked at the regimental Colours hanging out on poles above my head. They were no longer coloured really, they had taken on the greyness and gloom of their surroundings – old soldiers fading to dust in a grubby forgotten way. Many of them were so old that the complex embroidery, the golden threads and bright silks had rotted away, leaving tatters hanging on the net foundation. I knew this intricate and magic work from hours spent as a child closely examining such a Colour we had at home, used as a firescreen. It had been given as a great honour to my father on his retirement. The abandoned tatters in the church, ‘laid up’ is the regimental term, were deeply emblematic for me too. I wept as I drew for the poignancy of how the Army had moulded our family life, with its outer shows and inner losses. My drawing did not convey this to the others, no one else noticed the Colours or knew what they were. The story behind the drawings wasn’t immediately clear, which was disappointing, but also not the whole point. 2005

Seeing that making significant connections was my focus in learning and epistemic development, I needed to highlight particular features present in visual work, in drawing and drawings. This meant those links between our thinking and our visual perception that can also be part of learning, which are often carried by the processes of allegory or metaphor. I returned to the list of features in drawing and thinking, and translated these into a matrix that explored relationships between the structures of images, the layers of intention of the imagery, and graphic media whose terms also stood for ways of thinking. These would be animated in any particular drawing as the drawer’s story. From all the possible features five presented themselves as particularly obviously expressing metaphorical bridges between drawing, thinking and learning, and which resonated with the interview conversations. These were Line, Shadow, Perspective, Frame, Space. They have a motley relationship and despite their tendency to

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collapse into each other when thought about in drawing practice, each does have a particular richness of content, in the sense that they included some of those opposing features present in challenge and support of learning. Line indicates compartmentalisation, exclusion and also commitment; Shadows bring up doubt, but also nourish; Perspective asserts positions, and acknowledges relativism; Frame limits, is self-referential, focuses, and can be dissolved; Space represents indecision but infinite possibilities. These modes require interpretive activity or thinking work. Reading images in a more metaphorical way beyond superficial representation can give us a raft of narrative on which to sail into story areas where light, space, framing, boundary and point of view form the work. They are intended to stand as examples of the generative power of reverie and curiosity as part of our experience of the world around us.

LEARNING AND EPISTEMIC DEVELOPMENT IN DESIGNING

“Adult development means systematic, qualitative changes in human attributes (e.g. intelligence, insight, social cognition) as a result of interactions between internal and external environments…Adult learning means a change in behaviour, a gain in knowledge or skills, or an alteration or restructuring of prior knowledge or interpretations. Such learning is a developmental activity and process.” (Hoare 2006:346)

This chapter develops the outline of design training described in The Local Setting. It considers in more detail the design learning landscape for mature engineering graduates in an art and design school, and explores it as a setting for epistemic development in adults. Using the frameworks of experiential learning it considers some features particular to this kind of education and training: project-based learning, the relationship between tutors and students, the studio as a situation of learning, and the place of judgement forming and judgement making – both as part of designing and as part of learning and being taught about design on a course. Many different kinds of learning and knowing are present in the culture and activities of designing, such as working logically with abstract concepts, practically with one’s hands, using imagination, intuition and skills of judgement, alone and with others, problem-noticing and problem-solving. That design is such a multi-modal activity, and set in the context of how people live their lives, means that it is a very powerful site for learning not just the vocational skills of the profession, but other kinds of skills associated with personal and epistemic development. Design education can offer opportunities for developing more sophisticated ways of thinking, personal growth, and wisdom, all of which I consider are important for the professional designer. These may be skills applicable to many other areas of professional practice and this idea has contributed to a debate about whether ‘designerly thinking’ could be fundamental to a much

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wider agenda of learning (Cross 2006, [email protected]). As Niederhelman (2001:84) notes: “Design education, as a subject seems to offer something unique – a tool for creating connections between ideas, information, people and objects.”

Learning designing What designing consists of has been through intense debate in the design research community not least since J Chris Jones wrote the influential Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures in 1970, showing that modern design problems needed a system of methods to manage their complexity. The book went into several editions, the clarity and objectivity of its descriptions of design activities and thinking recommending it as a reliable handbook that could be followed for good results. Jones’s vision was, however, larger, a methodological approach designed not to reduce designing to some abstract process, but to ensure that the most far-reaching criteria and constraints could be entailed so that design could meet the subtlest human and societal needs. Unintentionally, however, creative thinking and its ‘antic’ qualities became subsumed into the prescriptive processes of the bigger picture. Jones, in his later work, went on to distance himself from what had come to seem inappropriately mechanistic, reemphasising the importance of intuitive processes as part of design thinking. While the design theory community now explores how this really works, it remains the discovery learning of every student grappling with a design project to work out how to evaluate not just her ideas, but how these ideas have been formed and what value they have. What is clear is that if one brings the learner’s experience to the fore, then learning even when apparently packaged as part of a formal educational or training environment, can be seen to involve the whole person. Design’s features of open-ended problems or scenarios requiring some design resolution can then pave the way for the use of a full spectrum of ways of knowing, cognitive, sensory, affective, conative. Beyond all the different aspects of designing that need to be learned as skills, as

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information, as attitudes I would like to highlight the idea that learning itself is a central dynamic in the design process. The reality of this is sometimes obscured by the rational, problem-solving paradigm that held sway in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Linking the ill-structured problems typically found in the design process to artificial intelligence did not reflect all that designing involves. Now the breadth of designing is more widely recognised. Dorst (2006:11) in his exploration of alternative frameworks for considering design processes is clear that an approach of AIdriven modelling that “represented the ‘relevant aspects’ of the world, and set up formal procedures to manipulate these representations in order to solve a problem” has failed. Using the perspective of situated cognition he proposed that “ ‘the design problem’ as such doesn’t really exist as an objective entity in the world. It is an amalgamation of different problems centred on the basic challenge described in a design brief. This amalgamation of problems discovered by the designer in the design process is partially created by the designer.” He develops the idea that “ a ‘design problem’ is taken as a paradox, made up out of the clash of conflicting discourses. The nature of creative design is the forging of connections between these discourses, on a general level or in the concrete design.” (2006:15) The ‘design problem’ becomes hard to pin down because it evolves in the design process. Such a dynamic, designer-centred process may question the line drawn between well and ill-structured problems. Furthermore, if the designer is central to the process, “subjectivity creeps into the problem-solving process by the actions needed to construct a solvable problem” (2006:7) so “if the problem-solving effort involves learning, or the redefinition of the problem, the problem cannot be considered well-structured.” (2006:6) Learning becomes the key dialogic process in the development of a design proposal, an important part of the processes involved. Dorst proposes that an ill-structured problem “depends on the solution methods available to solve it”, so “is linked to the capabilities of the problem-solver. Interpretation is a central activity as “we see that design is a process of multiple steps, not a one-off decision-making situation……the use of memory and subjective interpretation becomes a major influence on the problem-solving behaviour of designers.” (2006:7).

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Some years earlier Snodgrass and Coyne in their (1990, 1997:65) paper Is Designing hermeneutical? argue the importance of activities of interpretation: “the design activity proceeds by way of a hermeneutical cycle, involving the projection of pre-understandings and a dialogical structure of question and answer.” They contrast this with the logical processes of inductive and deductive reasoning method as supposedly used in scientific method, and the idea that formulaic, logic-based problemsolving processes are appropriate to designing. These do not accurately reflect what happens in designing. By contrast, the hermeneutical processes of designing are seen as part of the larger picture of how we live our lives: “The hermeneutical circle applies to one’s whole life, which is an ongoing process of interpreting experiences. Our interpretation of experiences modifies our perception of the past and our anticipations of the future; and our understanding of the past and the future forms the context in which we interpret experience. Understanding and experience are in constant interaction. Our self-understanding affects our understanding of all other things. All understanding is self-understanding….The hermeneutical structure operates in all exposition and in all learning.” (1997:80)

They emphasise the dialogical nature of the process of design, between the designer and the design situation, the unfolding of the design brief. Designers are constantly questioned (by the design situation). “They can facilitate that process by laying themselves open to the questions, leaving themselves vulnerable, at risk, by taking the questions as probings of their prejudgments; or they can proceed in a one-sided manner, asking questions of the situation, but protecting their pre-established biases by not allowing themselves to be questioned in return.” In the former case the design process can be “self-revelatory, a process of self-discovery or edification.” (1997:83) In these terms I see that not only designing, but also drawing is a process of learning, driven by a dialogue between the drawer and the drawing. The difference between learning engineering and learning designing as experienced by the IDE students has been mentioned several times. As is the case with all learners, perhaps especially adults, IDE students brought with them to this new learning environment the frameworks of their prior learning

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experiences, which in this case included the epistemic assumptions involved in undergraduate engineering education (and in some cases professional work experience). While looking for ways to integrate their engineering knowledge and experience into their new learning, they also had two other issues to deal with. The first was that the conventions of teaching and learning were entirely different, previously being relatively passive for students, with lecture-based teaching and the reiteration of material through assignments and exams to prove that material had been ingested and absorbed. The second was that extensive aspects of design were based on judgements and values rather than facts. That these two features were inextricably bound up in each other was the epistemic challenge. It is often not until one leaves the familiar surroundings that one becomes aware of what has constituted that ambience. PBD: If we go back to the course you were on before, where there was a feeling that it was a sort of clearer environment, if you looked at it in a different way would you say that it was also a culture? RC: Oh yes very much so. I think that’s very true I think that in some ways I think it should be more explicit especially in the context of university education as a whole now… no educated person going back to the start of the twentieth century wouldn’t be aware of what Marx was talking about, nowadays university doesn’t do that. There’s no … I suppose with engineering … there’s no framework … it’s all formulaic, I think there’s a huge … calling it knowledge … and a whole ritual almost about different disciplines which students need to be aware of in order to sort of orientate themselves to the subject, to get the most from it. I think that was present in my other degree but never referred to, on the engineering side of it I think the balance of scientific processes and the balance of scientific method and enquiry was just taken for granted it was never discussed why we do it. How does this come about, what is this all about, what are the implications? It was never discussed it’s just that’s the way it is and it always amazes me when you read people who really are masters of their subject just how openminded and wide ranging they are and how they’ve stepped outside of that and they’d made big leaps into other areas. I think that’s not something that’s pointed out to students necessarily – you know, that it has got outside references… seek them out. It’s up to individuals to think there must be more to this and then find out for themselves. But I think this course seems to be trying to raise that awareness as part of the course, you know there are exercises which you do, it’s not just in this little bubble and you stay within it there is an encouragement to look outside of that and make your own leaps and move on outwards. So I do agree that all areas … there are all these

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huge cultural things which are there which you might not be aware of and you appreciate it more to position yourself relative to it. AT: Initially from the outset I can remember thinking OK I’m going to learn once and for all how to use a marker pen … and things like that, so I had the image of Seymour Powell style marker only. And when we came in and were shown how it was, we could see from the outset the way this was going to evolve … the whole course was experimenting and things like that. So from then on, instead of … I think all my thoughts went, and I thought OK I’m here to learn … let’s be a sponge…

Learning design, especially at post-graduate level, will naturally incorporate a variety of features of epistemic development that have been identified by different writers. A relevant example is Kohlberg’s (1983) mapping of moral attitudes about personal behaviour and behaviour in wider society. He develops six stages of frameworks within which moral dilemmas can be considered and acted upon. This scheme can be useful in discussing designing in at least two ways. The first is that the manufacture and marketing of consumer products undoubtedly impacts on peoples’ employment and employment conditions, and also on wider environmental concerns of resource sustainability. Gainful employment for a designer, and apparent satisfaction from buying consumer goods and supporting a freemarket economy, is offset by damage to the world at large, including inhabitants who have little or no access to this market economy. One local effect of this can be seen on the streets of any large western city by comparing the range of babies’ pushchairs, with that of wheelchairs. Another kind of statistic much quoted in 2014 is that there are now more mobile phones in the world than there are toilets. These are both situations where design has had a significant role in affecting the ecology of which it is a part. Design takes place within the context of many overlapping and interlinking commissioning and consuming systems – economic, political, and cultural, with designers’ responsibilities extending into the wider effects of their work. This is a case of second-order cybernetics, which recognises that the observer (in this case designer) is an integral part of the dynamics of

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such a system, thus leading to the understanding that designers are implicated in the work they do.1 A second, complementary way that Kohlberg’s ideas are relevant to designers is through consideration of mature understandings of social justice, arrived at by looking at situations through another’s eyes. It is difficult but not impossible for young, fit design students to imagine themselves into the worlds of experience of the elderly or the disabled or the disadvantaged. If, however, they do not do this, design’s capacity to improve quality of life in substantial ways is denied to wider constituencies beyond high street style mongers. VA: Right up to my degree … I only applied for one engineering job and that was the job I eventually got, and that was due to the fact that in my final year project I looked at designing equipment for the health service and health industry and within that work period I had a lot of interaction and worked with a lot of health care professionals and basically their enthusiasm, and working with that type of group of people, and people contact and dealing with people with problems and issues rubbed off on me and sparked an interest in me. PBD: Were you worried up to your last year about what you were going to do after you left? Very much so because the engineering side I felt was dull and was boring, and I don’t like to categorise people but virtually everyone on my course, although from different backgrounds, had similar outlooks and interests: cars and things like that... I felt “what’s wrong with me? A car gets you from A to B I’m not interested in the technical side.” So falling in with the health care people was a wonderful break? Yes it made engineering more realistic, more social for me than anything, you’re actually dealing with people’s problems.

Mezirow (2000:350) says:

1

For a detailed explanation of the development of cybernetics, and the genesis of second order cybernetics see ‘For God’s Sake, Margaret’ a conversation between Stewart Brand, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, (1976) CoEvolutionary Theory. Issue no. 10, June. (http://www.oikos.org/forgod.htm) about the founding of the Macy Conferences that invented cybernetics; Glanville, R. (2004) ‘The purpose of second-order cybernetics’. Kybernetes Vol 33, 9/10, and Glanville, R. (2007) ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better: the cybernetics in design and the design in cybernetics’. Kybernetes Vol 36, 9/10.

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“It is much more difficult to compartmentalize in this way when participating in situational exercises that require the construction of knowledge, rather than its absorption… Adult learners who are called on to examine their experiences, express their observations, and then refine this exploration through dialog and discourse that encourages them to become more critically reflective of their assumptions and those of others participate in “meaning making”.

Michelson (1998), in her exploration of how experiential learning needs to be re-located back into the whole body from its isolation in the head, proposes that the differences between intellectual or cognitive and sensorial or bodily ways of knowing is gendered, especially through the European Enlightenment. An example is how the phrase ‘old wives’ tale’ has migrated from experiential knowledge of childbirthing to foolish nonsense. Project experience in the university undergraduate engineering environment could be difficult considering that some of design’s probings use and rely on the senses and require empathy. It could prove difficult for people used to respecting the superiority of abstract and quantitative reasoning. The stereotypes from the 1980’s described below in Engineering Education still persisted. EG: So I was asked to make ergonomic specifications for the chassis and I did, and the chassis designer said ‘well actually we’re not going to use any of your information whatsoever, we’re going to do it like this, you roughly decide on the size.’ I was overruled all the way through which, because my tutor was a woman, I was constantly in her office – actually we’d had tutorials and it wouldn’t be… umm… we’d start with ‘oh you’ll never guess what they’ve done now! Somebody wants to bolt through where the driver’s shoulder blades are going.’ And I had to, every time this would happen I had to threaten in a ridiculous manner. I mean I had nothing to threaten with, I had absolutely no leverage whatsoever and I had to threaten ridiculous things. The engines bloke who did the engine work wanted to drill through the fire wall I’d just made to suspend his manifold … he was going ‘oh it’s alright I’ll just stick a bolt here’ and I was going ‘no you won’t because if you were in a crash that bolt would go straight through your shoulder blade’. ‘Oh it’s alright I’ll put a round head on it”. And I had nothing else to do but to stand there screaming at him which was terrible for me as a member of the team because then they’re saying ‘oh she’s just a screaming woman’. PBD: Yes! How were the teams put together?

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Learning and Epistemic Development in Designing I applied. They split the car into ergonomics, body work, engine design, manifold design, chassis design. There were twenty-two projects and I applied and I was the only one who applied for ergonomics. … What do you think - I mean - we could just talk about that in terms of women as designers or the sort of things that women might be interested in - the values that they have - or …. Yes, I was just about to say about women in engineering, when they’re in a team, and it’s very careful when you’re in an all male team, it’s a careful tightrope between being perceived as one of the team and trying to take yourself away from being a different gender… …Do you sit there quietly? Yes, very difficult, very hard. But you’ve got your own personality anyway. Mmm. I think I’ve got worse at it actually. From having gone … walked into an engineering course at 18 and been like – it’s fine – you just get along and you just plod along and nothing much happens, and there are no difficulties at all and then the more I’ve gone through it…And then suddenly two, three years ago I started to realise no… people are… men are… there’s this going on there’s that going on and how do I deal with this? Normally I deal with it wrong and I think I’ve actually got worse – I’ve got more prejudiced about the whole thing and worse at it… … On the car I sometimes had the feeling I was this token…no there was this general thing I was the token woman….I got on really well with the quieter team members …one was the accounts guy, and one was the exhaust guy…and then there were these bullishly strong minded men who did the chassis and the engine and the shock absorber and I was constantly clashing with them, and they were just ‘oh she’s just some dumb woman who wanders around’.

Gender bias also showed itself on the IDE course through the dominant majority of male students and tutors, and sometimes the choice of projects. On the course female students found themselves released at last to undertake projects they considered important, some less mainstream ones being sanitary product disposal in public toilets, female urinals, personal cervical smear test kits, breast pumps, sleep-in bedside chairs for long hospital visits, a bra using radio transmission that automatically alerted police to a possible attack. During this period a well-known design consultancy, as part of a TV series about the complexities involved in product design development, embarked on an engineering development of a bra. This was an intriguing problem, and theatrically played up to the cameras for entertainment. An IDE student working there on placement was able to report however that the ribaldry was not just for the cameras.

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An important feature of epistemic development is that one becomes aware that learning is a process, a medium, which has previously been unarticulated, but which can now be thought about, played with and managed. Ways of learning and kinds of knowing are connected through experience – the experience of learning, and then the experience of knowing, which is then offered to the next opportunity for learning. Although this is described as a flowing sequence is rarely felt as such. Different modalities of learning can co-exist, at any one moment some to be more dominant than others, some mixing and linking, some not. For example, on the subject of “well-being”, an interesting range could include instinctive knowledge to avoid pain being overridden by a realisation that self-harming may elicit sympathy and attention, or even be a right of passage. Different artistic practices communicate the transcendent opportunities of suffering, and we have to use value judgments to compute the allocation of limited budgets for medical care in the face of a generalised lack of personal responsibility for well-being. Always as we experience the myriad opportunities for learning there is in the background the paradoxical presence of habit, the necessary stabilizer and at the same time inhibitor against adventure or exploration of other perspectives.2

Projects and learning In design education the project pays heed to the needs of the student and of professional practice, and also looks to the wider picture beyond. In the educational setting this means, for the student’s sake a progression from simple to complex. For the profession it is a simulation of practice, and especially at post-graduate level for the picture beyond, the incorporation of features that stretch and question the nature of the activity itself, and the naturalisation of higher learning skills. To move projects beyond exercises, however apparently simple, they need to involve scenarios where there is no one right answer. In educational terms 2

“When viewed from the perspective of experiential learning, the tendency to define learning in terms of outcomes can become a definition of non-learning, in the process sense that the failure to modify ideas and habits as a result of experience is maladaptive…the more I have “learned” a given habit, the longer I will persist in behaving that way when it is no longer rewarded.” Kolb (1984:26)

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this shifts the focus from the tutor’s authority to the student’s engagement, and thus the potential for experiencing the widest range of ways of learning and knowing, involving the whole person. In order to fulfil their learning potential projects need to be seen as vehicles for learning rather than imitative formulaic activities. They can then be set in a rich context of related knowledge and skills, activities and experience, where the design product becomes the proving ground. Seeing projects in this way, rather than as the objects they may involve (teapot, emergency warning, family wedding), removes the culturally bound and limiting but natural tendency to categorise our world, and to fixate on things we are familiar with: the problem of ‘naming’ discussed in Visual and Conceptual Thinking. Projects then provide the opportunity for a fresh look, for making new connections, marrying learning and design process together, where tools of thinking meet the working surface of the design challenge, at whatever scale. Schon and Wiggins (1992:155) in their discussion of how designing “serves as preparation to further designing” through the interplay of designing and discovering, quote Ledewitz (1987:5) who observes “every design problem offers an opportunity for discovery, a new problem that the designer, however experienced, has not solved before. The task of design is to solve problems that are, by definition, unique, complex and underconstrained, and each of these factors creates an opportunity for learning.” The designed object or system of the project is not however an empty vehicle; it has its own life of internally interacting factors, whose dynamics require the meta-skills of designing. The simplest design proposal is still actually complex, with many factors interacting. As Schon says (in an interview with John Bennett): “A system is complex in the specific sense that, whenever I make a move, I get results that are not just the ones that I intend. That is I cannot make a move that has only the consequences that I intend. Any move has side effects. This unpredictability is a central attribute of design…It means that there is no direct path between the designer’s intention and the outcome” (Winograd 1996:3).

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In their discussion of design as a hermeneutical activity, Coyne and Snodgrass (1991:125) note that: “Schon3 describes decision making and discovery in similar terms as the projection of metaphors with which we are familiar onto new, unfamiliar situations. In the process the metaphors undergo change. Snodgrass and Coyne4 similarly describe design. The act of designing involves the projection of a partial design onto a particular design situation. The match or otherwise between this projection and the situation as it presents itself brings objects to light and changes the game. Designing can be described in terms of a dialogue with a design situation.”

Lawson’s (1997) ‘box’ is a perfect illustration of how this works, and as such I used it in early discussions on the IDE course about design process, mapping out different examples.

Figure 11. The completed model of design constraints, Lawson, Bryan, 1980, How Designers Think, © The Architectural Press Ltd, London, reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Books UK. 3

D.Schon (1963:53). Displacement of Concepts, London, Tavistock. Snodgrass, A and Coyne, R. (1991) Design, hermeneutics, and the play of metaphor. Working Paper, Faculty of Architecture, University of Sydney, Sydney.

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For any given design proposal different kinds of constraints are interacting with each other, and the third dimension of the box signifies that these constraints may be internal to the ‘product’, and/or coming from outside its boundary. This produces a complex field of decisions to be made, including the feature that when one variable changes, all the others would be affected, as in the metaphor that a design intervention necessarily changes the ecology it is part of. As Snodgrass and Coyne (1997:89) note: “Wheras the use of logical methods is intended to arrive at a “solution” of a design “problem”, a design process that proceeds by way of question and answer can have no final end. The answers given to a question open up further questions for those who are open and receptive to questioning. There is no “correct” answer that can be arrived at by following a prescribed sequence of mathematical or logical steps. In the design process the answer to a question only opens up further questions, in a never-ending series….Whatever the nature of the external constraints that force an end to the ongoing process, every designer knows that any design could always be taken further.”

An additional conceptual model I used involved casting designing in the problem-solving mould.5 This was the hierarchy of decision-making observed by Duncker (1945) during his research on problem-solving, using the scenario of safely delivering radio waves to a tumour without damaging surrounding tissue. His analysis of the suggestions made (out loud) by people trying to work out how to solve this problem revealed a thinking process moving about through a related series of ideas, each influenced by what preceded it, on several levels from general to specific. Such a sequence could be schematised as a tree diagram revealing a hierarchical map of the ideas proposed. This process could be turned on its head and used for product analysis, design mapping, brief writing and creative thinking. One could generate a map of general to specific levels of ‘solutions’ around a specific product, on the basis of which a wide range of related product alternatives could then be noticed, revealing product gaps. Alternatives could then be proposed, depending on the level of constraints within the chosen brief. 5

I am indebted to David Warren Piper for this idea and process.

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Engineering practice of course also involves this kind of multifactorial design work, even if most undergraduate engineering training may not. As Baynes and Pugh (1981:14) point out “Professor Bruce Archer has suggested that designers operate in a way that is analogous to a movie camera, changing focus and definition from one part of the design to another until sharp definition is achieved throughout. Engineers’ notebooks tend to confirm this theory.” Schon and Wiggins (1992:145) speculate on how the connectivities are made. “It seems that students in architectural studios like Quist’s are exposed to particular families of design domains and particular views of their appropriate interconnection.” Students have to learn about the design domains themselves in the studio culture in which they are working and then get a critical perspective on how these are formed and related. During the period of this study there was also a change of culture being introduced, namely the prioritising of user-centred factors in design, with its accompanying radical approaches to work in both research and design development processes. Away from the immediate calls of commercial practice, projects can be progressed in line with developing skill and knowledge from simple (few factors involved) to complex (multidimensioned uncertainty) with expanding opportunity for innovation on all fronts, conceptual and technical. Buchanan (1998:66) described to the 1997 ICOGRADA6 World Congress how important it is for design education to work as an equal partner with the design profession, rather than following it. This means that education’s role includes investigating the nature of design, so that studio work can be ahead of design practice, and that design, “when properly understood and studied… provides a powerful connective link with many bodies of knowledge.” The logical end (usually not affordable in commercial practice) is the situation where a ‘problem’ space has been identified where there are no currently existing products. This requires the acutest observation, analysis and questioning of prevailing assumptions, personal and societal. It involves reversing the normal figure/ground relationship of product as a self6

International Council of Graphic Design Associations.

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sufficient narrative in its setting, to seeing that setting as a space full of holes. The potential outcomes can be very different – more landfill nonsense, or tools for living better quality lives for everyone, especially people previously marginalised. In this way the design project can become the site for life-long learning skills. In the setting of the design studio and its cultural assumptions the relationship with the tutor is crucial. Bruner (1986) when describing the important role that dialogue plays between adult and child in the child’s developing sense of self refers to Vygotsky, who uses the phrase “ ‘the loan of consciousness’ that gets the child through the zone of proximal development. The concept can be seen as relevant to adults when one removes the assumption that childhood is where all development takes place” (Hoare 2006:4). Bruner (1986:132) says the model is Socrates guiding the slave boy through geometry in the Meno. Schon (1987:83), in his discussion of the design mentor, also invokes Plato’s exploration of the central dilemma of learning described in the Meno: “the design studio shares in a general paradox attendant on the teaching and learning of any really new competence or understanding; for the student seeks to learn things whose meanings and importance she cannot grasp ahead of time.” The RCA is still fortunate in having generous dedicated studio working and making space to provide the setting for the ‘master/apprentice’ one-to-one tutoring relationships which have been the tradition in art and design education. Beyond the powerful medieval imagery of the term, the effectiveness of this style of teaching has become open to question and now to research enquiry since two influential papers on student learning in design were published in the late 1980’s. The first, “Nellie is Dead”, by the graphic designer Cal Swann was published in Designer magazine in 1986. The second paper “On Not Sitting With Nellie”, published in 1989, built on the ideas of the earlier paper, and was a Joint Working Party Report on Teaching and Learning Strategies in Art and Design by the CNAA (Council for National Academic Awards) and CHEAD (Council for Higher Education in Art and Design).

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Swann saw that with worsening staff/student ratios the approach would become impractical and ineffective, and also suggested that such an apparently passive scenario was no longer relevant at a time when ideas about student-centred learning were gaining currency. Claxton (1987 personal communication) however describes a different aspect of this relationship, drawing on Polyani’s descriptions of tacit knowledge: … “The long-term transmission of a skill requires a particular kind of relationship between Master and Apprentice. The Apprentice has to trust and respect the Master for his ability and judgement: the Master has to be patient and perceptive about the Apprentice’s progress and (hopefully) has the latter’s development at heart. Michael Polyani in Personal Knowledge spells this out: ‘To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyse and account in detail for its effectiveness. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules or the art, including those that are not explicitly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another.’ Observational learning is, I think, undervalued by adults in our culture. They do not think that anything worthwhile is happening unless they are doing; their trust in the learning process working “of itself” is not high enough. Sitting quietly and receptively watching a good model at work is an enormously productive in-activity, for we are constantly absorbing, at a tacit level, hints and notions, finesses of touch and timing, that inform and enhance our own practice.”

Any learner may need help to slow down and find patience to learn in an unexpected way. For the tutor, developing Socratic enquiry and being open to learning through genuine dialogue and reflection imply pedagogical skills. However, professional designers’ first responsibilities as studio tutors are usually seen

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to be about sharing and showing how design is carried out in practice. Developing the higher levels of students’ thinking and development may only coincidentally be understood as part of the agenda. Even contracted staff, many of whom are also practising professionals, express concern about the demands on their time, now that formal arrangements are in place for design tutors to have training as educators. Any new questioning about this tutoring system is also happening at a time when student numbers are increasing, tutor numbers diminishing, and studio spaces shrinking. Where designers working as studio tutors veer towards identifying themselves with a design client while guiding a student, the student is: “unlikely to engage in the higher order cognitive aspects which are characteristic of the more sophisticated levels (both in learning and in design). Learner activity, again when focused entirely on developing skills, cannot be seen as sufficient for enabling students to develop more sophisticated conceptual frameworks.” (Davies and Reid 2000, no page nos).

The main issues as described by them are about what Marton and Saljo (1976) identified as the differences between deep and surface learning. PBD: Well to put it in a more broad way – were you critical of exams? TF: You mean about?...Well yeah, the exam structure I found at B. from personal experience, I suppose, yeah, throughout my school career, I’d had no problems with exams at all, it was a tried and tested format and I knew what to do. And so there was no situation in exams where I’d panic and all that. And then at the undergraduate level I think the first year, it was an extension of what I’d felt at school, and then in the third year there was a bit of a realisation that you could get away with doing things like kind of tricking the examiners into thinking that you know what you’re talking about. So yeah you can play the game to their standard, and if you can figure out what they’re trying to see in you then you’ll get away with doing it which is a totally wrong way of doing it, it gets you results but it doesn’t help you personally in any way at all. I mean what’s so ironic is that it’s quite a clever skill - working out what someone else wants and then getting good at giving it to them without letting on that you know what they want. It’s quite a clever thing. Yes, but it’s just dishonest, it’s wrong. And how does it relate to extending your learning? It’s not as black and white as that at undergraduate level because I did learn things, I can still apply it in my knowledge. I found, very much, the academic

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process of practising and then application of your knowledge much more helpful than the sort of straight-up quiz type situation, saying do you know this do you know that because you can just learn in parrot fashion, and I found that whatever I learned for an exam, by the end of September I’d forgotten it.

Students are seen to be in danger of the worst aspects of imitation. Frascara, an eminent design educator and professional designer, notes that “context and content are alien dimensions for design instructors who work simply as ‘dog trainers’. The students are trained to please the masters through slavish imitation, and this is the worst thing that an instructor can do to a student.” (2007:63). Additionally there can be a reluctance to be open to reflective practice in the teaching faculty itself, at the same time as it is being required of students. Amongst all the things IDE students had to learn about they also had to work out new ways of relating to the teaching staff, discovering in themselves questions about the nature of authority in subjects and practice. Tutors needed to be able to support this, and although all students had a ‘personal’ tutor from amongst the teaching staff, demarcations about pastoral roles were not well defined.

Assessment The main assessment instrument for studio-based design training is the work review, or crit where students one after another present their work to tutors and sometimes other students, and it is discussed. The crit is a powerful conversational site of experiential learning, taking place in a space where work, 3D and 2D, physical and electronic, can be displayed and handled, on tables and walls, with tutors including possibly some visiting ‘experts’, and other students sitting round where the presentation takes place. The workings of Piaget’s concepts of assimilation and accommodation express the dynamics of what is in play in this performative process. Learning, rather than just experiencing, is a dynamic balance between filtering new experiences through existing ideas (assimilation), and changing our ideas in the light of experience and evidence (accommodation), an ecological idea.

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The crit operates on many levels. The participants have multiple and different aims, bring very different prior experience and expectations with them, are operating within a web of power relations, and have very different experiences during the ritual. Much of the interchange and feedback goes on quite locally about the proposal presented, with ideas for its further and better development. The crit is also meant to be for the exchange of technical information to reflect the norms and expectations of professional practice. Quite naturally talk will be about concepts and ideas, at the same time as other explorations are going on. This involves looking, handling and otherwise using the senses and maybe other parts of the body to interact with the model of the proposal, a holistic approach amongst people who are used to using their hands and eyes as partners to their minds. On another level for the learner/student (one could hope that tutors also learn in the crit) there may be what Taylor (2006:211) describes as the tipping of the balance of the interplay (of assimilation and accommodation) bringing about a disorienting dilemma, which according to Mezirow may lead to transformational learning. This could be about how value judgements are made, and what makes them differ, why some things are so difficult to learn, and other strategic-level ideas beyond localised technical information. Because it is also the medium where the skills of judgement are learned, this is meant to be the ground for taking on responsibility for one’s own learning. RC: I was originally trying to develop a different mechanism and that dictated the sort of shape and the components. In the end I stuck with the standard mechanism but the shape that I’d already got – I thought well, it’s quite nice, and I used that as the basis…it was almost accidental I suppose. PBD: Does that make it worse than if it had happened deliberately? I don’t think it makes it worse, I sort of feel in this environment I feel terrified that you’ve got to have some sort of… you know, it’s not what you say it’s how you say it sort of angle and I’ve got to go “oh this shape la di da di da metaphor this – influenced there – all the rest of it, put it all together, so it arrived at this” whereas the truth of it is it wasn’t like that, and I don’t think that makes it any less worthy but in some way I feel as if from a college of art point of view it’s not enough. I think you’ve probably touched on something which is… I mean it’s very interesting in its own right, but… quite inhibiting….

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ES: I was quite nervous, I always am with new things. And it was only towards halfway through the year that I started to talk in crits. I mean the first…. I’d had enormous difficulties standing up and talking in front of people. Now it’s not so bad. But the first week when we were told ‘oh by the end of this week you’ll have to stand up here and talk’, I started sweating then! Because I just couldn’t do it, I mean I had to do it on my last course and it was the most peculiar thing because although you’ve known – on my last course, you’ve known everyone for four years and they’re your close friends, and you’re standing up and talking in front of them, like you would be doing in the pub, but as it’s shop talk you can’t do it, it’s very difficult. But it’s good to have to do this so much because it’s such a valuable thing to do, is to have to talk in front of people. It affects more than your ability to do that in its own right because it affects how you deal with anyone. Because when you stand up they stop being your friends and they start being critics. PBD: So what’s the difference between a friend and a critic? Not very much here I don’t think! Umm, I think you know in crits people are prepared to ask a question if they think it’s worth asking, even if it’s going to be difficult to answer it, even if they’re your friends or not, and rightly so – you should be challenged in that way. Yes because sometimes friends are the last people to tell you things that you actually need to know. Yeah but people are quite good at it here. They’re quite open which is good. Well they may be open with their giving but it doesn’t necessarily mean to say that it’s easy to receive. No, sure, definitely.

Unfortunately, power dynamics may sometimes undermine the intended agenda of defending a proposal or learning of skills of presentation, (useful for epistemic development as well as persuading future clients). This is because learning, or changing the way one thinks, is difficult when under criticism, however apparently constructive, perhaps affecting one’s disposition to be open-minded and open to new thinking, except of the most cue-conscious sort. It is often said that, because of anxiety and the sense of competition, students learn nothing during their own crit, (and perhaps the one before and the one after). Additionally, because the discussion by practising designers is focused on the object presented, all too frequently the tendency is to evaluate the object as an alias for the student’s skills. Eraut (1994:109) generalises this important point: “A live encounter passes in a flash. What is remembered will depend on the ability of the perceiver to notice and select the right information rapidly at the

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time of the encounter….Reflection has to take place after the event and may not be helpful without an experienced tutor who has observed the same incident and noted the significant evidence.”

In the crit formative and summative aims are blurred; students engage in discussion, and then usually have some more formal feedback later. This was difficult for people used to marks (even if their range or scales had not been clear or questioned). SN: The problem with project crits is that the tutors all say different things and I don’t know who to believe.

My research took place before the cruder usages of learning objectives and attendant outcomes had been widely established in the interests of answerability, but I think the system was quite inefficient and ineffective for the individual learner. In terms of engaging with one’s own processes of learning, however, qualitative feedback can at least be discussed more productively than using marks on an unknown scale. Change was hard to introduce, as described in The Local Setting. The whole concept of objectives that I had used as a basis for discussion in the design of the course was alien. I had brought with me from previous teaching a profiling system which I felt filled some of the gaps. Using Osgood’s Semantic Differential process, and based on features of designing which were thought to be important by students in a pilot I conducted in 1983, it identified a series of technical and conceptual skills and dispositions associated with a design process, each of which could be marked on a five-point scale denoting more or less able. The profile was sent to incoming IDE students with a request that they fill it in for any design-like project they had recently done, either in education or in employment. Starting a process of reflection on different learning experiences, this was then used as an agenda to discuss the transition to the course, while at the same time raising awareness about the different nature of skills involved in designing, and learning itself. I then used it intermittently in tutorials throughout the course as a formative instrument, the student always having filled in the different constructs for a particular project, itself a reflective exercise.

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Adult learners Andragogy, or adult learning, developed as a field of research in the 1980’s (Tight 1983). It emphasises certain features that differentiate it from learning in children, or pedagogy. These include moving from being dependent to being self-directed, explicitly using one’s accumulated experience as a resource for learning, learning within an awareness of the various social roles that one has, and an assumption that what is being learned is for use now, rather than in some unspecified future (Knowles 1980). NH: I think age plays a large factor in that equation in the sense that I’m 28, nearly 29 now. If I’d have come on the course 5 years ago.... I’m so glad I came on it at this age rather than somebody who didn’t really have a clearer direction. I knew personally what I wanted from life when I started and that’s why I felt very committed and had no qualms about leaving a good job to come here, whereas should I have been 5 years younger I’m not sure whether I would have got as much from the course. PBD: Exactly, or would have been able to have that kind of internal conversation with yourself. I think it would have been quite easy to drift. Yes, drift, or do as you’re told. Do you think that it was easier because you were older to, in a sense … train the horses? I don’t know, I think possibly the older you get sometimes the more difficult it is to overcome the self-consciousness that is a part of actually learning a new skill. I can relate it to when you’re learning something as a young boy you’re not aware of that, you’re just so channelled and into learning, you’re not aware of what’s going on around you but I think the older you get the more self-conscious you become in some respects. Is that because the grown-up you is saying that I’m doing this from choice, or I’m aware that I’m doing this? I think it’s a very humbling experience. For example, when we were going to life drawing in the first year, we’d all stand in one corner and we’d all feel very inferior and we wouldn’t let anyone look at our work, but I think, if I was 18 or 20, I know what I was like then, I wouldn’t have cared at all. Because you were there to be taught? Possibly, and possibly because my outlook on life at that stage, I wasn’t the most responsible individual, so these things wouldn’t have really been an issue. PBD: You’ve been saying that time pressure is stopping you from fully exploring how to incorporate playfulness into your work…?

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ER: I think partly the time management thing actually acts against me because my very rigorous way of thinking means I’ve got to get things done, sometimes it blocks out the adventurous playfulness bit because I think ‘oh gosh I’ve got to get this done by so and so, and this done by so and so, so I don’t leave myself the moment when I can just say to hell with this I’m just going to spend a week just messing around because it doesn’t fit in with the grand scheme of things…some people probably spend too much in the cloudy area of dreaming…possibly I’m too much the other way, thinking how things come together rather than allowing that dreaming time…I think it’s to a large extent because of my background, the work I used to do managing these projects (at a large car manufacturing plant) they had to be ready on time, and there wasn’t really a requirement to be playful we just had to work. I think I’m conditioned into thinking or working in that way and it’s quite hard when you’ve worked that way for so long to de-programme yourself and it’s something I’ve really got to think about a lot more. ….. I think a good example of that is when I’ve been doing things like card modelling with some of my ideas this year. Those models were essentially for me, for me to explore ideas and if I got them wrong, well, so what, I got them wrong, and I’ll make another one. And therefore I’ve been able to play around with them quite freely and quite happily, get coloured paints out and paint them colours to see what they looked like, and some of them looked ghastly but it didn’t really matter, but it was because there wasn’t this sense of at the end of the day I’ve got to have this finished, people are going to look at it, I could chuck it all in the bin if I wanted to, it really didn’t matter…it felt like a safe environment in which to do it.

Allman, in Tight (1983:119), describes a salient feature of adult development as “a movement …in the direction of gaining ever-increasing amounts of control over our thinking and therefore our lives. For example if adults can accept contradiction and not be forced by the need for stability to have ready answers to complex problems, they are in control.”

Allman’s use of the word ‘control’ may now seem rather mechanistic, but with a second-order cybernetic interpretation as described above, ‘in control’ has more of a self-transforming or autopoeitic meaning. HM: I was thinking about how it’s quite interesting… is that because with Bella we did a little bit of just doing …. random things if you like, childlike things, and then somehow trying to construct them into something like a real object and the same way we were doing with Neil, and the fact now I’ve

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done it the second time we’re more comfortable being childlike at the beginning, because we now see the point of doing it which almost makes it not childlike any more if you know what I mean. PBD: Yes Even though you’re still, you’re still obviously being I think quite loose about things, but you know why you’re being loose now, wheras before we were being loose without really knowing what the point of that would be, and that made it harder, and the same as you’re already learning there’s that goal to do with being random. PBD: …there was some point where I made some remark where I was trying to make a distinction between child-like and childish and I think that sometimes, well I think there is a vital difference between the two. DY: I think to be able to play sort of child-like is to drop your inhibitions as an engineer and think no that won’t work, but play and see, do this and see what happens rather than casting the idea aside. So what about that concept of saying play and see, because what I noticed with a few people is they don’t want to make a move until they know it’s the right move. Well I’m probably guilty of that as well though. In what way? Often it’s to do with pressure of time, it could be down to laziness as well – I don’t want to spend days and days doing something that doesn’t work, but you’re not going find out unless you actually do it. I think it is being confident in yourself, being confident that I’m going to play and I’m going to get a result out of this.

Mezirow, (1983) in the same volume of papers about andragogy referred to above, uses instead of ‘control’ the idea of ‘self-directed learners’ in his ‘Charter for andragogy’, describing the role of educators as to assist adults to “learn in a way that enhances their capacity to function as self-directed learners.” A dominant metaphor for how this can be done is that of scaffolding (Taylor 2006:209), highlighting the need to support learners in changing the ways they learn, and to see what knowledge and learning are. An important aspect is the learner realising that her own experiences, and interpretations of them, form an integral part of knowledge which was previously conceived of as external to the self. “This awareness of themselves as constructors of meaning is essential to learning that is understanding, as opposed to knowledge acquisition.” Perry identified in his scheme (1970) that one can move from thinking of knowledge only as an

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academic subject, to realising that it can impact on and raise questions about one’s own life and behaviour. These perspectives point to the role of education that has more than instrumental aims. Frascara (2007:68) reinforces this distinction in the context of the role of design in society: “To educate is to foster the development of judgement, personal initiative, and the conscious adoption of values. This distinction is essential. To be a good designer in the broadest professional sense, in addition to technical knowledge, one has to be a good citizen, that is a socially responsible person.”

These are some of the issues that faced IDE students, and as in any other learning situation, motivation and disposition would influence how they engaged with them. PBD: How can they? In what ways can they? What can one do to...? what can one..? MR: How can you persuade people to draw you mean? Almost. It involves taking impromptu breaks from whatever you happen to be doing which is possibly what gets in the way. I think removing the barriers makes a big difference. Having a sketchbook in your bag means you must be ten times more likely to draw something than having a sketchbook at home where you’d have to say right today I’m going to take my sketchbook because I’m going to go past such and such a place and I will stop and draw. Yes, so there’s a sort of readiness, and I think even that readiness….if you... It’s quite a bridge to cross to even agree to carry a sketchbook around the place. Because when you carry a sketchbook around the place you’d say I’m the sort of person who might do some drawing, and even that… You’ve allowed yourself to be that person. Exactly. Were you ever not that person? I can remember when I decided to actively carry a sketchbook and pencil case with me… …I just decided that it really wasn’t very difficult. It was a much more haphazard way, I’d take a book if I wanted to go and draw something. I think it was the interest of friends as well, a lot of people. I think the defining moment was I went to the Natural History Museum with friends and one of them just brought a sketchbook out of his bag and started to draw something that he wanted to draw and I was just thinking ‘damn, I wish that was me’, and it wasn’t, and I thought well do something about it, it can be you.

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Yes it’s I mean…what’s interesting is that often things happen like that, they don’t happen through some kind of teaching, structured activity. Often the most valuable thing... It’s always going to be you who makes the decision... You can’t be told to do it..

Adults, like children, are subject to both intrinsic and extrinsic motivational drives, but there are important differences. Adults can be highly motivated to learn if they see the relevance of it in the context of the other parts of their lives, and have some control over what they are learning, but may quickly forget what they have learned if it is not embedded or brought to life in their current life concerns (Knowles 1980). As in all learning situations one needs a nice balance between challenge and support, and adults often have to provide this for themselves. PBD: What do you think are the conditions which enable somebody to trust their instincts… I’m thinking about internal conditions, social conditions, teaching and learning conditions, emotional conditions, a whole variety of different types of conditions… NH: For me, it was reassurance that that was a way to work - I knew I had the ability to do that, I just needed reassurance from someone who’d been through this process…I just felt a bit tentative to lunge into this process and …to some extent I think that could have been down to this - not lack of desire - but this tentative nature of not wanting to get stuck in. But I think it was really reassurance.

Motivation for adults may be affected by their disposition to learn. At one level disposition may be about difficulties a person faces when having to learn things that challenge an already established view about herself, who she “is”, and what she believes is being challenged in the setting of the new learning, and it may result in some resistance (Rogers 1977:37). In a more holistic perspective Rowson (2008:87) quotes Perkins’s (1995:88) description of disposition as the ‘soul of intelligence’, describing it as the ‘complex interplay of motivation, values, habit and freedom’ that learners can choose to bring to bear on whatever they are engaged with. Rowson further suggests that tutors “make most impact at the dispositional level when students are stretched in such a way that their habitual way of making sense will no longer suffice and their meaning-making capacity has to expand. What is distinctive about this kind of learning experience is that it belongs to the students in some way.”

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Issues of motivation and disposition were present for the IDE students, and the play of extrinsic and intrinsic rewards came into the foreground in response to the challenges encountered. These challenges were in three main areas: relationships with tutors, assessment processes, and the culture of studio-based work. While Rowson’s passage was written with school students in mind, it is no less relevant in the setting of the master/apprentice model of design studio teaching.

Experience It may seem strange but it is necessary to mention experience before discussing experiential learning. Kolb (1984:28) quotes Hegel: “Any experience that does not violate expectation is not worthy of the name experience.” It rather implies a very heightened state of being except when one is figuratively asleep in one’s habitual practices. At the very least however one needs to be able to make sense of the world as sensed and thought about from moment to moment. The educational literature presents many interpretations of experience, linking all its aspects in myriad ways, including how the significance of those interconnections changes over time and in different cultures. An important dimension in this study is the relationship or connection between the apparent opposites of thought and emotion, the rational and the intuitive, the abstract and the concrete, the physical and the conceptual, and how these connections can lead to more substantial understanding and acting. Mahn and John-Steiner (2002:47) discussing how Vygotsky’s ideas influenced their thinking about the interrelationship between thought and affect, quote: “Thought is not born of other thoughts. Thought has its origins in the motivating sphere of consciousness, a sphere that includes our inclinations and needs, our interests and impulses, and our affect and emotions. The affective and volitional tendency stands behind thought. Only here do we find the answer to the final ‘why’ in the analysis of thinking. (Vygotsky, 1934/1987:282)”.7 They draw attention to Vygotsky’s use of the Russian word perezhivaniye, apparently difficult to translate beyond ‘lived emotional experience’. “The 7

Rieber, R.W. and Carton, A.S. (Eds.) (1934/1987) The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky. New York, Plenum Press.

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emotional experience arising from any situation or from any aspect of his environment, determines what kind of influence this situation or this environment will have on the child” (Vygotsky 1994:3398). The concept can be elaborated throughout adulthood as “we subjectively live through events, (or) perezhivaniye…We perpetuate our culture when we share our understandings with others through conversation, teaching and creating cultural artefacts, books or inventions (through a process of) externalizations (Moran 2010)”. Stanislavski, (1949) the Russian actor and dramatist, also used the word perezhivaniye in his teaching, urging his actors to connect subjectively with the lives of the individuals they were to play, to experience and become them as totally as possible. The reason why these ideas of synthesis in experience are relevant to this study is because it is about students who were entering into a world, or onto a stage where affect was going to be an important dimension of learning, and where empathy was going to become an important design tool. They were going to take on new roles as design students in an art school, and were going to learn new professional parts by trying out being designers in simulations of practice. They speak some of their experience, telling different kinds of stories, and I have tried to find the right props and scenery so they can be understood in their drama, and it is not reduced to a pantomime called ‘The Two Cultures’. Experiential learning “provides a framework for the integration of the cognitive and socio-emotional perspectives of the learning process. In the integration of these perspectives lies the possibility of a holistic approach to the learning process that recognises both the emotional and intellectual components of the learning act.” (Kolb and Fry 1975:56)

Experiential learning We all vary in how we approach a learning ‘situation’, what we notice, what we do and what we learn. This is because our past experience inevitably means that the way we come into the present moment differs from person to person, affecting our disposition and our approach. Educational researchers 8

Van der Veer, R., and Valsiner, J. (Eds.) (1994) The Vygotsky Reader. Oxford, Blackwell.

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have found ways to describe some of these differences. Many of them are bipolar, for example Pask’s (1969) serialists and holists; Marton and Saljo’s (1976) surface and deep learners, and Hudson’s (1966) convergers and divergers. While such spectra are initially attractive as ways that tutors may identify students’ approaches (which they themselves may be completely unaware of), the field of experiencing learning and learning through experience is more complex. It is addressed by what is known as experiential learning. This has been a useful frame of reference to me both personally and professionally. I was introduced to the concepts of experiential learning while I was on the CSDHE9 course in the late 1980’s. Although I had been working in education, as a tutor and as a designer, I was aware of a lack of learning in my own life; I did not seem to learn from experience, and I did not think of learning as part of daily life, as a life-skill. In order to learn anything I felt that an enormous amount of effort was required, outside of myself. Despite what I knew about the mechanisms of perception, I had little sense at one level that learning was a continuous part of consciousness, and that at another it had an instrumental aspect to it. Thus the concepts of experiential learning were welcome and influential since they provided ways to think about lurking personal questions, as well as broader issues. In the 1970’s Kolb and Fry incorporated the idea of learning approaches or styles in their work on learning seen as a cycle of different ways of experiencing the world. They built on earlier experiential learning theories, especially those of Lewin, who borrowed the metaphor of the learning cycle from electrical engineering in order to highlight the important role of feedback (Kolb 1984:21).10 Kolb’s mapping of his cycle onto a problem-solving process for various kinds of decision-making activities immediately suggested its usefulness for considering whether curriculum development in design reflected an understanding of the different kinds of learning involved, as it established 9

Centre for Staff Development in Higher Education, Institute of Education, London University 10 Some link learning styles to Howard Gardner's work on multiple intelligencies, although I have not taken that route.

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common ground between learning to learn and learning to design (Bramwell-Davis 1996a, 1996b). The cycle embraces the multi-sensorial and social as well as more obviously cognitive aspects of learning, providing for the broadest agenda of design skills. However, Heron (1992:197) suggests Kolb “has to tack on other modes such as intuition and imagination in an unsatisfactory way, on to this structure to make up for its limitations.” There has been other considerable criticism of most aspects of Kolb’s model, but I have remained with its concepts because they appeared relevant and applicable, and because the saliency of experience in learning was unfamiliar to those who were more used to thinking that learning was an abstract and purely intellectual process.

Figure 12. Kolb and Fry Learning cycle, 1984.

The model, now very well known, and widely used by design educators, comprises many separate features, which build towards a scheme addressing different levels and aspects of learning. Initially there is a circle of four ways of knowing: concrete experience (CE), observations and reflections, or

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reflective observation (RO), formation of abstract concepts and generalisations, or abstract conceptualisation (AC), and testing implications of concepts in new situations, or active experimentation (AE). These are set at four poles, such that forming a circle, or, if as Eraut (1994:107) notes, there is the disposition, it more dynamically becomes an iterative cycle, each informing the next, as learning from experience takes place. The graphic scheme is not intended to map onto one’s continuous stream of experience, but is a way to clarify the relationships between the ways different kinds of experience can lead to learning. Secondly, the opposite pairs in the circle – CE and AC, and RO and AE, are seen to describe opposing but connected ways of thinking. “The ELT11 model portrays two dialectically related modes of grasping experience – apprehension (concrete experience) and comprehension (abstract conceptualization) – and two dialectically related modes of transforming experience – intension (reflective observation) and extension (active experimentation)” (Baker et al., 2002:4). We do experience the world in these different ways, and it is through engaging with the dialectical tension produced by different ways of knowing, and finding ways to integrate them, that one flexes the muscles of learning itself. Daloz (1986) drawing a comparison with Perry’s (1970) metaphor of development as a journey, or pilgrim’s progress, stresses that the dialectical process is not a mere synthesis, a merging of black and white to make grey, but results in a move to another level of understanding where the process itself can be seen as well as its results. This new position leads to further dialectical interactions. Kolb (1984) expresses this process by extending the model, literally and metaphorically, drawing a cone arising from the original circle, this representing integration of the different ways of knowing. Such a diagram only indicates static concepts; to express the realities an entirely different analogy has struck me as apposite. The dialectical struggles alluded to by Kolb as necessary for higher learning are like the effort to amalgamate oil and vinegar in an emulsion that is more than the sum of its parts; if one leaves off the effort, the different elements separate. 11

Experiential Learning Theory

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Snodgrass and Coyne (1997:88) situate the designer at the centre of the design process, as I situate learning. They suggest that in order to understand what designing consists of “we locate design activities within the field of the design situation and the meanings that situation has for the designer. Making sense of the meanings of design actions and a design situation can only proceed by reference to the circle of interpretation.”

Figure 13. Learning cycle with design-related activities, after Kolb, 1984.

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CE/AC and Tacit Knowing “Concrete knowing involves experiencing the world primarily through feelings in an immediate, tacit, and subjective way, whereas abstract knowing is centred in a conceptual, linguistic, and objective interpretation of the world” (Kolb 2002). The opposition between these two ways of knowing has been compared by several authors to a passage by the poet Keats.12 He turned the phrase ‘negative capability’ to mean when “man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.13 The sharp juxtaposition also hints at the assumption, a common frustration amongst ‘creative’ people, that explicit, quantitative knowing is of higher value than tacit knowing, eclipsing, or marginalising the virtues of unarticulated knowing. I have tried, in the section on Visual and conceptual thinking, to explore what are posed as two ways of knowing, the conceptual and the perceptual. Their sometimes oppositional nature, as well as the epistemic backgrounds they came from was sometimes experienced by IDE students in some confusion, as described in The Local Setting. Keats was perhaps assuming that the poet works alone with his thoughts. However, when one is with others, as Wyss-Flamm14 (2002:154) notes: “In conversational learning the formulation of juxtaposition can be seen as a deepening of individual meaning-making of a larger conversation. It moves the learner across a dialectic from concrete experience to abstract conceptualization (Kolb 1984), from awareness of difference at a more tacit to a more explicit level (Nonaka 1994).” She adds in a note an elaboration about her use of the concept of ‘juxtaposition’ that turns the subject fullcircle: “The verb “to juxtapose” is the act of “placing side by side especially for comparison and contrast.”… The concept that ideas set side by side influence each other comes from the visual arts: when colors are juxtaposed, they become influenced as to their hue. Juxtaposition thus also implies creativity.” (2002:161) 12

for example Claxton (2005:149), on intuition, and Starr (1966) on expansion of experience. John Keats in a letter to his brother, 21st December 1817. The Letters of John Keats, (1958) ed. Rollins, H.E. Cambridge, MA, I, p. 193. 14 Wyss-Flamm is writing about conversational learning in multi-cultural groups. She uses ‘multi-cultural’ with its more conventional meaning, but the observations could also apply to the professional multi-culturalism of the teamwork involved in getting any design project from idea to product in the marketplace 13

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Concrete experience gained through freehand drawing, through exploring materials and tools, and making things by hand mediated through the senses, is an important source of tacit knowledge.15 Rust (2004:79) describes several projects which explore how such tacit knowing can be made accessible, after having clarified that it is a fundamentally misguided idea that “people’s tacit knowing can somehow be extracted and made explicit in the form of rules for all to employ (as) expressed often in the field of knowledge management….The original tacit knowledge held by individuals is unique to them, a product of their whole experience, and not a direct source of generalizable knowledge.” He recalls Polyani’s use of the term ‘indwelling’ to describe the processes of using tacit knowledge. The projects described by Rust involved designers working with scientists on different problems, where objective data were complemented by more holistic approaches. The designers’ ability to embody ideas and knowledge in artefacts such as simple models and drawings, which enabled a reframing of representations of the problem and proposals, set up a process where interacting with them could ‘unlock’ tacit knowledge in the participants, including potential users. “The provision of a rich set of images or artifacts….provides an environment in which individuals can dwell in their work and employ their tacit knowledge.” (2004:81) Tacit knowing is often associated with creative processes, and there can be an unwillingness to explicate their “paradoxes and antinomies” described by Bruner (1979:20-27), or to consider that creativity can be learned. Creative thinking is however a good setting for exploring the integration of concrete experience and abstract concepts. Bruner’s discussion of the conditions of creativity (rather than what it is) identifies passion and decorum, detachment and commitment, deferral and immediacy as paradoxical pairs of approaches that work together to produce the “antic” quality of creativity. He describes this “combinatorial activity” as necessary to produce “effective surprise”. If, as is often the case in undergraduate education, engineering subjects are presented in the abstract in order to instruct principles, without real-world

15

It is sometimes differentiated as unconscious knowing, which we are unaware of, and preconscious knowing, which may be able to become explicit.

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examples considered alongside, the opportunity may be lost to develop such tacit understanding and to flex learning skill itself. PBD: If you were going to work on that project (previous work) again can you see what you might call on from work you’ve done here? VA: I think thinking more laterally with breadth, which I would say I’ve been exposed to more this term than I have before which, I would admit, I haven’t picked up on as quickly as I would have on perhaps things I’ve touched on before – you sort of have a grasp for it and you pick it up and you’re running quite quickly, but, I think things like where I’m exposed to a completely new concept of thinking, perhaps I haven’t given myself enough time to stretch myself, and not only that, but to let go of my constrained thought processes from my previous experiences I’ve had, the engineering course and holding down a job for four years, you have certain restraints on your time to just go completely whacky. But now, where you’re basically free to explore your own mind or develop as much as you want, it’s quite hard to actually do it, it’s hard to just let go and say “right I’m going to be off the wall here, completely, I’m going to give this thought as much breadth as well as height.” Yes it’s not quite the same is it, because as you said just now sometimes one picks up things and you think I’m quite good at this, I can run with this immediately. Some of them might be chunks of knowledge – “I’ve got that, go with it”, but these other things are processes, they work in a different way? Yes you don’t go to a library and read up on them; you’ve just got to think and ponder and wonder, and whether you think by doodling or sketching or ideas or just walk and think, I find it’s hard getting to grips with that creativity thing where you’re not coming in to your desk for eight hours and that’s a really good day: “I’ve worked really hard, I haven’t come up with anything creative but I’ve put the time in, I’ve had a good day.” I have to try and get into the thought that I might have some inspiring thought while making my tea at night, it’s not a work period for creativity, it comes twentyfour hours a day. I think it is helpful to know more about it; if you do know more about it then it becomes more of a friend that you can be curious about, you can watch your own behaviours a bit, say “Am I behaving in a way that’s likely to lead to me loosening up a bit or am I still in the channels?” But you can’t just suddenly do it. PBD: Have you had time on the course to do anything exploratory? ES (after graduation from IDE) Not as much as I would have liked to do. I find more time to do that when I’m working funnily enough, because you see funny things…I was always planning to make a soap dish out of a rear engine

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mount for a motorbike because I thought it looked like a soap dish. But I mean I find more inspiration for that sort of thing when I’m outside of College. OK then lets explore that a bit… … on the course It’s overload. It’s overload. Yeah I mean because you’re in room full of creative people its hard to break out of that kind of…but whereas if you’re working in a weld shop you’re probably one of the only creative people so you have time to look at things in a different way because it’s not pushed upon you, so you see things you otherwise wouldn’t have seen. So it’s quite a contrast isn’t it, between, I mean it sounds a bit like the difference between working in an autonomous free-wheeling way and the other one is where somehow or other it’s the agenda and therefore you’re being asked to do it and therefore somehow or other, ironically, its harder. If you’re around creative people all the time there’s a sense of constraint almost, whereas if you’re not being forced to be creative, think creatively, if you’re in an environment that’s not normally considered to be creative you’ll see things in there you can make things from. I think this is really important in terms of the conditions under which creativity can flourish. Yes I think it comes out in the most peculiar places. Is it there anyway? Yeah. It’s quite ironic that it’s a course that is set up for people to learn to be more creative, to be creative, but because of the very nature of the – whatever it is – the intensity of the work that they’re doing it’s actually more difficult for them to be creative than if they were in another environment.

Tacit knowing and skill are not only associated with experience through the senses, as in the context of hand-craftsmanship, or with the instinctual level of knowing how to use something (itself often the result of good design). In the context of post-graduate professional training Stevens-Long and Barner (2006:466) also note that “Tacit knowledge implies higher order thinking processes rather than the acquisition of facts. It involves the ability to formulate and solve problems within highly complex and unstructured settings”, which not only describes the scenarios of the ill-structured or ‘wicked’ design problems designers work on, but also the management scenarios of the multi-disciplinary teams they often lead. Baker et al. (2002:4) from a learning perspective say that “The interplay of tacit and explicit dimensions of knowledge manifest themselves in conversational

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learning as individuals come together in a joint meaning-making process”, and this as well describes a design tutorial or crit as it does a management meeting in professional design practice. Early experience of trusting and productive discussion can sow the seeds for later management skill, but it does require teaching with developmental intentions, rather than just news from the front. As Snodgrass and Coyne (1997:89) note, design seen as a hermeneutical activity involves a dialogic process with oneself as well as with others, and they distinguish tacit knowledge from tacit understanding: “The design process is an uncovering of tacit understanding, and this hidden understanding is not something fixed, crystalline, frozen. It is processual, fluid, in incessant flux. It cannot, therefore, be brought to the surface in the manner of an archaeological findsome lifeless object dredged up from the depths of the mind.” PBD: So did these people skills come up before the degree show in other projects? ES: On a more personal level I think, I mean just having to talk to people about what you’re doing and stuff and having to convey ideas to people on the course – I mean it’s quite valuable talking to everyone on the course, even if you’re talking to people and they’re not saying what you think is valuable or useful, but it does cause you to think about your work differently. So just having to talk to people on the course is something I’ve not had to do before and it’s something we ought to do. Yes, but where did that idea come from in you, that you felt that you wanted to struggle? Well yeah I just felt that I ought to do that whether I liked it or not. I mean sometimes it’s not always gone that way and towards the end of the project I don’t want to talk to anyone, “just don’t give me new ideas because I’ll just start thinking about them and stuff”, but I mean maybe I still ought to do that. But to sort of lock you away in a box and design things is no good. But is that something that you thought it was going to be like or is it something that it has been like before? Umm, I’ve never had to discuss with the people around me so much. On my last degree it was get on with your own work sort of thing because it was technically more intense, but I figured before I came on this course that there would be more interaction in the studio. When you come in here for the interview, just having a look around the studio and seeing people working together and helping each other out, I thought well that’s cool. That’s umm that’s not natural for me but it’s going to be good.

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So is that something you’ve worked on, or did it, as it were, come out naturally? Sort of came out really.

Wyss-Flamm (2002:154) describes how awareness of difference (of gender, of background) means that tacit knowledge can emerge into circulation as part of the social process, such juxtaposition leading to a deepening of individual meaning-making. “At the same time as it connects, juxtaposition remains the unique individual expression of experience.” This is a description of the most fruitful kind of studio discussion with one’s peers, with or without tutors involved, where assumed priorities and other value judgements drive exploration and evaluation of design proposals, outside the arena of assessment, and is a strong argument for maintaining studio-based learning, for higher level learning and development. The activity may not, however, fulfil its learning-to-learn potential without another internal voice drawing one’s attention to what is going on, following Kolb’s assertion “that learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” (1984:41) recalling the transformative dialectic of AE/RO16. Especially in the world of craftmaking, tacit knowing somehow has an aura that it is self-evidently good. However there is another perspective. Argyris and Schon (1974) make the distinction between theories-in-use, and espoused theories about how we act in the world. The latter is what we think we do or would do, the former refers to the ideas that actually determine our actions, but which we are largely not in touch with; they are tacit and habitual. In Management Studies attention is often given to how these theories-in-use can be made more visible. Sennett (2008:50-51) in the context of craftsmanship, in this instance of management in the NHS, says: “In the higher stages of skill, there is a constant interplay between tacit knowledge and self-conscious awareness, the tacit knowledge serving as an anchor, the explicit knowledge serving as critique and corrective…. (however,) bedded in too comfortably, people will neglect the higher standard; it is by arousing self-consciousness that the worker is driven to do better.” 16

Active Experimentation/Reflective Observation

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The IDE students were not all mature students, but they were adult learners, who had had time to acquire procedural (or tacit) knowledge, and “its associated strategic abilities of the….problem-solving strategies, skills and productive expertise” in their adult roles in life, (Hoare 2006:11) as well as the issues described by Argyris and Schon above. These they brought to learning how to design. PBD: So let’s say that was sort of not quite as strict as testing but at least it was trying it out in a very pragmatic way. And how did you feel about the validity of that relative to your previous training let’s say – what ‘valid’ means? NT: I’m very glad that I did the small-scale tests and then I relied on my engineering experience of scaling those things, which there are standard engineering approaches to these but they’re also something that you just develop and grow, you get a feeling for ‘there’s not enough steel in this’ or there’s not enough material or these are not the right shape. You could spend five days on a million pound machine working these out to the millimetre but I think you grow in this way and just playing with bits of the material I knew how it worked in a certain size and extrapolate that up, and it’s playing with the material at home – making it, moving it. Would you have been able to do that on your undergraduate project? Take that same kind of attitude? I think these things are certainly possible but I don’t know that I’d have had the confidence to have actually done it. NH: I was trying to apply mathematical models to the profiles on the edge, and in the end I played around with it and in the end I just scrapped all these calculations and stuff and drew a line by hand on one side what I thought was right, cut it, planed it off and sanded it by hand and just did the same on the other side. So again it was this leaving behind this methodical approach and in the end thinking well look it’s got to be done by eye. PBD: But at the same time you see, I don’t think you’re doing it like a child doing it by eye, I have a feeling that you were doing it by eye based on the intimate knowledge you’ve built up during the research stage of what the constraints on the form could be. So maybe the sophisticated skill is knowing when to trust your instinct.

Some people had had work placements in design companies before joining the course. Others who had been through apprenticeships had a well of work-based knowledge, and respect for it. Others had professional industrial experience. Gut feelings about design were not always on such a solid base.

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Design tutors on the other hand spoke from their tacit knowledge about design practice. There is an assumption in design teaching that there is a kind of osmotic transfer in the conversational space of the design tutorial. This kind of interchange can represent what Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1986) describe as knowledge constructed through integration of the voices of others, which has moved on from a more subjective or private stance of ‘I know what I know’ and a discomfort with ideas that contradict one’s own (Taylor 2006:202). Tacit knowledge is by one definition that which cannot be made explicit; having become aware of it in someone else, one needs will as well as imagination to pursue it. The design tutorial has a lot of responsibility for negotiating these different strands of knowing.

Learning seminars and Learning Styles Inventory activities As part of the broader agenda of engaging students with taking responsibility for their own learning as a natural feature of post-graduate work, I ran a series of seminars about learning during the first year of the IDE course. I introduced the concepts of experiential learning, and invited students to fill in the Kolb’s Learning Styles Inventory (LSI), devised to reveal preferred learning styles. In many cases the results were congruent with Kolb’s research findings about engineers and mathematicians. In the IDE seminars we were able to discuss this, with reference to the students’ scores. The main focus was on introducing the idea of learning itself, and the proposition that there might be learning styles, and preferred ones. Further mapping of these on to the problem-solving, or design cycle provided an intriguing and plausible context in which to have tutorial discussions about any correlations with those aspects of the design process any particular student found most difficult, or even alien, rather than her wondering if it was some obscure personal failure. Criticism of the LSI has included the point that Kolb himself made that the ratings were based only on the way the learners rated themselves. This can however be turned to advantage. I filled in the forms each year, trying to sidestep the fact that I knew it almost off by heart. Despite this I surprised myself by consistently scoring low on the AE pole. Reflection on this was a learning experience in its own right.

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Fenwick (2000:244), in a wide-ranging critique of experiential learning, sees theorizing it as a way of disciplining experience: “…a process that inserts governance as a matter of course and naturalizes hierarchies of knowledge and skill. The resulting appropriation and compartmentalization by educators of fluid spaces of human meaningmaking reifies, essentializes and narrativises experience as a knowable resource to be exploited in the service of rationalistic and utilitarian notions of knowledge, splits rational consciousness from messy matters of the body, (and) regulates subjects through technologies such as critical reflection and accreditation of prior learning.”

I see this as a strong and valid political statement, calling to mind debates about how education may and may not make one free. However, seen on the level of a tool to hand (recalling the positive aspects of the work of the bricoleur), it was quite clear that the conceptual frameworks of Kolb’s scheme did provide useful ways of thinking about learning designing in a programme of work otherwise primarily devoted to just getting on with it as the assumed best way to be doing it.

Reflection According to Kolb (2002:91) AE/RO is a transformative dimension of learning where “the creation of knowledge and meaning occurs through the active engagement in ideas and experiences in the external world and through internal reflection about the qualities of these experiences and ideas (Kolb 1984). Thus learning occurs through the dialectical movement of action and reflection as learners move outward into the external world and inward into themselves.”

AE/RO “work” on what has been taken in from the axis of experience and abstract ideas, integrating intention-reflection and extension-action (Kolb et al. 2002:52). Pigrum (2010:1) in his exploration of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein (situated being) discusses the importance of ‘transitional drawing’ processes in mediating between an inner and an outer world, where such activities act “as

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a place holder for something that is emerging, something provisionally woven together that allows us to do, to undo and redo in order to forestall premature closure.” Rogers (2001:41), in his survey of reflection in higher education, notes that definitions vary, but that “the intent of reflection is to integrate the understanding gained into one’s experience in order to enable better choices or actions in the future as well to enhance one’s overall effectiveness.” Testing the implications of ideas in a new situation is the necessary partner to prevent reflection from becoming empty reverie, even if these two activities may seem to inhibit each other at any one moment. One must try out the effects of reflection to see if they have substance. In design one does a quick but accurate sketch or some ‘quick and dirty’ model-making to see if an idea might work. In a different context one would try out a different approach to understanding. Reflection may initially appear to be a cognitive process. Boud et al. (1985:11) however are clear that the process “is a complex one in which both feelings and cognition are closely interrelated and interactive.” Rogers (2001:45,48) elaborates: “data collection involves first attending to feelings and then re-evaluating the experience through the elements of association, integration, validation and appropriation.” In terms of outcomes “in keeping with their emphasis on the affective components of reflection, the authors described possible emotional outcomes such as changes in feelings, attitudes and values.” Michelson (1998:218) goes further in her critique of experiential learning by saying that: “the dualisms underlying experiential learning – reflection/experience, knowledge/skill and theory/practice – are all versions of the mind/body split and the privileging of mind over body.” In contrast she makes the case that experiential learning, including reflecting, is a holistic process that includes the body and its senses as equal partners in the process. Some of this was evident in the project crits, as described above. This aspect of reflection is very important for design, where the practical implications of empathy for the affective aspects of design work go beyond rule-based ergonomics and anthropometry. These quantitative approaches

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have often assumed it is possible to fit an adaptable person to a machine or device, what Stephen Pheasant described as the use of “so many Procrustean beds”17, rather than vice-versa. For too long in popular fashion ill-fitting clothes have been dimensioned for out-of-date and out-of-culture bodies.18 Design is multi-modal for the designer, for being in touch with the emotional aspects of users’ experiences, where an interface is not just cognitive and physical but emotional as well. There is pleasure and satisfaction in the feeling of a problem solved for both designer and user. It is not too much to think of ‘I like how I feel when I use this product’, especially when it is, for example, a good chair to sit in for hours at the bedside of a suffering child, or about carrying around a diabetes injection kit (now a device like a pen to be worn in a jacket pocket, rather than something embarrassing in a plastic bag).

Wisdom Kitchener and King (1981) developed their Reflective Judgement Model (RJM) on the basis of Perry’s (1970) work. What makes their model relevant in design work is that their stages each describe not only views of knowledge, but also concepts of justification. This is of immediate application in various stages of a design process where judgements are being made, both about the content of ideas and about how decisions are made, and the developing skills of evaluation by students of their design work. Kitchener and King’s stage 1 concept of justification is: “Beliefs need no justification since there is assumed to be an absolute correspondence between what is believed to be true and what is true. Alternate views are not perceived” (King and Kitchener 1994:14). This adequately describes a remark I heard about his project from a student on the other RCA product design course: “It’s a good idea because I have had it”, (this not to be confused with Marcel Duchamp’s 1913 proposition about the art status of his readymades). For highly complex design projects affecting the lives of many people the stage seven concept of justification is more suitable:

17

Stephen Pheasant (1996) Body Space. London, Taylor and Francis. A practice no longer justifiable now that computer aided modelling can interface between a customer for a pair of jeans in Europe and a manufacturer on the far side of the world. 18

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“Beliefs are justified probabilistically on the basis of a variety of interpretive considerations, such as the weight of the evidence, …. the risk of erroneous conclusions, consequences of alternative judgements, and the interrelationships of these factors. Conclusions are defended as representing the most complete, plausible, or compelling understanding of an issue on the basis of the available evidence” (King and Kitchener 199415).

The development of understanding of systems of justification, one’s own, those of authorities and those from the wider culture, is one of the necessary skills of judgement for a student progressing through a conventional studiobased design course towards professional practice, where such skills would further develop in a working life. Along with other writers, Kitchener and King (1981) associate reflective ability with dealing with ill-structured or wicked problems (the stuff of much design work), and Rogers (2001:39) identifies a necessary antecedent for reflection being an unusual or perplexing situation. This relates to Bruner’s (1979) ideas about creativity, where reflection may defer closure, by enabling people to stay with a tolerance of ambiguity.19 This is applicable in searching for better solutions to design problems, as well as in developing a longer-term ability to deal with discrepant information in other contexts. Schon’s (1987:28) use of the term ‘reflection’ is also well known in the design education community, perhaps because he developed his ideas on it while working with architectural students, and trying to understand the nature of the interaction between a designer and a design problem using the media of drawings and models. To distinguish ‘technical rationality’ from the more autonomous processes of more experienced designers, he distinguishes reflection-in-action, reflection-on-action, and reflection-onpractice. On the spot experimentation works in partnership with reflection as in Kolb’s (1984) original scheme.

19 Frenkel-Brunswik, E. (1949) Intolerance of Ambiguity as an emotional and perceptual personality variable. Journal of Personality, Vol. 18/1 pp. 108 - 143. Bruner, JS and Postman, L. (1949) On the Perception of ambiguity: a Paradigm. Journal of Personality, Vol. 18/2, pp. 206 - 223.

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Reflection-in-action happens in the moment of an experience. It takes place very acutely in the present via the senses without verbalising. Atkinson and Claxton (2000:5) take up Schon’s argument for experienced intuitive knowledge with a quotation from Munby and Russell: “ ‘the reflection that Schon is calling attention to is in the action, not in the associated thinking about action’ (1992 original emphasis)”. They (Atkinson and Claxton) go on to maintain that this is meta-cognition rather than reflection, which would accord with Schon’s usage (1987:28). Michelson reminds us that “observation is embodied – literally so – in human sensory apparatus and technological artefacts” and thus that “knowledge-production takes place within a dense web of interaction” of different factors. (1998:225) Nonetheless my personal experience is that this can be called reflection; it is useful to be able to distinguish a state of mind where all ‘mind-talk’ is suspended, and this I would call reflection-in-action, where all associations are dropped as noticed, things move, and then reflection-on-action is able to take cognizance of it. Schon (1996:2) in explaining reflection-in-action says it is “closely tied to the experience of surprise”. It takes us out of our habitual everyday actions. Tellingly, he uses as example the way jazz musicians improvise: “they think, or perhaps feel what they are doing. While in the process, they evolve their way of doing it.” (my emphasis). Schon goes on to describe reflection-on-action as “a stop and think…where the designer pauses “to think back over what she has done in a project, exploring the understanding that she has brought to the handling of the task.” Reflection-on-practice happens after an interval. “The designer may surface and may criticize tacit understandings that have grown up around repetitive experiences of designing.” While reflection may sound like an independent activity, Michelson (1998:231) insists that “practice always enacts particular social values and particular visions of the good” implying that reflection cannot be a fundamentally radical activity, although in my view it can lead to it. It may be a philosophical question, whose fine points are not relevant here. What is obvious is, as Mezirow (1991:167) says

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“although the transformation of meaning schemes, specifically beliefs, attitudes and emotional reactions through reflection is an everyday occurrence, it does not necessarily involve self-reflection. On the other hand, the transformation of meaning perspective, which occurs less frequently, is more likely to involve our sense of self, and always involves critical reflection upon the distorted premises sustaining our structure of expectation.”

As Stevens-Long and Barner (2006:457) say of perspective transformation: “It causes us to challenge the assumptions that constrain the way we perceive, understand and feel about the world” adding that this is the beginning of affect being seen to be part of the process – how we feel about the world. “Most of the literature on cognitive development ignores the implications for emotional change altogether.” Mezirow says (2000:19) “We transform frames of reference – our own and those of others - by becoming critically aware of their context – the source, nature and consequences of taken-for-granted beliefs.” His test of his idea of ‘perspective transformation’ clearly shows that personal implication is involved. It is “not only that it is more inclusive, discriminating, and integrative of experience but also that it is permeable (open) to alternative perspectives so that inclusivity, discrimination and integration continually increase” (1991:156) King and Kitchener (1994:212), as a result of their research into parallels between developing reflective judgement and developing moral judgement conclude that: “promoting the development of reflective judgement may be one step in the process of developing higher levels of moral judgement.” All these explorations of the effects of reflection describe increasingly sophisticated ways of thinking in recognition of the complexities and uncertainties of knowledge in and of the world. The implication is that ethical dimensions will become apparent, and that, at the very least, options become available to behave in more ethically aware ways. As I believe that, in most design, the intellectual and ethical dimensions have almost complete overlap, it seems that more developed thinking would lead to more ethical awareness in professional practice. This does not mean one would automatically prioritise ethical criteria over all others; it would depend on one’s disposition.

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It seems that another role of reflection is in the development of a disposition to learn, essential for autonomy once formal education and training are left behind. Rowson (2008:88), while writing about children, describes the best kind of mentoring work one might find in the proactive environment of the design studio: “by consistently encouraging students to reflect on the relevance of what they are learning and to make connections that only they could have thought of, teachers help them develop their imaginations and increase the chance that learning will become dispositional, rather than merely add to the sum of their inert knowledge.”

In the context of lifelong or professional learning it is equally relevant to adults. It is easy to reduce reflection to a wordy, internal conversation. Michelson’s perspective asserts that observation comes from the whole person, including one’s subjectivities; the body, which is gendered, and its attendant senses, is there all the time, and it is the self that is engaged “as a mirror and a window” (Stevens-Long and Barner 2000:463). My experience is that this is true for reflection-on-action, but not for reflection-in-action, the useful definitional difference between them being that the latter is a process of intense metaphysical awareness in the moment, with suspension of any and all conditions, sometimes deliberately chosen, followed by the inevitable return to an accounting process as thoughts rush in, but with a new perspective. This intersection of self and knowledge corresponds to King and Kitchener’s “epistemic” cognition, in their view the highest level of reflective judgement. Reflection-on-action and reflection-on-practice are conversational processes, whether with oneself or with others, and are also the sites of new thinking. Kolb (2002:92) describes how an internalised mode of dialogue can go through a transition to a collective mode of exploration through conversation, under the right circumstances. Being open and experimental requires trust. This may build up with familiar peers, but would be more difficult in multi-disciplinary meetings with people one does not know.

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“In order to create new knowledge, it is necessary to overcome, not only the fear of knowing which Maslow discusses, but the active hatred of learning from experience which Bion suggests is present in most adults….Perhaps learning occurs when we are able to transcend that fear in a dialogue with others where we let empathic understanding have free reign.”20

Meanwhile if the design artefact is seen in some way as one of the actors in the process of designing, then Schon’s concept of “backtalk” acquires bigger dimensions. “Most of the time she is in a kind of progressive relationship – as she goes along, she is making judgements. Sometimes the designer’s judgement has the intimacy of a conversational relationship, where she is getting some response back from the medium….One form of judgement…I call backtalk, where you discover something totally unexpected” (Winograd 1996:4).

This conversation does not only happen with the work in front of one, but can take the designer out of her own head into the wider world where products are at the mercy of their unpredictable users, and can reveal novel features, interesting or disastrous. A gradient appears of the kinds of conversation one can choose to have with the different media of a subject – an idea represented as a formula, a diagram, a drawing (of varying degrees of realism), the physical world. Each requires a more multi-faceted kind of engagement as the ‘backtalk’ becomes richer and more challenging, stretching ways of thinking and knowing. These, however, are all circumstances of the uncertainties of practice, which Rogers (2001) noted as one of the potential triggers to reflection. A growing 20 John Steinbeck, in ‘The Log from the Sea of Cortez, the narrative portion of the book Sea of Cortez with a profile of Ed Ricketts’ (1958:xlvii) quotes his friend and fellow sailor Ed Ricketts: “Adults, in their dealings with children, are insane,” he said. “And children know it too. Adults lay down the rules they would not think of following, speak truths they do not believe. And yet they expect children to obey the rules, believe the truths, and admire and respect their parents for this nonsense. Children must be very wise and secret to tolerate adults at all. And the greatest nonsense of all that adults expect children to believe is that people learn by experience. No greater lie was ever revered. And its falseness is immediately discerned by children since their parents obviously have not learned anything by experience. Far from learning, adults simply become set in a maze of prejudices and dreams and sets of rules whose origins they do not know and would not dare inspect for fear the whole structure might topple over on them.”

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recognition of the values of reflective practices would enable one to find time in busy schedules, and to transcend or absent oneself from the buzzy studio environment, with its increasingly go-faster dynamics. The idea of wisdom is usually associated with higher levels of thinking and inner reflection. Keller and Werchan (2006:424) suggest three meta-criteria over and above rich factual and procedural knowledge: “Life-span contextualism, relativism of values and life priorities, and recognition and management of uncertainty.” This relativism is not the ungrounded indecision of Perry’s middle stages of personal development, but does acknowledge that in the modern world even a concept such as wisdom may be culturally determined. They continue, quoting Hoare’s discussion of the work of Erikson: “the historically and culturally relative adult is a ‘highly sophisticated person, one who thinks at the metacognitive level of abstraction, is knowledgeable about history and cultural differences, and cares to be insightful about and open to other persons and ways of being in the world’ (Hoare 2002:145).” In the context of designing this introduction of the conative dimension is pivotal, the crucial aspect for me in the quote being the word cares. This reflects people’s decisions about the values to be prioritized in any design situation. Sternberg (2008:144) sees it as a process of balance and integration, using language that relates closely to design: “Wisdom is the ability to apply one’s successful intelligence, creativity and knowledge towards a common good by balancing ones own…interests, other people’s…interests, and larger interests over the short and long terms, through the infusion of values, in order to adapt to, shape and select environments.”

Developing the capacity for reflection on current experience in the light of mature judgement with the aim of greater care, as described above, draws me to return to the subject of hupomnemata, or notebooks, discussed in Research Process. This return is also an example of my notebook process at work, where a chance encounter can be recognised as a significant one, because the earlier half of the connection had been made explicit, by being explored through writing and reflection. Here is an example of this process at work.

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Figure 14. Hieronymus Bosch, 1560, The Tribulations of St Anthony, © Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon, Portugal.

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In Foucault’s (1997:207-211) essay Self-Writing, he refers the practice not only to classical Greek philosophers but also to Saint Anthony, as part of his ascetic life in the desert as a spiritual recluse. Foucault describes one of the purposes of such self-writing to be that “it offers what one has done or thought to a possible gaze” and also that it can be “a weapon in spiritual combat. While the Devil is a power who deceives and causes one to be deluded about oneself…, writing constitutes a test and a kind of touchstone: by bringing to light the impulses of thought, it dispels the darkness where the enemy’s plots are hatched.” Some time after writing my account of my research process, and while I was thinking about the metaphors of transition between different ways of thinking and knowing, I came across Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych of The Tribulations of Saint Anthony, painted circa 1505 (Massing 1994, Bax 1979). The left-hand panel shows St Anthony exhausted by fighting off the temptations sent to him by demons in various guises. He is staggering over a bridge on his path, underneath which sit three devils concocting further accusations to be thrown at the saint, the word diaballo originally meaning ‘I accuse’, usually falsely (Massing 1994:115). A devil messenger is about to deliver a mock protest about the saint’s torments, under the pretence of rendering service (Bax 1979:15). Foucault takes pains to point out that the hupomnemata “ought not to be understood as those accounts of spiritual experience (temptations, struggles, downfalls and victories) that will be found in later Christian literature”. They do not constitute a “narrative of oneself’”, but they do have “a purpose that is nothing less than the “shaping of the self, “la constitution du soi”.21 However, taking this last phrase “the shaping of the self”, and referring it back to learning, as outlined in this section, I have sidestepped the Christian iconography of the painting. (Bosch was a member of an orthodox confraternity and was known to be “a moralist haunted by the devil, obsessed with the deadly sins and their eternal punishment” (Massing op.cit.:109)). I have seen the tempters and temptations as the moral and ethical questions that lurk for all of us, regardless of religious persuasion, which we deal with in various ways, reflecting amongst other things our 21

Foucault, M. (1983:1238) Dits et Ecrits. Paris, Quarto Gallimard,

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epistemic development. The temptations of the bridge metaphor itself are further explored in Interlude: Bridge. The notebooks that some of us keep for various purposes, including designing, (when they may also be sketchbooks), may not often have the same function as the hupomnemata, but the diagram below attempts to show some of the themes they can have in common. The process of critical reflection remains central to learning in all three settings.

Figure 15. Notebook processes compared.

ENGINEERING EDUCATION

IDE students had all graduated with engineering degrees, usually with high grades. I learnt from their application forms, their entry interviews (all shortlisted students), and during the course that there was great variety, in the different universities, in the way their courses were structured and oriented, what subjects were included and the work that was done. Even though the name of the degree was in most cases Mechanical Engineering, or some close variant of it1 different subjects were included and there was little consistency in the work done. Some courses also incorporated industrial design. Once the students were in the IDE department an experience held in common was that, regardless of what engineering degree had been undertaken, each student felt that he or she had now entered a profoundly different culture, both in terms of the way things were learned as well was what was to be learned. Students had framed the attitudes they brought with them in the culture of those undergraduate courses, and so deep was the difference between the past and present that it was a significant factor in how students were able to work in the new culture of the IDE course. To explore epistemic development in the setting of the IDE course, I have therefore needed to look at the prior experience of the students. Descriptions of engineering teaching and learning commonly used in publications about training from within the engineering institutions portray the student learner as a passive creature. In an engineering image the student is in training in order to be processed, to be transformed from raw material into a product that is appropriate to the employment and professional needs of the day.

1

A few students came from courses in electrical, electronic or civil engineering, and the remarks of this section apply equally to these cases.

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A searching paper (2008) by Edan, Finger, Sandler and Livshitz in the International Journal of Mechanical Engineering Education on the problems facing universities attempting to match the needs of the market for newly graduated engineers, includes a diagram that seems to carry this processing metaphor further.

Figure 16. Edan, Y. et al, 2008, Fig. 2, Layout of the process of fitting the basic knowledge that the engineering education establishment provides for its graduates to meet the consumer’s requirements, p. 199.

In 1980, the government report chaired by Sir Montagu Finniston (the Finniston Report) decided to use the term ‘formation’ instead of education and training. “We have adopted this term, in preference to the more usual education and training, to convey the progressive process through which a young engineer develops his or her technical and personal capabilities.” University-based engineering courses have, for the past 150 years or so in the UK at least, been the debating ground for how to resolve a number of conflicting ideas and pressures about engineering education recognised at the level of institutions and within the professional community. The debate has produced strong opinions on what engineers need to learn and how they should learn it. The accounts students gave me of their undergraduate

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experiences (in the years before they would have joined IDE, i.e. approximately 1985-2000) showed a great diversity of courses being offered, and many of these issues still unresolved. I think these tensions generally had a marked effect on the readiness and confidence of some IDE students as they embarked on learning in a new cultural domain, especially one that focused on the primacy of experience, personal judgement and individual point of view. The issues facing the engineering education community map onto two axes. The first is about kinds of knowledge, practical and theoretical, and ways to know them. The second is about volumes of information, as increasing amounts, or as simple and complex systems. These issues are developed below, followed by some discussion of the curricular implications involved, in the light of changing ideas about the work and employment of engineers. The main themes are historically sequential. It seems that rather than being resolved, others have been added on top of the earlier ones. I have described them in a way that foregrounds the kinds of dilemmas I found that students were trying to resolve as part of the agenda of who they were as learners.

Practical knowledge and theoretical knowledge The first fault-line, or battle-line in the culture of engineering in the United Kingdom became apparent in the early years of the nineteenth century almost as engineering itself crystallised as a named profession and prime mover in the Industrial Revolution. It was drawn by those who had opposing attitudes claiming superior status for two different kinds of knowledge: that gained through trial-and-error, hands-on experience, and that held in theoretical form, in mathematics and the applied sciences emerging from Natural Philosophy. Most engineering innovations during the early part of the Industrial Revolution were achieved by men who had no formal education in the sciences, but had trained as craftsmen through apprenticeships. For example Telford, the bridge and road builder was a stonemason, and Smeaton, the

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builder of the Eddystone Lighthouse was by training an instrument-maker. The status of the early engineers was rightfully high, as people saw all around them the products of these astonishing mechanical and structural innovations benefiting daily life. However, as these features became normalised in society (macadamed road surfaces, sanitation, lighting, cheap textiles, etc.) these achievements came to be taken for granted, and the status of these first agents of innovation in materials, mechanisms and structures declined (Hinton 1970). As Hinton notes, this process resonated strongly with the background Enlightenment culture proposing intellectual learning as superior to practical knowledge. Right from this start tension can be seen about both the subject contents of the new profession, Engineering, and in what proportions they should figure, between on one side a hands-on intimate knowledge of how things work and are made, and on the other the knowledge and application of theoretical concepts from the physical sciences and mathematics. As engineering theory based in scientific knowledge became more complex, so engineers saw other professions such as medicine acquiring status by formalising the subject through university training. From the middle of the nineteenth century several initiatives led to the establishment of Chairs of Engineering at various universities, accompanied by scholarships for a number of students. For example, at Edinburgh, a three-year course was established whose object was “to show the practical application of Science to some branches of engineering”. But, from the outset, one reason there could not be an integration of the two kinds of knowing was because of a mutual lack of respect between the two cultures of university knowledge and craftsbased knowledge. This was despite the fact that right from the establishment of these first Chairs, professional engineers in the universities knew from their own work and experience that theoretical concepts could not in fact be useful without practical experience (Hilken 1967).

Ways of knowing, kinds of knowledge The Engineering Institutes all acknowledge that mastery in the art of engineering involves deep knowledge of two apparently very separate worlds (Finniston 1980). One reason they are separate is because of the way

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they are known about, and how and where they are learned about. One kind of knowing is about how the world works physically. This comes about through physical interaction with and manipulation of materials, structures and processes. It involves using skills in increasingly sensitive and responsive ways, mostly by developing coordination of hand, eye and brain in an intimate feedback cycle of trial and error with the materials and qualities of the work in hand. Traditionally learned in the setting of a workshop, in an apprentice and master relationship, although sometimes gained without the tutoring of an advanced practitioner, this knowing can be vernacular, intuitive and tacit. Another route was the drawing office, sometimes almost an industry-based research centre, where practically experienced apprentices could become designer-draughtsmen. The other kind of knowledge about the world in this context works through abstract concepts, theories and ideas, learned through mental actions and work on theoretical problems. It has necessarily mostly taken place in settings where ideas are shared and shaped through debate and enquiry with other like minds, in universities and other institutions of learning, and in books and journals. These different ways of knowing are inextricably linked to the environments where they are experienced. The working surface where experience may be transformed into learning is part of what constitutes that environment, whether it is a physical object or a workshop, or an engineering drawing or a page of mathematical reasoning, or, at a larger scale, a department in a university, itself an element in a larger cultural system. VA: Basically the route I chose at sixteen, I must admit I didn’t have a lot of confidence, and didn’t think of myself as an individual. I did Maths, Physics and Chemistry at A level… for most people they would have had an opinion by then and would have been quite confident in their direction, but I wasn’t and basically chose those subjects because I was able at them and because I knew they would give me a range of areas to go into afterwards. But when the time came I chose engineering because of the previous years when other people did those subjects did engineering. I was more science based than I was English, History and Arts based, but I think that’s possibly because they are an exact science and at that age you like to know when you are doing things right and in those subjects you get direct feedback… …then I went on to do my engineering course at L which was a four-year course which

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involved one year in industry, and the course I didn’t really get to grips with till the final year…and not until I did my year out really I appreciated…I was able to get a lot of hands-on - instrumentation and machine work... PBD: Was it making it real? Yes it meant…I mean it was ridiculous I was a second year engineering student and I hadn’t seen a lathe or worked with a lathe, but now I was using the tools and I could appreciate when I went back to lectures what they were talking about.

The recognition that different kinds of learning take place in different kinds of environment was a concern in the nineteenth century, and still is today. When a Royal Commission in Cambridge in 1850 recommended a special course for the education of engineers, saying that it was a legitimate subject for university study, it also clarified that “many of the practical and technical details could, no doubt, be taught best in industry itself, but no amount of practical skill and experience could replace the theoretical knowledge needed in the most advanced applications of the science” (Hilken 1967:26). This was despite the problem that most of the students would be articled apprentices and so unlikely to know Greek which was part of the normal curriculum for university study. It took James Stuart, Cambridge Professor of Mechanisms and Applied Mechanics three years from his appointment in 1875 to get private funding to establish a small workshop and smithy next to his department. Only later did the University agree to fund its necessary expansion ( op.cit.: 66). The question of standards was also an important part of the debate. It was obviously necessary to establish some kind of examination, preferably more difficult than an Ordinary degree, but it might lack the intellectual status of an Honours examination, or the Tripos. Knowledge, skill and understanding in these two domains of practice and theory may be superficial or it may be deep (Marton and Saljo 1976). A professional level of knowing, or mastery, needs deep learning, and this is an issue when devising suitable learning experiences for students. But what may be more divisive remains the different status of the two domains of knowing, because intellectual knowing is considered superior to crafts-based knowing. Apart from the broader cultural reasons mentioned above, I think there is another factor embedded in engineering work itself which contributes to this divisiveness. In any engineering enterprise or project it

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can be seen that many sub-projects go towards making up the whole. The development and management of the whole, however, is also a specialised task, and it is not hard to see why management skills within the project, as well as at and beyond its apparent boundaries, may be seen to be more important, of higher status, than those component skills that contribute towards the whole. This is reinforced, when, as is invariably the case in the engineering literature, mechanistic analogies (such as “cogs in a larger machine”) are used to conceptualise what projects consist of and how they work.

More information, and moving from simple to complex systems Innovation, new applications and expanding technical knowledge all contributed to each other in the increasingly mechanised and modernising social project of the nineteenth century in Europe. Since that time the areas of engineering work and jobs have proliferated, horizontally in terms of broadening subject areas of application, and vertically in terms of the kinds of responsibility an engineer might have, from technical to managerial. The engineering establishment has both formed and adapted to these changing demands of professional life, and part of this process has involved recommendations about training. A major ‘horizontal’ curricular factor, as seen by those running training courses, has been the apparent need to accommodate more and more technical material in the different subjects to be digested by engineering students. This trend has continued to the present day. One main difference from the earlier period is that much of this information is out of date by the time the student is in professional practice, and in some areas learning how to learn could be more strategic. In considering the ‘vertical’ dimension of increasing responsibilities held by engineers, subjects such as management, ethics, economics and sustainability studies, while apparently far from the traditional curriculum, can now be seen to be essential aspects of professional practice. As the range of circumstances and types of engineering work proliferated, so it became obvious that different kinds and levels of training were needed, regardless of the well-established issue of difference of status between craftsmen, or engineers trained on the job, and academically trained

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professionals. This fracturing along one plane of the engineering world responded, however, to only one aspect of the growth in the subject and its practice. Since the establishment of cybernetic studies after World War II (Pask 1961, Wiener 1950) and the emergence of sociological studies of engineering in the 1970’s, it has been possible to see that engineering’s physical applications, rather than being safely bounded by the knowledge worlds of physics, structures and materials, are players in far more diffuse systems of activity and innovation in society (Bucciarelli 1994, Ferguson 1992, Latour 2008, Vincenti 1991, Whalley 1976). In answering the question: How does something work? Bucciarelli shows that the answer involves knowledge from many domains, with permeable boundaries. As he says: “It is the fixation on the physics of a device that promotes the object as an icon in the design process” (1994:4), and he introduced the term ‘object world’ as a way to describe the broader interconnection of objects in the social context of their existence. Fundamental respect for the relatively hard and fast facts about the physical world is true to the origins of formally constituted and taught engineering, but it is increasingly apparent that engineering’s professional place is in the workings and management of systems of functions interacting at different levels of complexity in a social as well as a physical setting. As Whalley (1976) discusses, this understanding of engineering’s modern role has also been open to Marxist interpretations of the divisions between abstract and practical knowing. In this view engineering is seen to be inextricably entwined with the workings of capitalist production processes, where engineers perform ‘mental labour’ (Poulantzas 1975) which separate them from the working class either because they are in a supervisory role, or because they are using specialist expert knowledge.

Employment and employers’ requirements in training In all higher education subjects there is tension between the relative independence of the academy and the demands of paymasters, and the

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employer’s perspective on engineering education and training is inevitably instrumental. The picture is however more complex when there are changes going on in industry independent of developments in how training is seen, and there is also a lag in the cycle between employment articulating its needs and the training providers responding, by which time the needs have changed. This is a problem applicable in many system design situations, and described by Donald Schon in his 1971 Reith Lectures, Beyond the Stable State. There is an inevitable misfit between the engineers as trained and qualified and their employability (University of Sussex Institute of Manpower Studies 1990). The backdrop to these initiatives in the twentieth century involved survival and recovery from two world wars and the expansion of industry into competitive world markets, with increasingly rapid technological change in all areas of engineering. The profession diversified in its areas of application, and in the kinds of jobs and responsibilities involved. During this time university and college training for engineers underwent changes in style, structure and content, in response to needs seen internally to reflect the nature of the profession. These did not necessarily overlap completely with the demands of industry. In the UK in the 1960’s various reports discussed research in the university setting, the Royal Society proposing in 19692 that PhD’s were too theoretical, and should be more geared towards technology, following the American example. The medium of published reports and pamphlets has been a very publicly visible face of discussions between universities, industry and the engineering institutions about the problems of engineering education. However, they may not have been effective. It is more likely that the great diversity of engineering courses available at universities in the UK reflects academia’s own strenuous engagement in the issue. A revealing example of this pamphleteering can be seen in a series of booklets issued by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London 2

Postgraduate Training in the United Kingdom, 6. Engineering and Technology.

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between 1965 and 1981. Professional Training in Mechanical Engineering Practice for Chartered Engineers, published in 1965, opens with the statement: “This booklet is concerned with the training a mechanical engineer needs to supplement his academic education”. The foreword notes that the booklet is an updated version of an earlier publication from 1960 entitled The Practical Training of Professional Mechanical Engineers, and continues: “It cannot be stressed too strongly that the object of this professional training is to produce a chartered engineer and not to produce a skilled craftsman.” The 1965 booklet describes how the chartered engineer needs to be able to work in a variety of practical contexts such as the engineering shop floor, the workshop, and the industrial enterprise itself, and uses quite a lot of its page space to illustrate its points with cartoons of the engineer in his (sic) white coat in these situations. I found it striking that the medium of cartoons, and, to me, fatuous ones, was used as a way to treat the subject of the application of academic learning to practical work. Perhaps in an effort to avoid appearing patronising, humour has been used to bridge the accepted gap between the brain and the practical world. The very character of the cartoon style however reinforces the issue. In 1970 a second edition of the brochure was issued. With some acknowledgment that its visual appearance might carry a message about the importance of its contents, the typeface has been modernised by a change to sans-serif. A new sentence has been inserted before the one in the Foreword of the earlier edition: “Training in the art of engineering is as important as education in its science, and a proper balance of both provides the necessary foundation on which to build a professional career in mechanical engineering” (1970:1). An attempt has been made to elevate the practical work of industry by including it in the concept of the ‘art of engineering’. However the pathetically caricatured chartered engineer in his white coat is still muffing his role on the shop floor in the anonymous cartoons.

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Figures 17, 18, 19. Three cartoons, 1980, Professional Training in Mechanical Engineering for Chartered Engineers, London Institution of Mechanical Engineers, pp. 9, 12.

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In 1980 the booklet was reissued. The cartoons have increased in size on the page, and there are a few more, reflecting some new and up-to-date roles of the engineer in industrial practice, including his having to work with women engineers - depicted in a conventionally sexist way. In 1981 there was a change of heart. The booklet was reissued again, but parts of the text have been taken out, and other parts rewritten, and all the cartoons have gone, perhaps in acknowledgment that engineering professional practice is growing up. TS: It’s just an incredible freedom here compared with when I was in a job as an engineer with an aerospace company being told that you had to wear certain clothes - that was awful. PBD: What were you told you had to wear? Well I couldn’t wear a dress I was wearing - it was too feminine. What was going to be the effect of wearing the dress? Well it was off-putting. For the blokes? Yes Was it too short? No, it was just too girlie - too young and girlie. Was it a summer placement? Yes, that was when I was 19 or 20 and had bright red hair and it was a long dress and I was wearing big shoes, and I just wasn’t an engineer, I didn’t look like an engineer. And what was the effect of that on you? What did you feel? I felt undermined, undermined as an engineer. I felt silly, I felt as though I was being unprofessional, and I also felt that I didn’t belong. Which was good in the long run.

These pamphlets and their development highlight the continuing concern about how to marry practical and theoretical work in professional practice, and thus produce an integrated epistemology of engineering. On the one hand there is the passionate recognition that engineering cannot happen without practical and applied work, and on the other the inbuilt apprehension that the hands-on partner may somehow lower the tone of the marriage. It may be a particular feature of UK engineering culture that practical skills and applied knowledge continue to be seen either as intellectually inferior, or not suitably rigorous repositories of knowledge. The other intended message of the pamphlets is that the integrated practice of the diverse skills and

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knowledge of engineering needs to be learned in the social and physical environment of industry. Meanwhile, to take only one example from the European tradition, a booklet published as far back as 1959 by the Institut Francais du Petrole: Report on the Training of Engineers and Technicians specializing in the Oil Industry is, page by page, a superb example of modernist typography and graphic design, describing an integrated curriculum of theory and fieldwork practice, the very pages communicating that this is a sophisticated profession. Moreover, the designer of the booklet, Francoise Deniau, is named on the inside of the cover. While pamphleteering is a good medium for rhetoric, and debate may be furthered, ideas are not necessarily acted upon. The Finniston Committee’s report of 1980 was entitled Engineering our Future - an Enquiry into a Profession in Transition. Looking at the requirements of both professional and technician training, it immediately stimulated discussion. In the same year the Institution of Mechanical Engineers published a critique on the treatment of the subject of standards of professional practice. It pointed out that it was the Institutes that accredited courses, held exams that were the yardstick for university exams, chartered the engineers, and thus were the true repositories of standards and how engineering ‘formation’ should occur. Further, Institute membership had for years depended on specific periods of workshop experience, and the Finniston Report had made no mention of the Institution’s recommended pre-university year in industry. Twelve years later in the House of Lords (Hansard, 2/11/1992) a member of the Finniston Committee expressed frustration and concern that implementation of the Committee’s recommendations was still being held up by lack of funding enjoyed by the Engineering Council (especially compared to that given to the Design Council). Baroness Denton, the Under-Secretary of State in the Department of Trade and Industry, pointed out that the setting up of the Engineering Council had been delayed because of objections by the professions. Continuing problems with definitions of terms within engineering, and the recognition that, even amongst some practitioners, engineering did not have

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a good name, led in 2000 to a joint report from the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Engineering Council Working Group: The Universe of Engineering: a UK Perspective. To reflect the differentiation within engineering of increasing branches of more specialised knowledge, from aeronautics to mining, the behaviour of materials to the behaviour of complex systems, terms such as Science, Pure Science, Applied Science, Engineering, Engineering Knowledge, Engineering Process, Technology, and Innovation were explained at the beginning of the report. Distinctions were clearly drawn between engineering disciplines and engineering applications, and a matrix display gave an indication of the breadth of the field. The issuing of these reports indicated that as knowledge from theoretical enquiry and practical experience grew, and opportunities for technological enterprise and problem-solving expanded, so industry’s role continued to expand. Training for engineering’s many roles, from draughtsman to chief executive, in research, in production and in management continued to be problematic. Into this mix needed to be added the agendas of young people considering engineering as a career as it was presented to them, and how it fitted with their perceptions, aspirations and capacities. More than the proliferation of specialist subjects and skills and how they are to be learned there has also been an increasing recognition that the metaskills of knowing how to acquire and manage knowledge and judgement in order to generate higher-order knowledge is also part of engineering epistemology (Vincenti 1990). In 1977 the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the Institution of Electrical Engineers published a pamphlet entitled Opportunities for Sponsored Training in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering. Its preface says: ‘“Why”, you may ask, “should I undergo training when I already have (or shortly expect to have) a degree or similar qualification?” It is not just something that the professional institutions insist upon because it is traditional. Competent creative engineers use, whenever possible, their knowledge of engineering science to guide them towards a solution to a given

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problem. They realise that few real life situations are tractable by analysis alone and moderate their solutions to allow for their experience and for concepts and principles which are not amenable to analysis - in short, the ‘art’ of engineering’.

This term ‘art of engineering’ was also used in the 1970 version of the IMechE’s3 pamphlet on professional training described above. Vincenti (1990:198) describes it as “knowing how”, referring to tacit knowledge. So the idea of the ‘art’ of engineering had migrated from the crafts skills of the workshop to the craft of systems management. The phrase still seems to be being used with the aura of some kind of alchemy, one of the roots of engineering in the first place.

Curricular developments Until the 1960s most UK engineers obtained their formal education through part-time study or block release while working in industry (Finniston 4.13). Less than 25% did full-time courses. These proportions changed once the Colleges of Advanced Technology became Polytechnics, and changed again when they became Universities. There was an increase in the number of institutions offering degrees. Reflecting political pressures to increase the number of engineers, the 1960’s and 1970’s saw an increase in the supply of places at universities, but with this came the lowering of standards (Finniston). In 1971 the Council of Engineering Institutions decreed that a degree would be required for all full-time Chartered Engineers, with only the fewest of exceptions. University departments have had to react to the amount and spread of (sometimes rapidly obsolescing) knowledge that must be incorporated into course curricula. There has been a focus around two ‘solutions’ to this problem - the idea of sandwiching other kinds of learning into and around the university course, and a drive towards a more formal recognition of what the undergraduate student should have learned and experienced before or during his or her university degree, and what is more appropriately learned after it. 3

Institution of Mechanical Engineers, London

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Although engineering training has long been established as a subject of sufficient standing to be studied at a university, the question of the best way of learning practical skills continues. Sandwiches, both ‘thick’ (long), and ‘thin’ (short), of practice-based work were initially seen as the natural link with apprentice-based learning, while apprenticeship schemes themselves waxed and waned. This was partly because of developments within the industries themselves, and partly due, no doubt, to cultural factors influencing how factory-based work was seen in an unattractive light in an increasingly post-industrial society. A 1967 booklet from the Engineering Industry Training Board entitled Training for Engineering Craftsmen: the Module System was illustrated with grainy black and white photos of people lounging or slouching at lathes and other machines. It looked as though no one had thought that the appearance of the message was as important as, or connected to its content. Many manufacturing firms, from aircraft engine makers to shoe makers put out booklets of apprenticeship schemes, and with their universally dull appearance, communicated the same message. Work-based learning has taken many forms, but in a developing context of the establishment of clear and consistent standards, there then appeared a whole subset of pedagogical issues about how work-based learning could and should be assessed, and by whom. Learning through hands-on experience continues to vary from course to course, and each student’s learning path is unique, with very different attitudes towards the time spent on the practical work ‘sandwich’. Inevitably there is criticism of the limitations of every approach. Particularly strong has been the idea, reflecting the origins of engineering practice, that theoretical knowledge must be built on a foundation of workshop-based hands-on knowledge (Hinton 1970), awakening the age-old quandary of the relative superiority of the two worlds of knowing. ES: Because it was so black and white technically, people didn’t feel they needed to discuss things. PBD: OK They only needed … if ever people were talking it was mathematic links … numbers and stuff, but no-one really had to talk about ideas, or very little … someone might say ‘How do you bolt this on here?’ That would be about it really, because there wasn’t that richness on the course.

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So do you think it’s a whole area that, as it were, didn’t get practised? Completely yes. Because all you learn is technical skill and I think it’s a problem. I mean the best year of my last degree was the placement – was the third year and I’m just very surprised, one of things that surprised me when I came on the course here is just how few people – their previous degree had required them to do a placement year. Because there’s not many and I think it’s shocking. I think it should be mandatory. It was on my course, I couldn’t do a degree without doing a placement year, and it was just a massive opportunity… …Say you’re asked to design a welding mask you’d have to go to talk to the welder and figure out what he wants, and you’d have to think about a lot – where’s he going to put it? How heavy is it going to be? How does he use it? And that on a very basic level was sort of user interface thing whereas when you’re doing the academic stuff, when I was doing the academic stuff I was – you just don’t consider that at all, you just have to know that it worked technically.

Approaching the issue of which is the better kind of knowledge from another point of view, Bucciarelli (1994:107), in his study of engineers working on design problems, identifies what he describes as the different stories people use in engineering problem-solving, both the ‘object world’ aspects and more apparently abstract elements. He takes a textbook example of a statics and dynamics problem involving a hydraulic cylinder, and examines the language of how it is described, through words, and different kinds of engineering drawings and diagrams at various levels of abstraction. He notes that all ‘object-world’ elements have apparently been excluded as irrelevant, but still the difference between applied maths and engineering mechanics remains blurred. “This masking – this fantasy of a mechanism hiding the motion of a point in a plane – is the essence of the construction of problems throughout all engineering curricula. Thus engineering education in this respect teaches the students not to see……Reductionism is the lesson.” He then goes on to set the problem in a variety of different real-world contexts, as they would be found in practice. But because of the way that students have been taught they “would learn to see the underlying form and to disregard everything else. It is no wonder that engineers claim that their work is value free” (1994:109).

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Some Renaissance precedents

Figure 20. Galileo Galilei, 1638, Cantilever beam and weight. Discorsi e dimonstrazioni matematiche, intorno a due nuove scienze, Leida, Appresso gli Elsevivii, 1638. Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, trans. Henry Crew, Alfonso de Salvio, New York, Macmillan, 1914.

Bucciarelli refers the discussion to an image by Galileo (Figure 20) of a cantilever beam supporting a weight protruding from a fragment of an ivyclad brick wall, which also shows letters of the alphabet indicating the forces at work on the beam. He goes on to say: “the new science comes in positing a relation between the beam as physical artifact and vernacular technique, and the beam as abstract lever and mathematical artifice.” He continues that the addition of all the real world features of the crumbling wall with plants growing out of cracks, and the grain of the wood of the beam are not relevant to either of the concepts, or to the relationship between them.

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Other contemporary images however show that it was entirely normal to depict technical devices in natural settings and social contexts such as landscapes or domestic interiors, combining precise mechanical information and, to our eyes, irrelevant features in the surroundings. For example a side view of a cannon, illustrating the new science of precise trajectories stands on stony ground surrounded by clumps of grass, a reminder of the difficulties of moving such heavy devices to the site of battle. A well mechanism with two basic kinds of winding gear is shown in an extensive landscape with different kinds of trees and birds flying overhead. Men are shown turning different kinds of handles, and one of them seems to have thrown his jacket off onto the ground beside him (the work is still heavy). In another situation of hard work two men, a joiner and a turner, are shown in a wood-workshop, while in the background a woman approaches them bearing a jug of something refreshing. A detailed image of an apparently domestic interior shows a couple working at degumming silk cocoons in heated water, and then winding the threads onto a frame. The image also includes a distant church spire seen through an open window, and, in the foreground, a dog apparently annoyed by fleas. With a modern sensibility we may ask what these drawings are of, as we are so used to technical illustrations being shorn of context, or seeing depictions of such objects by artists with some other descriptive purpose in mind. It might be easier to understand if we did not separate things in the world into replicable technical systems, and nature, as we do now in the way Bucciarelli describes, instead seeing a more holistic view of the world – nature and mechanisms and those who toil at them all of a piece.4

4

Harpur (2002) describes in his history of the imagination how people in late Renaissance Europe of Galileo’s time still saw the cosmos as including everything “from God and the angels to planets, humans and animals.” Ideas such as heliocentricity, which had been known since the third century CE, were ideas or hypotheses, not facts. Galileo and other thinkers of the late sixteenth century took the revolutionary step of proposing that the ideas were literally true, and it was for this that he was persecuted by the church, rather than for the theory itself.

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Figure 21. Hans Rudolph Manuel Deutsch, Three men at a well-winder, woodcut, De Re Metallica, Basle, 1556, London, Mining Magazine, 1912, p. 162.

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Figure 22. Derry, T.K. and Williams, T.I., 1960, Joiner and Turner at work, Low Countries c. 1600, woodcut, A Short History of Technology, London, Oxford University Press, p. 103.

Figure 23. Olivier de Serres, 1671, The Perfect Use of Silkworms, and their benefits, William Stellenge, London. Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, New York, Da Capo Press, 1971.

Returning to the twentieth century Bucciarelli suggests that “contemporary design is, in most instances, a complex affair in which participants with different responsibilities and interests – that is, working within different

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object worlds – must bring their stories into coherence” (1994:83), and uses the idea of the rhetoric of objects to explain this. Galileo’s image of the cantilever beam is a case in point. It differs from those I have described above because it is drawn in a much more naturalistic style, with so much physical detail about the wall, with its crumbly brickwork, and the details of the plants. The drawing recalls scenes of romantically portrayed ruins in contemporary painting. Bucciarelli says the image is disconcerting, and I too find it so, neither wholly a mathematical diagram nor an image from nature, but somehow more than both. A closer look at the drawing led me to another interpretation. The image is not of a design, but is of an idea that would inform design. It shows the workings of several different disciplines together opening up another reading of the image, the presence of other possible stories “to be brought into coherence” by an enquiring mind such as Galileo’s. And this is despite him being at the time under the threat of the Inquisition for questioning the ultimate authority of Scriptural explanations for natural phenomena. At one end of the wall in the drawing, there appears to be the beginning (or perhaps the demise) of part of an arch, branching out into space. On this part of the wall there are two leafless bushes growing out of the brickwork, one of them cantilevered out horizontally, the other pointing downwards. To my mind this is a direct observation from nature, forming an analogy to parallel the discussion of the more abstract beam. The story of plants is that they grow from anchored roots, upwards preferably, but where there is no choice, quite efficiently either horizontally or downwards. Accompanying the drawing is Galileo’s explanation of how the cantilever beam works; what is left as a question for other natural philosophers to consider is exactly how a living plant solves an apparently similar problem. Such questions reflect contemporary considerations of the relationship between nature and art, or tekne, as originally described by Aristotle. Whilst anonymous craftsmen, imbued with profound and detailed technical understanding of their trades, may have left no writings about theoretical ideas behind them, they were “the tacit bearers of the practical knowledge… who approached the construction of machines and the knowledge and

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experience related to them as a kind of battle against nature.” (Valleriani 2010:201) Galileo, however, being highly educated, could do things differently, integrating practical and theoretical knowledge into new understandings, new science, his achievements nonetheless rooted in practical knowledge. Renn and Valleriani (2001) describe how Galileo’s Discourse of two new Sciences of 1638 was the eventual result of a range of different approaches he would use in any enquiry. He would undertake rough practical experiments in his own home, discussing problems with other scholars, his notebooks showing how he moved freely between fluent descriptive drawings and mathematical diagrams and calculations (Bredekamp 2001). The notebooks show he used close observation of the problems involved in equipment or machines which he was employed to improve, and that he would also gain first hand evidence from those involved in their existing design and use. His work with the Venice Arsenale on enlarging the scale of galleys focussed down onto the limitations in size of oars that could be used in such already giant ships. It was “ an issue that was to become the central subject of Galileo’s new science, the dependence of the stability of a beam on its dimensions.” (2001:23)5 He gathered information from the boatbuilding craftsmen and experts within the Arsenale organisation, even mentioning in the Discorsi a specific remark by a “venerable workman”, which became the core idea of the new science.6 Here is an example of the wide-ranging skills, including an educated and practical visual intelligence that Galileo was able to put to work in his researches. Much of this, both skills of observation and of drawing, would have been learned while he was associated with the Accademia di Disegno in Florence7 where he learned the arts of drawing as part of the education 5

The subject of the illustration of the beam discussed above, the problem having easily migrated in Galileo’s visual imagination from an oar with fixed rowlocks, to a beam sticking out from a wall. 6 Renn and Valleriani record that the idea of attributing the core idea of Galileo’s first science “was apparently so outrageous to Arthur von Oettingen, author of the German translation of the Discorsi, (first published 1890-1904) that he decided simply to change Galileo’s text in this passage. In his rendering, the author of the crucial idea is no longer the workman but Galileo himself.” (2001:5), a fine example of the prejudice against the status of practical compared to theoretical knowledge. 7 “The foundation of the Accademia di disegno in 1563 by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo I (1519 – 1574), is one of the most significant demonstrations of the recognition of

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offered. Under Ostilio Ricci, the professor mathematics, he particularly studied stereometry, perspective and chiaroscuro. Combining the skills of observation, understanding what he was seeing, and being able to draw, enabled him to propose ideas about the world that were still in the fog of unknowing for those without this integrated knowledge.8 (A further example of Galileo’s approach is discussed in Chapter X, Drawing and the Drawer’s story). Latour, in his essay Drawing things together, has another approach to the importance of imagery to scientific thought. He is suspicious of grand narratives about the achievements of science, preferring instead more “parsimonious” stories, going on to propose that “the most powerful explanations, that is, those that generate the most out of the least, are the ones that take writing and imaging craftsmanship into account,” (1986:21), adding many other examples from different fields of practice where graphic work collapses the gap between abstract thought and concrete work. Twodimensional inscriptions or “paperwork” (covering all kinds of images and writing) have many advantages over working with “the sky, the air, health, or the brain.” (1986:44, 45) “Paperwork” can be seen as “immutable mobiles”, whose advantages are that they can travel easily, be reproduced, and be rescaled without changing. Most importantly he says, they can merge with geometry and they can be “reshuffled and recombined”, because of their “optical consistency” rather than because of any connection being made in the mind. “The same is true of what we call metaphor.” Thus they perform as powerful agents in scientific, social and political development. Arguably the reason that Galileo’s image is disconcerting is because several different kinds of information, or very rich inscriptions, are present in parallel through the process of metaphor in this one graphic the increased relevance of practical knowledge in the sixteenth century…. Pupils… learned the basics of military architecture, drawing techniques, the composition of colours, the science of machines, sculpture, civil architecture, hydraulics, practical arithmetic and geometry. The aptitude they displayed for certain skills while working on specific projects determined whether they would work as artists, or architects or machine makers.” (Valleriani 2010:197). This kind of syllabus would nowadays justifiably attract the descriptor “holistic”. 8 Galileo’s extensive notebooks show he was adept at a wide range of visualisation techniques, from geometric diagrams to detailed figurative drawing, and working combinations of them both.

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statement, as distinct from a focal story and its social or environmental context. Latour describes how Galileo’s combining of different kinds of knowledge in graphic form on one surface enables him to “connect many different problems, wheras his predecessors (only) worked on disconnected shapes over which they had no control.” The ambiguous image of the beam and the wall has travelled well, carrying with it not only different kinds of information about cantilevers, but also access to knowledge through two different approaches to learning, through abstract reasoning, and through concrete experience based on physical observation. Their “optical consistency” enables connections to be made between the two different kinds of knowing, opening the way to a more complex engagement with enquiry. Bucciarelli (1994:210) notes that in trying to understand the apparently unambiguous language of the mathematical proposition of a problem, “realworld, hands-on experience might even detract from a correct reading and prove dysfunctional by leading the student further astray.” A footnote continues: “The relation between textbook knowledge and the practical, hands-on knowhow of the tinkerer or builder is an important and complex question.” The activities of the bricoleur are once again unconventional, and marginal. This recalls the equally ambiguous figure of the ‘inventor’, almost the fool in the drama between design and engineering, usually a man, with wild hair, working in some kind of romantic shed, but absolutely unable to get any funding or support for his ideas unless he takes them abroad from the UK. Much to their annoyance, IDE students were consistently referred to as ‘inventors’ by the MSc Business students at Imperial College with whom they did joint projects, and it is noticeable how the media insist on describing product innovations as having been invented rather than designed. A widely held perception at all levels of education is that students would do a lot better at their current level if they had learned a lot more in their earlier educational experiences. In the case of engineering this applies to the core

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subjects of maths, physics and chemistry, good grades at ‘A’ Level being the conventional entry requirement to an undergraduate engineering degree course. It could also imply the desirability of either a broader education to provide a real-world context for engineering studies, or more directly some kind of preparation for learning from abstract concepts and from concrete experience, to use Kolb’s terms, a solid foundation on which to build learning skills themselves. This can be difficult where subject streaming at secondary level, in England at least, means that humanities subjects can be dropped altogether. The problem of a structural narrowness leading to later problems within the higher levels of applied professional practice has long been recognised. In 1982 The Engineering Council submitted a memorandum on the subject to the Select Committee on Science and Technology: “2.2 ….the Council is determined to encourage the development and teaching of mathematics, science and technology in schools in a way which is relevant to the needs of society, industry and the engineering profession. It is, however, important that this education must not be narrow. The country needs engineers who are literate, articulate and widely educated.” (21 October 1982)

Furthermore the Committee saw that undergraduate engineers had inadequate mathematics and science, and also had generally poor communicative skills and a narrowness of outlook. It asked for a broader school curriculum, noting that such a broad curriculum was possible in Scotland and Germany. At the RCA, potted history books of art and design became popular with IDE students, reflecting a certain desperation about their ignorance of the cultural history of objects, which ironically had been brought into the world with engineering knowledge. As one student said to me: “Before we came here we hardly knew which came first the Bauhaus or the Renaissance”.

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Figure 24. Carlo de Bonardis, 1695, Scientist undertaking an experiment, Bona Castellotti, Gamba et al. 1999/2000, p. 141. In a timeless, if slightly histrionic image of the interaction of practical experience and abstract concepts, a herculean figure is furiously bent on the solution of some problem in natural philosophy. With a combination of epic strength and delicate fingering he physically engages in the manipulation of his apparatus; while leaning on a pile of scholarly papers, he hugs to himself a learned tome whose pages can guide his heart as well as his mind in his quest. This is perhaps a ‘research’ notebook, in the way I have discussed the concept in The Researcher’s Journey. There are quotations from the book of Job, Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Marcus Manilius’ Astronomica for the scholar to reflect on as he also works on the problem in a practical way. The Latin text indicates that there are three kinds of knowledge - understanding, learning and doing. Writing on the sheet lower down constrasts how experiment may give knowledge of particular things, while ‘ars’ (a larger concept than ‘art’) gives knowledge of universals. The connection is that through trials and examples showing the way, experiment or experience has created ‘ars’.9 9

I am indebted to Nicholas Debenham, Arthur Farndell and Matteo Favaretto for their translations and insights into the meaning of the texts.

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As long ago as 1955 Columbia University in the USA was cited as an example of best practice in general intellectual training in the report How to train Engineers for Industry, prepared by the Professional Engineers’ Conference Board for Industry in cooperation with the National Society of Professional Engineers10. The graphic design of the report is visually sophisticated, given the time when it was produced, and it is noteworthy that the cost of two-colour printing was considered appropriate to the purposes of the pamphlet. The current website for the department at Columbia prefaces information about the engineering courses with a description of this approach and the introductory course, indicating how important it is seen to be by the number of credits it carries. This detail of the website architecture of the department is an expression of its culture. The ‘narrowness’ comes partly from learning that has taken place without context, leading to a focus on components without awareness of the systems they function in and are part of. Narrowness can also mean that the learner may be ill-equipped to move from the manipulation of well-defined information, to managing the more ill-defined problems of complex, sometimes radical engineering projects involving many disciplines and constraints, or the kind of project on an industrial design course where coming up with innovative ideas is being prioritised. This is because, as Bucciarelli (1994:104) describes it “in the baggage of normal engineering, science-based learning that students must accommodate is that, in a wellposed problem, all critical information to solve the problem, and only that information, is given.” (his emphasis). Vincenti (1981:8) describes how the majority of engineering practice consists of “normal design”, taking place in a context where most factors are already established and the work is to improve performance of some aspect of the whole in an incremental rather than an essential way. What he names “radical design” calls for a different outlook and training. To gain professionalism in practice the engineer must continue to learn theoretical knowledge, and practical and management skills after graduating from university. This is because not everything, to use Freire’s (1970) 10

Executive research survey No 4.

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banking metaphor, can be taken in at college. Interaction with the complexities of professional practice, with its economic, social and human constraints, requires a different approach. In recognition of this, and also with an eye to being the guardians of standards of professionalism, both industry and the various Engineering Institutes have offered supplementary management training. For example, in 1981 the Iron and Steel Training Board issued handbooks to support engineers working as managers and supervisors in industry. The IMechE has since at least 1986 offered short courses and in-company training seminars to support professional development. Many post-graduate engineering courses now include advanced management and business studies as part of the curriculum. Even if the engineering courses I heard about from the IDE students varied quite a lot, there were more features they had in common. There was an emphasis on maths, physics and chemistry subjects, and mostly not in the context of practical applications. Where there were exercises or projects to demonstrate particular principles in action, the problems that were set usually had a right answer to be found out and learned, either in the form of facts, or as decided by the tutor responsible. The temptation was to try and winkle it out rather than work it out. This was entirely unlike the use of design projects on the IDE course (or any Industrial Design course in the Art School setting). Design projects are primarily vehicles for learning particular aspects of design process, where it is taken for granted that there are multiple possible solutions whose appropriateness is evaluated using value-based criteria, some decided by the student himself or herself, as well as factual information. This had an effect on students’ broader ideas about authority. In contrast to the idea that engineering in application was best learned, partly through mimesis, in a workshop or industrial setting, in Industrial Design students are working on design projects in the college studio, very like a professional design studio, with tutors who are practising designers. The student’s learning happens through the medium of discussion with and stimulation from the tutor, most famously studied and described by Donald Schon as “reflection-in-action, and reflection-on-action” (Schon 1983) (see Learning and epistemic development in designing). The student has to move the locus

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of authority inside him or herself, thus facing the process of becoming aware of and taking responsibility for learning itself. A further contrast in the way the subject of design is communicated compared to engineering is in the role of the lecture. In engineering, lectures are conduits of detailed, examinable material, which must be acquired in an unquestioning way. Lectures in art and design education, mostly used for cultural and historical studies, are rather ancillary to the main medium for learning – the design project. At the RCA, knowledge of their content was not examined, but it was expected to inform and then stimulate question and debate. This was a front-line of confusion about studying, learning, being a student, and the nature of knowledge. (of a lecture about Cultural Theory as applied to international design) LN: “I don’t know what to do with this lecture. It’s difficult to take useable notes. Is this just someone’s personal opinion, or what?”

Assessment as a tool for learning itself was a very difficult subject, and for me was a focus of many of the fundamental differences between learning engineering and learning design. It seemed that in engineering assessment was geared primarily towards reinforcing ideas surrounding the surety of the ‘right’ answer, whereas in design training it has the opportunity (not always taken) to point towards refining the mechanisms of judgement. BN: “Where we come from, we all knew we had the right answer when we had the same answer, here it’s all different!”

The students arriving on the IDE course had already been exposed to some contrasts of knowledge and knowing on their engineering courses. There were contrasts between knowledge held in abstract form, and that held through hands-on practical work, or exercises; between personal, sometimes intuitive knowing and knowing based on external authorities, often of an analytical nature; between knowledge of facts, and understanding of systems. There had been different media of teaching and learning, such as mentored practical work, and lecture-based learning, team work and individual work. This, however, was not enough in most cases to prepare the students for the move into the epistemology and culture of design, with its acknowledgment of the validity of the individual’s creative thinking and

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judgement and the privileging of intuitive knowing, set in the very real cultural context of the world of environments, systems, objects and tools. DP: …They expected you to very quickly become fluent with this very numerical, abstract view of engineering. And, if you did that was great, but the lack of real-world relating science… using models that relate science to the real world was absolutely frustrating, and … I just think that however…. I mean it’s just an approach…I mean they would say well they teach general engineering, they don’t specialise in a subject until the third year and what they do is they teach from first principles and teach general principles that can be applied in all disciplines, and therefore that implies an abstract approach. A great problem for me was that the reason for wanting to be an engineer was completely perpendicular to an abstract approach, it was all about making and solving people’s problems, solving the real problems, designing and making things that were in the physical world. And through studying physics you start to realise there’s a body of science that’s there to help you in doing so, but it has to be… I thought engineering would be relating that to sort of the real world situations and it is, that’s the ridiculous thing, they’re actually, in creating abstract models, they are sort of…I mean they’re obscure abstract models really, they have to be…I mean the fact that you have to state that there is an amorphous body of material in free space implies that actually you’re talking about something real but you’re having to release all the constraints so you can make a fully… PBD: but even saying something like ‘a body in free space’ It’s a situation. It’s a situation which nobody knows about either – is it dark? Is it light? Is it this side of the moon? But when you came out of a session about something did you look around and see it in operation? Umm…thermodynamics, the approach there never mentioned actual… Cups of coffee, cardboard ones as opposed to ceramic ones? No I mean it was ‘if you have a box with this heat flow in here labelled ‘H’ and this flow labelled little ‘h’ and given these formulae therefore it must be this… …beyond a point absolutely no connection, and the trouble with that is that you learn the formulas by memory not by understanding… …I worked on the basis that I would learn things that answered questions, learn the technique, learn the recipe, treat it like a recipe, and that’s not fulfilling, because you’re not understanding the reason for doing it, you’re just… finish! And the other thing about their approach in that sense is that people who don’t understand the relevance of the formulae is that the syllabus doesn’t change very much and that this is… arguably, it was possible to practise previous exam papers and look at how they use the formulae without actually understanding the full significance of that.

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PBD: It’s interesting you started off with the idea that there’s book work and there was project work…here it’s meant to be an integrated activity…can you see any kind of pattern has happened? EG: I think more from the mistakes I made than anything else, because of having come from B. which was a total culture of ‘it must be right first time’, there was no sort of development,… and if I was doing the development, when I look back, but I wasn’t aware that that was what I was doing, I wasn’t aware of why I was doing it. So to come here and I came from this culture from ‘it’s got to be right’, I’ve got to have all the information before I do anything. So getting out of that habit made me really depressed about what I was working on because I was feeling like I wasn’t achieving anything, and now I get it! PBD: Have you ever revisited that particular drawing, the approach for that drawing? MR: Once I think, but I mean it’s a conscious effort and it probably took me all day to get around to it and actually do it, rather than the half an hour it should have taken. It’s a mental barrier more than anything else, it’s not not being able to, or not having the time. It’s nothing to do with… No it is a mental barrier but that’s the thing I think is interesting, is what is the mental barrier. I think one of the problems is the way, like I was saying how you do a drawing and it’s got no immediate value, or there’s no immediate reason to do it, the reason might come out later, it might not, but it might. And is that tolerable that idea? I think that’s one of the barriers to doing more drawing… is that you might be wasting your time. You cannot say I need to do this in order to move on. Right, yes, so unlike, for instance, learning a set of stress formulae, you can say that’s what these are and I know that they will be useful and what’s more I can pluck them out. At any moment and use them in different ways. Yes But then the skill of drawing you could pluck at if only you practised!

The titanic struggles in the world of engineering training described in this chapter reverberated in individual learning environments and experiences. IDE students who arrived thinking it might be enough to add Creativity and Marketing into their already bulging sack of knowledge and skills, found themselves instead faced with a very different kind of learning adventure, whose main tool for success would be epistemic development.

VISUAL AND CONCEPTUAL THINKING1

“We see nothing truly till we understand it.” (John Constable, The History of Landscape Painting, 3rd lecture to the Royal Institution, 9 June 1836. Beckett, R.B. (1970) John Constable's Discourses, Suffolk Records Society, p.64)

My aim is to explore visual thinking as a form of epistemic development. In this chapter I set out to probe the joints or spaces between different ways of thinking. I begin by discussing some contextual frameworks for understanding the links and overlaps between visual and verbal thought, and then consider the ways in which these ideas impinge upon design practices and therefore also upon the education and training of designers. Most design work, certainly product design development, involves visual thinking and development work using visual media, both drawing and threedimensional realisation. Designers usually use images and writing or talking while developing ideas, conversing with themselves and also with colleagues and with clients, needing to have a sense of when each is most appropriate. (Tomes, Oates and Armstrong 1998) The ocularcentrism that has been a recognised feature of post-Enlightenment thinking, dominating the other senses in our understanding of design, is now giving way to a realisation of the importance of the other senses, especially touch, in how we relate to the products and spaces, and materials and tools of our inhabited environment.2

1

Note: where I have used the word ‘image’ I am using it in the conventional sense to refer to the variety of depictions we experience visually in our environment. The word ‘image’ is used in psychology to refer to images in the ‘mind’s eye’. I have used the phrase ‘mental image’ for these, and they are further discussed in Prehistoric cave drawing and painting. 2 The whole body should not be excluded from this consideration. In the 1960’s Edward T Hall described what came to be known as Proxemics, how people understand the space around their bodies as an integral part of themselves, and how they manage this in interpersonal relations. Claudia Hammond in her 2012 book Time Warped: Unlocking the

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This discussion, however, is primarily about the relationships between visual and verbal thinking and is set in the broader context of how to think in more subtle, sensitive and sophisticated ways, so as to be able to engage effectively with more complex issues in design and thus in life. It is framed by the experiences of students moving from engineering to design, learning that visual development work could be as challenging as the more calculating abstract work they were already familiar with. Visual thinking and visual work improve each other, but practising these new skills involved different and in some cases unfamiliar kinds of activities and outcomes, which were not always easy to trust as useful against an earlier model of what learning should consist of. Perhaps because words are the obvious carriers of abstract concepts, visual thinking is not generally referred to in descriptions of epistemic or personal development,3 but it seems that it is a significant contributor to these processes. ES: I think I’ve done very, very little of drawing in the physical world, certainly we were not encouraged to do that on my previous degree because it’s not relevant to what we were doing. You sort of shut off from the physical world really. You’re just told to keep your nose in the books and do the maths. The research we had to do for projects was not really encouraged – we were never taught how to go about doing research and how to think about going off and doing research.

In the following discussion I have referred to the work of artists and poets, as much as design thinkers. As mentioned earlier it was an artist rather than a product designer who introduced the IDE students to visual thinking, because our aim was to establish the central role of the imagination in designing, and some of imagination’s processes are visual. This was not about design as self-centred fancy, but in recognition that design’s responsibilities require more than analytical and quantifiable responses to the problems and projects it encounters. Mysteries of Time recounts how blindfolded people tend to lean forwards when talking about the future, and backwards about the past. 3 Howard Gardner in 1983 proposed visual or spatial thinking of one of his Multiple Intelligences in Project Zero. (Gardner, H. (1983/2003) Frames of Mind. New York, Basic Books).

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Visual and verbal modes of thinking can be rational or intuitive. While there are many ways in which they are interconnected in experience their ideas are approached differently by those primarily using them to produce creative work, and by those whose work is to comment on it. Mitchell (1980:361), literary critic and editor of the journal Critical Inquiry, describes how “the realms of language and imagery…..are generally regarded as fundamentally different modes of expression, representation and cognition. Language works with arbitrary, conventional signs, images with natural, universal signs. Language unfolds in temporal succession; images reside in a realm of timeless spatiality and simultaneity”. However he sees that they are interrelated and wonders why “common sense keeps violating itself this way, erecting barriers between different symbolic modes only to find more ingenious ways of transgressing them” in all kinds of expression. Arnheim (1986:136,139), writing from the point of view of a visual psychologist and educator, insists that visual and verbal thinking are linked and complementary, not separated, even if of different natures and values. He asserts: “Productive thinking operates by means of the things to which language refers – referents that in themselves are not verbal but perceptual… productive thinking must solve any kind of problem perceptually because there exists no other arena in which true thinking can take place.” He traces the separation of perception and thinking, of the “intuitive from the abstractive functions” (his emphasis) to “Descartes’ … (definition) of man as a “thing that thinks”, to which reasoning came naturally; whereas imagining, the activity of the senses, required a special effort, and was in no way necessary to the human nature or essence.” In an early version of this chapter (1980:494) Arnheim describes the role that visual images (often of the most abstract nature) play in conceptual thinking as “visual structuring”, which occurs in two ways that he, perhaps provocatively, calls the intuitive and the intellectual mode. In closer focus, Varela et al. (1991:163) describe how: “the neuronal network does not function as a one way street from perception to action. Perception and action, sensorium and motorum, are linked together as successively emergent and mutually selecting patterns.” A

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more pooetic version is that by Rilke, R quoted at the start of Drawing and the Drawer’’s Story. The phillosopher andd cyberneticiian Waddinggton describees in his boo ok Tools for Thinkking (1977:xxiii) how he deliberately d cchose to use a lot of diag grams to illustratee his rather dry d text, and also made th the choice off getting a paainter to produce them freehaand using a brush, becaause: “they are not intended to express facts …theyy are strictly y illustrationns of ideas; their purpose is to stimulatee your imagiination, to seeize the gist of what the idea is abou ut. They are therrefore not drawn d in the way that has becom me conventio onal for illustrations in technnical or mosst other intelllectual book ks.” An interesting examplee of the oppposite appro oach is provvided by Allexander (19 964) an architecttural philosoopher. When n he also illuustrates a hierarchy he uses u the more cconventional ‘finished’ kind of illustration. This imp poses a metaphoorical impersonality on the inform mation, makiing it hard to see networkss as other thaan an abstracction.

Figure 255. Waddingtonn, C.H. 1977, A simple hiera rarchy, p. 49.

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Figure 26. Alexander, C. 1964, A hierarchy of design concepts, p. 62.

Arnheim (1996:19) reasserts: “All cognition of reality derives from perceptual experience, which provides our only access to reality. Perception …always involves the imposition of a network of concepts derived from the sensory raw material. Concepts are congealed generalities, whose nature depends on the medium that happens to generate them. Every act of cognition requires such a network of concepts, regardless of whether it applies to a purely perceptual object such as a painting, or to a verbal text”.

He uses the example of chess players where a game presents itself as “a highly dynamic network of relations” rather than “a mechanical copy of the arrangements of pieces on the board”. The difference is between perception and thinking, not between image and text based media. He gives an example of how they can connect (1986:95): “a few key words pointing to a landscape…sprinkled over a page. The reader’s mind …may create a unified picture that possesses the principal property of any visual percept: all elements are fused in one organised whole, and all relations are integrated in a unified pattern…Networks of relations are what the mind uses in reasoning. These relations do not fuse as they do in a percept, but in order to be readable they must be organisable hierarchically or sequentially”.

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These are the same as the principles behind the designs of book pages that enabled early medieval scholars to commit them to an inventoried memory, which could then manipulate their contents inventively as ‘networks of relations’. (See Ars Memoriae and Illuminated Manuscripts) Visual perception is spatial and holistic, while language-based work is necessarily linear and sequential in time and space. Poetry uses many devices (metre, metaphor, spatial layout of words and lines) in an attempt to break down the linearity of writing in its efforts to express and communicate experience in the moment. Arnhem’s (1997:234) observation that “the components of intuitive thought interact within a continuous field. Those of intellectual processes follow each other in linear succession” contributes to the idea that thinking and reasoning can only take place in language not in visual media. His illustration above could however be translated directly into a design brief, a few key words pointing to a design opportunity, for example: “a full and busy restaurant, high volume of noise, people unable to converse…..” Or: “piles of empty plastic bottles lying in a dried-up riverbed….”. Arnheim, working in the tradition of Gestalt psychology, has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the role of perception in thinking, and how we can express ideas through images and through words. However the subject is not new. The Roman poet Horace maintained that poetry could be considered on a par with painting as a medium of expression with his much-quoted dictum ut pictura poesis (as painting so poetry) in his treatise Ars Poetica (circa 18 BCE line 361). His proposition has been in and out of favour with art historians ever since.4 In the ancient Greek classical art of rhetoric Ekphrasis is term which refers to the skill of being able to describe something from one medium in another, for instance using speech to describe visual images. Its existence is a reminder of the importance at that time of being able to summon up bright images as a way to bring speeches to life. The Latin translation of ekphrasis is descriptio, or pictura. Carruthers (2009:9), scholar of medieval thinking, 4

See G.P. Landow The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin, Chapter 1: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ruskin/atheories/1.1.html#sa

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points out that “the details of an ekphrasis could be realised quite differently in each person’s imagination, for its purposes were affective and cognitive, not scientific description. The line between descriptio (or pictura) as ekphrasis and descriptio (or pictura) as an actual painting is thin and highly variable in medieval usage.” The process of moving from one medium of communication to another brings up the problems involved in the naming of things, discussed below. In his novel Dead Souls Gogol (2008:27) infolds painting into writing, and both into the shared skill of observation: (In attempting to describe the character Manilov) “The author must acknowledge that the task is no easy one. It is far easier to represent characters of broader dimensions – you just have to fling your paints as hard as you like onto the canvas: searing black eyes, jutting brows, a forehead furrowed with wrinkles, a black or fiery red cloak thrown over one shoulder, and your portrait is done. But all these gentlemen, of whom the world is full, look very much like one another, yet when you take a closer look you see a lot of the most subtle peculiarities: they are fearfully difficult sitters. Here you have to focus your attention very hard to force all their fine, almost invisible features to reveal themselves; in fact, you have to develop your insights, which may be very experienced in the science of observation, to a far greater degree.”

The art critic Clark (2006:163,176) writing of Poussin’s painting “Landscape with a Man killed by a Snake” (1648, National Gallery, London) explores how visual expression manages to portray significant themes in life in ways different from using words: “The figure of the washerwoman seems to me an emblem of… the way that any particular form, or direction, or kind of spatiality in an artwork of this intensity always stands at the crossroads between very different semantic worlds.” (his emphasis) “The running man is not running back into the world of the sign, it follows, so much as into the world of reason, or of a reasoned dialogue between word and image. Surely the woman and her basket stand for that relationship above all. Here the fixing of attention, there the mere fall of light; here the sign, there the stuff; a touching and compassionate “body language”, but offset – sustained, substantiated - by

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things as remote from the world of words as the folding of yellow or the torquing of blue and white.”

Arnheim is interested in how the different expressive media of writing and visual work can be used to describe experience. He refers to a classical sculpture5 which depicts Laocoon’s desperate attempts to escape the writhing coils of two serpents sent to kill him, as discussed by the eighteenth century art critic Gotthold Lessing. Arnheim (1997:247) writes “Lessing argues that painting, concerned with shapes and colours in space, is equipped to deal with objects which coexist in space, or whose parts do so; whereas actions, successions in time, are the proper concern of poetry.” This apparently separates stillness and movement in the world, and how they are best depicted or described, and then understood. Arnheim (1994:412, 416) resolves this issue by pointing out that “every visual object is an eminently dynamic affair.” Metric descriptions sidestep the underlying fact that “visual perception consists in the experiencing of visual forces….Directed tension, then, is what we are talking about when we discuss visual dynamics…. Natural objects often possess strong visual dynamics because their shapes are the traces of the physical forces that created the objects” and these dynamic physical forces are the underlying truth of the natural world of which we are a part. While painting and poetry may seem distant from the concerns of conventional sketching and brief-writing activities of designers, they are relevant here for several reasons. Visual literacy and sensitivity enables the designer to be increasingly aware of the dynamic play of forces in the objects and spaces whose forms are being explored. Beyond this, designed objects and tools need to be able to accommodate emotional as well as practical aspects of how we experience using them, and so these requirements need appropriate media and approaches for their exploration. Some of the students were good at rational thinking and at the same time were mostly inexperienced in the range of the communicative potential offered by drawing. They needed to become aware of what Arnheim calls the psychophysical forces involved in using the tools 5

circa First century BC and CE, Vatican Museums.

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Figure 27. Filippo Agricola (1776-1857), Study of the Laocoon, red chalk on paper © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

of drawing, (the “graphological” qualities sometimes evident in the work done). Some were unsure what aspects of a design should or could fruitfully be pursued through visual work. This tended to mean that few people were

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inclined to be experimental, or to explore affective aspects of design through drawing. ES: It’s just – a lot of the projects that were done throughout my degree were quite different to my final year project where I had to consider human aspects or whatever – normally its just something you can calculate out so you don’t really ever have to leave the studio or the library to go and look at things. PBD: I think one of the things that didn’t fit into that kind of course is that when you draw the physical world you only draw a version of it. Mmm. I’d always thought oh you just draw what’s there. Previously I would have tried to exactly copy what was there. If somebody told me to draw that (a plant on the table) I would reach for a green pencil. But I think now I would try to record the feeling of the plant to give it a bit more… So you start to include yourself in the equation. Yes you want the essence of the plant and then how you see the plant and that’s obviously where the ‘art’ comes in I suppose. Or, even if neither of us were artists we would perhaps both have different kinds of reactions to the plant. Oh yes yes I mean – and a botanist would have a different kind of background. But it’s certainly easier to record that if you know how to draw I suppose. I suppose you wouldn’t necessarily have to draw it you could write about it or compose a song about it – it’s the same thing I suppose.

The differences in some mental processing seen in the left and right hemispheres of the brain support the idea of two separate ways of thinking, verbal and non-verbal. John-Steiner (1997:87) reports on the work of the psychologist J.C.Gowan who “suggested that the continual stream of internal discourse overshadows imagery, an on-going right hemisphere process in the brain. It is necessary, he believes, to allay the work of the dominant left hemisphere – where language is mediated - and to pull or focus the thinker’s attention to visual processes which he, too, considers critical in creativity.”

However, it is not so much that different sides of the brain have different functions such as language or imagery, reason or emotion, rather that language and imagery are used differently and in a complementary way by each side (McGilchrist 2009). Edwards, in her books about the learning of drawing (1979, 1989, 1999) has popularised the concept, explaining that the

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right side of the brain’s intuitive and creative character has been lost in the educational system, but can be revitalised through approaches to drawing that exploit its strengths. These books have been very influential both within formal art school education and popular culture. Certain personality or mental conditions may also affect the dominance of different kinds of thinking. For instance Temple Grandin, a veterinary specialist who is also autistic, has famously written and made films about the strength and extent of her visual thinking, as well as other sensory sensitivities while working with animals, and designing equipment for their kinder management.6 There are many conventions and techniques in image-making to explore the bridges between ideas and visual form, some to be responded to emotionally, others more intellectually. The artist Paul Klee (1961) discusses the possibilities extensively in his Notebooks. The poet Auden also experimented with abstract imagery in his Journal of an Airman, in the book The Orators (1932).7 Unexplained shapes and diagrams accompany the text; in my interpretation these are efforts at depicting connections between the enemy within and enemy without. Laurence Sterne, author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1769) was one of the earliest English language novelists, and it is interesting to see that, at this early stage in the development of this genre of work, he uses a generous peppering of visual devices throughout the work, to take expression beyond the linear flow of the words. Some of these are typographic such as dots, dashes, lines, spacings which animate the text expressively, others freely drawn lines. I have referred in Research Process to his graphic forms to describe the unfolding of the book. Traditional Chinese art, being closely related to Chinese calligraphy, is naturally able to make close links between words and images. For example Willats (1997:156) sees that: “A Northern Sung landscape, conceived part by part, is read rather than experienced; it has a great intellectual sense of scale but lacks physically described space and recession. The result is a conceptual 6 7

See www.templegrandin.com a book he later distanced himself from because of its fascist leanings.

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landscape that represents no mere retinal image of nature but a vision of the macrocosm.” Berger (2005:123) expresses it differently: “(Chinese) Calligraphy, the trace of things, is behind the model and the draughtsman has to search for it, looking through the model. On his paper he then repeats the gestures he has seen calligraphically.” Artists are also more likely to be able to exploit the experiential space of ambiguity. Colm Toibin (2006:54) describes looking at Howard Hodgkin’s paintings with the artist: “If you leave something empty, he (Hodgkin) has said, the eye fills it. But the process of doing that, the eye at work, offers a fresh dynamic to the process of looking, makes room for a strange attraction between the viewer and the work. If this incompleteness is quite deliberate, then that moment when the eye moves into action is more sophisticated and complex and alluring. This I think is the energy he seeks to unleash when he paints.”

Lodge (2002) describes how the term ‘qualia’ has been coined to refer to the specific nature of our subjective experience of the world. He argues that both lyric poetry and some prose fiction can achieve this description and thus communication, as I believe does some painting. Of course some art such as icons, and writing such as sacred texts are not considered to be media of communication of another’s experience, but to be living expressions themselves. Most writers, artists and designers are however trying to communicate, at times with themselves, as well as with others. Notebooks and sketchbooks offer everyone a medium for sliding productively between visual and verbal work, for designers an opportunity to explore the difference between design as object, and design as usage and experience which is much harder to grasp and articulate. Professional artists and writers sometimes make finished work in this way, in the ‘livre d’artiste’. Their intentions may be illuminating for designers. The painter Gauguin, who had also worked as a journalist, deliberately wanted to move away from what he saw as the deadening kind of writing used by the critics, and to explore beyond his central practice as a painter.

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His collages of writing and images used his own drawings and photographs and those of others, and in his writing he used “different authorial voices and literary registers….in favour of the suggestive and synthetic approach that he associated with visual art.” He says in his autobiographical text Avant et Apres: “Different episodes, numerous reflections, a few jests, appear in this volume, from who knows where, (they) come together and retreat; a child’s game, images in a kaleidoscope” (Goddard 2010:34,35). These last two analogies point towards key features of creative thinking so necessary in design: an innocent approach, and the breaking up of fixed patterns. Monastic practices of thinking moved seamlessly between words and images, as I have described later (Ars Memoriae and Illuminated Manuscripts). According to Carruthers (1998:3) “The emphasis upon the need for human beings to “see” their thoughts in their minds as organised schemata of images, or “pictures”, and then use them for further thinking, is a striking and continuous feature of medieval monastic rhetoric, with significant interest even for our own contemporary understanding of the role of images in thinking.” This also included “the monks’ ‘mixed’ use of verbal and visual media, their often synaesthetic literature and architecture.” For example, beyond the earlier emphasis on aids to memorisation, the word pictures in the Luttrell Psalter serve “not to render the psalms more readily memorable, but to provide a heightened and intensified experience of reading, through the discovery of all the riches both apparent and concealed in the words” (Sandler 1996:95). Also commenting on the Luttrell Psalter, Brown (1998: 16) comments: “images did not only serve to help recall and to navigate text, however, but were an integral part of its perception and the understandings of its meanings.” Carruthers (1998:3) adds a note from Mitchell (1994:107): “the purification of the media in modernist aesthetics, the attempt to grasp the unitary homogeneous essences of painting, photography, sculpture, poetry etc. is the real aberration…(for) the heterogeneous character of media was well understood in pre-modern cultures”. Many approaches towards better communications work on the assumption that image and speech have different strengths, advertising being a particularly obvious example. In another domain the UK Open University’s

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Systems Management course8 teaches that groups using “rich picturing” to elaborate problems through drawing are able to include emotional dimensions of thinking, and to appreciate others’ points of view, as the drawings also act as a medium of expression of things a member might be unwilling to express in speech. The examples from different fields above show how the development of fertile ideas depends on an intertwining process of visual and verbal modes of thinking, recalling in my mind the spiralling vine metaphor of the generation of knowledge so pervasive in illuminated manuscripts, and directly translatable to design research and design generation. The sociologist Bauman (2008:511), discussing how writing uncovers rather than records, forming categories of interpretation, (see also Research Process) asserts that “‘Linguistic universe’ is a pleonastic phrase: the universe in which each one of us lives is, and cannot be anything but, ‘linguistic’ – made of words.” But he then elaborates this by using the strongest visual metaphors: “Words light the islands of visible forms in the dark sea of the invisible and mark the scattered spots of relevance in the formless mass of the insignificant. It is words that slice the world into classes of nameable objects and bring out their kinship or enmity, closeness or distance, affinity or mutual estrangement. And so long as they stay alone in the field, they realise all such artefacts to the rank of reality – the only reality there is.”

Design theorists and design historians are also exploring the subject of how visual ideas and visual thinking are incorporated in the emerging field of the cultural analysis of design. As Lees-Maffei (2007:1) notes in the introduction to an issue of Working Papers in Design on Image and Text: “Notwithstanding the fact that the interconnectedness of text, narrative and image underlies the majority of our cultural experience, understanding of how these three phenomena work together is in its infancy. Students pursuing courses in ‘Literature’ or ‘Art History’ are too seldom invited to see their 8

http://systems.open.ac.uk/materials/t552/index.htm OU course T552 Systems Thinking and Practice: Diagramming.

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chosen fields as part of a hybridised, remediated, mixed economy of culture, and recent work in visual and material culture goes only so far in overcoming the assumptions of conventionally discrete modes of understanding cultural practice and artefacts.”

Another direction of enquiry is outlined by Atzmon, at the Design Research Society’s 2006 conference: “Despite the recent flurry of interest in the visual, the written word continues to dominate as both the focus and medium of deep analysis. I suggest that we ought to challenge this paradigm by questioning the privileging of the verbal in Western culture in general and the academy in particular. I propose that one way to do so is to elevate visual rhetoric to equal status with verbal rhetoric. Unfortunately, when visual entities are “elevated,” the “elevator” commonly turns to framing strategies that isolate artifacts from the broader cultural contexts in which they are created and used. Not only does this strategy encourage narrowly defined analysis based on visual form, it perpetuates a separate, but not quite equal status for visual rhetoric. Instead, I suggest design historians should explore the narrative encoded into design artifacts by analyzing the ways in which cultural content is distilled and then instilled in the design process, and then ultimately expressed in the use and visual form of design artifacts. This approach reveals complex narratives that are not readily apparent to most people.”9

Tversky (1999) a psychologist with a particular interest in how designers think through sketch drawing, describes several connections between the way people describe and how they sketch-draw situations. The feedback process between the drawer and drawing has more structure to it than might appear to be the case. In an example of a task describing an environment or sketching a map it was observed that “both descriptions and depictions followed the same hierarchical order… (suggesting) that environments are mentally organized first, independent of communication medium, and that prior organization is imposed on the communication.”

9

(http://www.iade.pt/drs2006/wonderground/index.html ).

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She sees implications for how designs are developed because of chosen saliencies. “Mental hierarchies are typically structured in a natural way, by appearance, by function, by significance…the order of drawing elements reveals the mental organization underlying the design” (pages not numbered).

While this appears to describe underlying mental connections and processes, their development has to be learned, and can perhaps be learned to an unlimited level. Gregory (1966) recounts the experiences of a blind man (‘S.B.’) gaining sight in adulthood. The man had been a regular user of buses, knowing how to get on and get off through using touch with his white cane. With newly gained sight he started to draw the bus, but could only ‘see’ and thus draw the part of the bus he knew, namely the step-on back platform and the wheels. Gradually more elements were added as sight became conceptually available and useful. S.B. was however never happy in his new sighted world, where so much was difficult to comprehend. Touch remained his preferred gateway to perception of and interaction with his environment. Another example of such haptic and spatial intelligence is when the hairdresser, to check she has cut hair evenly on both sides of the head, will close her eyes and grasp the hair ends in the fingers of both hands. Using non-verbal feedback from the precise projection of the arms and hands, and perhaps some balance sensors in the ears she can check for symmetry. Design researchers Schon and Wiggins (1992:137, 135), analysing the activities of an architectural student on a particular project, describe the complementary activities of seeing in the drawing, and seeing that certain implications arise, the word ‘seeing’ bridging visual and mental processes: “In a single act of seeing, she both visually apprehends the configuration, and judges its scalar quality.” They describe this as a kind of “reflective conversation”. “In all this ‘seeing’, the designer not only visually registers information but also constructs its meaning – identifies patterns and gives them meanings beyond themselves. Words like ‘recognise’, ‘detect’, ‘discover’ and ‘appreciate’ denote variants of seeing, as do such terms as

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‘seeing that’, seeing as’ and seeing ‘in’.”10 These also apply to different conceptualisations of ‘gaze’. This prepositional link is taken up by Fisher at the 2009 Drawing Research Network conference ‘Thinking through Drawing’, where he connects several different kinds of thinking to approaches to drawing, saying that drawing places thinking into a relationship. For example “Thinking can mean recognition….In that sense drawing is both a form of empirical enquiry and a vehicle for revelation.” Drawing moves us towards seeing, and the prepositional link that establishes that drawing is always drawing for something moves us towards seeing as. Increased understanding of the processes involved in visual and verbal thinking enables us to make more of them, a skill central to design. Since certain principles can be identified, I argue that they should be elaborated in design training. The first of these is that we think with and through categories even if we are unaware of it. As Bruner (1957:124) proposes: “Perception is a process of categorization in which organisms move inferentially from cues to category identity…Predictive veridicality….as…a perceptual categorization of an object or event permits one to ‘go beyond’ the properties of the object or event perceived to a prediction of other properties of the object not yet tested.” Later (1998:47) he continues: “What human perceivers do is to take whatever scraps they can extract from the stimulus input, and if these conform to expectancy, to read the rest of the model in their head. The philosopher Thomas Kuhn was sufficiently beguiled by our experiment that he took it as a paradigm of what he came to call paradigms in science.”

This quote is particularly relevant when thinking about the cultural divide reported by the engineers between their previous and their new work where there were seemingly so few common frames of reference.

10 Schon and Wiggins reference ‘seeing as’ to Wittgenstein L., Philosophical Investigations 1953.

Figure 3. Meindeert Hobbema, 1689, The Avenue at Middleharnis, © National Gallery London Picture Library.

Figure 9. Scott, K., 2014, Starting the plaited braid for Ugandan mat-making, Kampala, PhD Royal College of Art.

Figure 10. Michelangelo, 1524-1559, Staircase in the San Lorenzo Library, Florence, 2013.

Figure 14. Hieronymus Bosch, 1560, The Tribulations of St Anthony, © Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon, Portugal.

Figure 29. Peter I Bruegel the Elder, 1560, The Fall of Icarus, Museé des Beaux Arts, Brussels © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. Photo: J. Geleyns/Ro scan.

Figure 32. Grass drawing, Lake Michigan shoreline, 2009.

Figure 34. Suzanne Burke, Pulpit in St. Mary’s Forane Church, Champakulam, Kerala, India, 2012.

Figure 35. Maker unknown, late 13th century, Page from a Gradual, with historiated initial R. Music for Easter Mass with image of Christ’s tomb and Christ in Majesty above, Arezzo, Italy, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Figure 37. Roman bridge over the river Afrin, Nebi Huri, Syria, 2009.

Figure 43. Galata bridge, Istanbul, Turkey, 2009. © Gunold Brunbauer/ Dreamstime.com.

Figure 45. Drawing with chalk on a near vertical surface using wooden revetments for stability, Fovant, Wiltshire, 2013.

Figure 47. Early twentieth century cigarette card illustrating the constellation of Scorpio, 2014.

Figure 48. Rembrandt van Rijn, 1632, Philosophe en Meditation, © Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Figure 49. Sun-dried cod, Lofoten Islands, Demons from the deep, 2009.

Figure 50. Fra Raffaello da Brescia, 1513-1537, Intarsia panel with various woods, Bologna, Italy, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Figure 51. Beech avenue, Tollard Royal, Wiltshire, 2014.

Figure 52. Susanna and the Elders, tapestry, wool and silk with embroidery, Tournai, Belgium, circa 1500. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Figure 53. Anonymous Self Portrait, Flammand or Hollandais, Italy 1620 – 1630, Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille, France.

Figure 54. Situated Self.

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These processes of ‘perceptual readiness’ work across both visual and verbal thinking. Language enables us to name things in categories to identify them, to make sense of the world, and to produce meaning. Language also “helps to offset a tendency in perception to see things as pure shapes. Having been coined for practical needs, language tends to suggest functional rather than formal categories and thereby to go beyond mere appearance” (Arnheim 1997:238, 239). Spearman’s Principles of Relations, and Principles of Correlates described in his book Creative Mind (1930) are fundamental. Such categories have levels of abstractness to suit the circumstances of use in any context. The effect of this is that naming influences what we see. Abercrombie (1969) describes one experiment11 where simple line-drawn images were shown to two groups of people at the same time as they were named, with different titles being given to the two groups. When the participants were later asked to draw the images with the names they had been given, they were drawn to more closely resemble the different titles given. Categories having been established by such naming, their characteristics can become mobile. Smets (1989) reports on a study12 showing how a visual characteristic associated with youth – rounded skulls in young babies and animals, was transferred to another domain altogether – the profile of a car. Images showed that rounded, rather than flatter profiles of a car were considered ‘younger’.

11

Carmichael, L., Hogan, H.P., and Walters, A.A. (1932) An Experimental Study of the Effect of language on the Reproduction of Visually Perceived Form. J. Exper. Psychology 15,73. 12 J.B Pettinger, R.E. Shaw, and L.S. Mark, Perceptual Information for the Age Level of Faces as a Higher Order Invariant of Growth, J. Exper. Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 5 (1979): 478-93.

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Figure 28. “The pattern of geometrical changes in the skull (top part of the drawing, in which the skull of a child is represented by points, that of an adult by circles) is found to provide the possibility of detecting its age. This “growing older” invariant can be applied not only to growing organisms such as bird, ape, or dog, but also inanimate objects (Volkswagen). Experimental subjects describe the Volkswagen as young or old.” Smets, G. 1989, after Pettinger et al. (1979) op.cit., Design Issues: Vol V, No. 2, Spring.

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ES…As far as the controls and colours well it had to be appealing in a feminine way and it had to be around children – not to scare the children off. PBD: That’s what semiotics is referring to. The way you would choose the colours, the textures, the shapes, particularly say the fabrics. Did you see M’s Porsche baby buggy in the Show this year? I didn’t see the Show Ah right, well M came back from doing a summer placement with Porsche Design with the idea that he wanted to explore if there was such a thing as Porsche design. So he took a product that he thought needed designing which was a baby buggy that men wouldn’t feel idiotic wheeling about, and he did it as something that would fit into a Porsche car but would be a visual expression and, in terms of integrity of materials and that sort of thing, would be an expression of Porsche design, so there it was in the Show looking like a Porsche car. So it was reeking of the semiotics of alternative ways of looking at buggies because what he saw was that buggies were all soft pastelly and he thought that that excluded certain categories of people such as men, who wouldn’t want to be seen dead wheeling these things. No! I remember when I bought a buggy to experiment and test when I was doing the project and I bought it in the shop and I had to take it to the studio and I thought ‘when can I buy it when there’s no one around to see me with the pushchair?’. Put it in a carrier bag.. What was it about the pushchair that was embarrassing? I don’t know really I guess it was. .. I don’t really know to be honest. It was just something that I didn’t want to be seen with as such. I’m not quite sure what sort of image it would conjure up. But was it to do with you having a baby or the appearance of the buggy? Probably a bit of both – the fabric and the buggy and teddy bears – not quite my thing. It should have been black and chrome wheels and then I would push it down the street.

Our ‘making sense’ is both an interpretive strategy, and becomes a projective habit as we navigate the identifiers of the myriad communities we belong to, using processes of classification, and of course we then influence and change them as we interact with them. This has far-reaching implications for design semantics. Designers as people use naming categories, (Athavankar 1989) and people as consumers experience objects in categories, which constrains acceptable innovation in product types. De Bont. et al. (1992:201) in their study of cognitive style and preference for forms of espresso machines, found confirmation of earlier studies that “broad categorizers were more inclined to buy new products than narrow

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categorizers… and respondents with a higher tolerance of ambiguity were more inclined to buy new products.” As Smets (1989:91) observes, Gibson’s (1979) concept of perception as ecological rather than individual, using the idea of ‘affordances’, enables design to shift the connection between function and form to function as behaviour and usage. These ideas about the role of perception in design thinking formed the basis of a series of seminars at an early point in the IDE course. In Learning and epistemic development in designing I have described how apprentice-style aspects of design training relate to the ideas of Situated Cognition (Lave and Wenger 1991). They propose that we understand the world through language and our senses, but not as a mechanistic and isolated process, rather as part of our relationship with the environment around us, social and cultural as well as personal. Such an understanding requires a more deliberate approach to teaching about perception than is normally assumed to occur through anecdotal examples offered by designers from their experience. Mental imagery is assumed to be an important design tool, usually taken for granted despite many problems associated with its use. We experience the world both in a holistic, and in an incomplete way. Such incompleteness can have disadvantages, when our understanding is erroneous, but also advantages, if it enables fresh insight or learning. We rely often on mental images as part of using memory, but it is well known that they are probably never photographically accurate renditions of what has been seen. More general is a certain incompleteness of image, the features that are remembered as being important in some way perceived and reconstructed against an unnoticed featureless background, a special case of the fact that all pictorial images are representations. This phenomenon was relevant to different IDE students in different ways. MN: I can’t imagine I would ever pick up a pencil or a pen and draw something without a purpose. Already I know the scale it’s going to be in and I know the rough measurements that it has to be and so I wouldn’t just tend

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to doodle really and come up with interesting shapes because that doesn’t inspire me to, in a way, I just don’t do it. DY: I think, coming from a manufacturing sort of engineering apprenticeship, it being drummed in to you from the start – everything has to be spot on, absolutely perfect, and often, I think it holds me back, often it can hold you back, often you’ve got to be messy, sketch models don’t have to be perfect and beautiful. PBD: What’s the advantage of them being messy? Because it’s freer. It sort of frees you up if you’re messier…often from, if you’re sort of a trained engineer as in manufacturing, you’re very narrow and look for that perfect form all the time, whereas if you often played a bit more to start with, especially with sketch models, I think ideas develop a lot further.

In his paper Sketching and the psychology of Design (1995:70,71) Arnheim makes a more positive point about mental images in the context of visual thinking: “Mental images derive from optical percepts, but they are not identical copies of them…they differ from the optical percepts recorded by the eyes by their reduced intensity. They are fugitive, easily wiped off the slate of memory and, therefore, they offer a freedom not granted to optical percepts, especially in their dealings with space. Mental images can handle visual objects as though they were weightless. They can display them with ease from any angle or at any distance, as long as the person’s visual imagination is sufficiently concrete. They can ignore gravity, if they so choose… Percepts….remain committed to the physical objects of which they are projections, whereas mental images depend much more loosely on the percepts from which they derive by the remnants of memory”.

Arnheim is writing about the role of sketching in design development so it is natural that he goes on to make the point that while there is a goal to be reached the vagueness of images can be a positive feature. “Its pregnancy is what the designer requires in the search for a final shape.” There are however well-known examples of how particularly bright mental images have helped to produce ideas and solve problems. A well-known one is that of the nineteenth-century chemist Kekulé who reported that during the time he was trying to solve the problem of the molecular structure of benzene, he was once dozing by the fire; he saw a teeming mass of

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molecules, then a writhing snake which bit its own tail. He linked this image to his problem and saw the solution – the previously unthought-of structure as a ring (Koestler 1970). ES: The only drawing I’ve done previously is from my ideas… I’ve never really, not since I was very young, gone out and drawn what I see in front of me. So that when I sort of came here and did this drawing course well that was where I was falling down, I couldn’t look at something and draw it – if I could see in my head I had an idea about something I could draw it out but I couldn’t draw what’s in front of me.

Metaphorical connections can be simple or sophisticated. Kekulé’s example, while visually fairly literal, was not the ‘routine’ and unproductive metaphor that accompanies so much of thinking, nor was it the rich but abstract image that implies but does not explain literally. Visual work and writing generously lend each other many descriptive terms that enhance understanding of themselves and the other.13 This capacity for making metaphorical connections is therefore another feature of thinking that should have its place in design training (see Metaphor). This kind of thinking breathes life into the networks and concepts that we learn in experience and build in the memory. This is a process of many hazards, but it does lead to more richness in our ideas, and sometimes substance in productive thinking. As Arnheim (1997:83) describes memory, with almost poetic imagery: “Traces resembling each other will make contact and strengthen or weaken or replace each other. To put it in the terms of Kurt Lewin: memory is a much more fluid medium than perception because it is farther removed from the checks of reality.” Further, he says (1966:63): “If the memory image does not simply duplicate some scene of the physical world, what is it like?...The mind, it is said, can cut pieces from the cloth of memory, leaving the cloth itself unchanged. It can also make collages from memory material, by imagining centaurs or griffins.” Making connections seems to be a basic process of sense-making, but in general in order to notice and produce linkages beyond the obvious, it needs

13

for example: ‘sketching’ of ideas, ‘flowery’ or ‘formal’ kinds of language, and ‘phrasing’ and ‘inflection’ in drawing, as well as the idea of drawing itself being a ‘language’.

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focused attention. Away from the scientific context, where analogical thinking is an interesting aberration from more commonly accepted analytical thought, the poet Wallace Stevens (1960:165) distinguishes between the impressions we receive, and the work and effort involved in making something of them: “We find that the operative force within us does not, in fact, seem to be the sensibility, that is the feelings. It seems to be a constructive faculty, that derives its energy more from the imagination than from the sensibility…the mind retains experience, so that long after that experience…. that faculty within us of which I have spoken makes its own constructions out of that experience. If it merely constructed the experience or repeated for us our sensations in the face of it, it would be the memory. What it really does is to use it as material with which it does whatever it wills. This is the typical function of the imagination which always makes use of the familiar to produce the unfamiliar.”

John-Steiner, in her survey of creative thinkers makes a similar observation: “Productive thinkers use their stubborn patience to work with these images to go beyond the representational function of visual thought. They find new thoughts hidden as metaphors in their reflections as did the young Einstein while riding on his wave; these images lead them to new generative syntheses.” (1997:109)

Stevens makes a necessary distinction between imitation and resemblance: “An imitation is artificial. It is not fortuitous as a true metaphor is….Resemblance in metaphor is an activity of the imagination; and in metaphor the imagination is life” (1960:72). Memory is a tool and a source that can be used with much more effect. If I have stressed here the recognition of its active and generative role by artists and poets, this is because a current trend to supplement our thinking is to replace memory’s use with the extensive information holding-banks of the internet. It may seem that with the proliferation of images everywhere in broadcast, computer-based and print media, that the ‘visual’ has displaced the ‘verbal’ as the primary means of communication. Clark (2006:175) criticizes the

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banality of much of the image-production we are surrounded by (logos, graffiti, web-pages, video-games, etc.) because they are so “utterly under the spell of the verbal – and that’s the main part of the trouble with them…. Therefore it becomes more and more imperative to point to the real boundaries between seeing and speaking, or sentence and visual configuration. And imperative to keep alive a notion of the kind of visuality that truly establishes itself at the edge of the verbal.” (his emphasis).

It is easy to absorb the visual imagery so common in our environment, even if understanding some of the codes may need sub-culture insider knowledge. I think however that this is different from a deeper understanding and appreciation of visual culture and its history, and the kinds of visual interaction that emerge through that experience. Design students who have some visual literacy because of the prevailing culture, may nonetheless still have a shallow level of visual thinking. This contributes to difficulties in using drawing to explore, develop and detail visual ideas, and does no favours to our designed environment. Visual and spatial thinking should not be thought to be present or relevant only in subjects in the Humanities. Mathewson (1999:33) discusses how “thinking with images plays a central role in scientific creativity and communication but is neglected in science classrooms.” He lists an extensive array of ‘master images’ that can be constructed from the visual/spatial content of science, while lamenting that these do not translate into the teaching of visual thinking as part of science education. The terms ‘mechanics’, ‘structures’ and ‘dynamics’ are all key concepts in engineering, and infuse our language as ways to explain how things work, whether abstract or physical, without any sense they come from a separate world. Less fortunate borrowed metaphors include those using mechanical ideas of meshing cogs to describe organic processes such as how the brain, or society works14. This discussion has concentrated on the relationship between the processes and products of seeing and thinking. All such efforts, at an individual and at 14 A surely ironic use is in the Eames’ animated IBM film “The Information Machine, described in My Relationship with the study

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a social level are initially directed at making sense of the world, and communicating about it, and in design’s case also changing it. There are many limits on how designers can design appropriately for other people in areas beyond the casual crossover of taste and style. These constraints include research funding, inclination, the drive of the market, and most obviously the difficulties involved in trying to understand someone else’s experience of the world. The design process is stereotyped as primarily working by sketch-drawing of objects into existence, and this is in fact the common practice. However, using a product is an action, that action situated in patterns of usage both personal and social, and this aspect of a product’s life may be harder to speculate about and describe, not just because of unfamiliarity, but because of lack of fluency in the media being used for such exploration. Designing, like other kinds of productive thinking uses the reasoning processes and imagery that connect us to experience and to reality. Since design should seek to embrace the broadest implications of any proposal, there is a strong argument not only for the continued teaching of freehand drawing, but also, within that, visual thinking skills. The educational aim would be to strengthen memory, explore the fertile territory of metaphor, and nurture the imagination. Steven’s (1960:25) assertion about the true place of imagination being in reality rather than fancy points the way for design every bit as much as for poetry. “The subject matter of poetry is not that ‘collection of solid, static objects extended in space’ but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene, but the life that is lived in it.”

METAPHOR

According to ‘strong metaphor’ and its adherents metaphors not only arise out of perception but are formative of it. By this argument, catachresis – the perception of similarity and consequent crossing of category-divisions – becomes a vital tool in perception, as well as its most obvious and vivid manifestation in language. (Lewis 1994:10) If …learning must always start with what the student already knows, then we are faced with the problem of how the student can come to know anything radically new. It is our thesis that metaphor is one of the central ways of leaping the epistemological chasm between old knowledge and radically new knowledge. (Petrie and Oshlag 1993:583) The logic regulating the Text is not comprehensive (define ‘what the work means’) but metonymic; the activity of associations, contiguities, carryingsover coincides with a liberation of symbolic energy (lacking it, man would die). (Barthes 1977:158, reprinted by permission of Harper Collins Publishing Ltd ©, Roland Barthes) “What is ironic is that in the professional socialization of educational researchers, the use of metaphor is regarded as a sign of imprecision; yet for making public the ineffable, nothing is more precise that the artistic use of language. Metaphoric precision is the central vehicle for revealing the qualitative aspects of life.” (Eisner 1991:227)

In my work on the IDE course, I was concerned with helping people to develop the inclination and the capacity to think imaginatively. They therefore needed to enter a realm of thought where metaphor and analogy would become familiar tools in developing ideas. For many this was a very unfamiliar way of working and thinking. This chapter sets out to establish why metaphorical thinking is so essential to the practice and understanding of drawing and design. I have already discussed the important role it plays in different aspects of learning itself, as

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old connections are loosened, and new ones explored. Epistemological chasms can be leapt between ways of knowing, as well as between ways of seeing design scenarios in a radically new light. Since metaphor is itself so embedded in language, this discussion of it cannot help but use it. I shall not highlight metaphorical terms in the text, unless they are particularly relevant to the meaning of what is being said. Analogy is the process of explaining or elaborating an idea by bringing it to help illuminate other, unlike concepts. Metaphor is related to analogy but much less constrained. Analogy aims to get more objective coherence for a particular meaning, wheras metaphor attempts to broaden the context by exploring wide associations involving leaps of the imagination. Analogy is perhaps reductive, metaphor seeks to expose new meaning that did not exist before. Authors from different domains maintain that metaphor is not just a figure of speech to add rhetorical or poetic effect. Keller-Cohen and Gordon (2003:6), writing about its usage in the organisation and expression of narrative in life stories, report that “Lakoff and his colleagues argue that metaphor is not a special use of language but rather a central organizing principle for the way we think and talk.” Lakoff’s (1993:244) summary on the contemporary theory of metaphor starts: “Metaphor is the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning. Much subject matter, from the most mundane to the most abstruse scientific theories, can only be comprehended via metaphor. Metaphor is fundamentally conceptual, not linguistic, in nature.” Mithin (1998:245) while writing about the development of the mind in pre-history, says that one of the critical features of science is its use of “metaphor and analogy, which are no less than the ‘tools of thought’… The most powerful ones are those which cross domain boundaries, such as by associating a living entity with something that is inert, or an idea with something that is tangible.” These require the kind of cognitive fluidity that Gardner (1983) identified as moving between his different domains of intelligence, “the wisest individuals, he suggests, (being) those who are most able at building

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connections across domains as exemplified in the use of metaphors and analogies” (1998:41). Memory is important in the use of metaphor, as this is ‘where’ we find our resource for the comparisons we choose to make. These memories of experience may take the form of perceptions, through the senses of sight, hearing, smell or touch, or of stories of events and happenings. Lakoff and Johnston (1980) point out that there are two types of mappings: conceptual mappings and image mappings. Within these are the ways we relate our experiences to our three- and four-dimensional perception of the world. Metaphor becomes a way to connect past experiences to present ones, as well as a way to speculate imaginatively about future structures and ideas. As metaphor is an integral part of conceptual and perceptual understanding, rather than a figure of speech isolated from experience, its use is based on interpretation, a seeking for the similarities between the tenor (or topic) and the vehicle. Its use has to be learned. People will have different degrees of ability to make it work, to play with it, especially to explore features beyond the most literal connection. Where the metaphoric impulse is to make connections between things previously unconnected, so the opportunity arises for shifting and liberating frames of reference, as meaning from one setting is linked to meaning in another setting. This activity of choosing to move an object or a concept outside its habitual frames of reference is a fundamental feature of both creativity and learning. The process of building a metaphor is explained using the terms ‘tenor’ or ‘topic’, and ‘vehicle’. These have such strong resonance with completely other fields, that it can make the process seem more rather than less obscure. The ‘tenor’ or ‘topic’ refers to the original statement, the ‘vehicle’ to the borrowed new set of concepts. For example in the statement “He was inundated with requests for financial help” the tenor/topic is that he received a lot of requests; the vehicle brings in the idea of flooding, to add its dramatic features to what might otherwise pass as a less noticeable event.

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These workings of metaphor can be shown by using a spatial metaphor. Diagrams of the connection process between the tenor and the vehicle usually use vertical lines between them to demonstrate the idea that the connection dives into a soup of link-making imagination from the tenor, then engages with the vehicle before being transferred back up to surface again in the tenor (see for example Fiske 1982:92). As I look at such a diagram I instinctively know that somehow the longer the vertical lines the more interesting would be the connection – employing the metaphor of down the page into the richness of the imagination. Sideways across the page with horizontal lines would not evoke this idea, although they can be used for other things. The evolution of homo sapiens is often shown as a line of creatures walking from left to right taking more ‘developed’ and upright forms as they go, with HS as the final triumph at the right-hand end. Why left to right? Because right is better than left! Homo sapiens is ‘way ahead’ of his earlier cousins in intelligence, etc. The line however speaks nothing of what is actually happening in the mind, something still largely a mystery. The success of this spatial metaphor may well depend on the viewer’s experience in another domain altogether, namely the direction of writing and text. In European languages the text ‘moves forward’ as it is laid down from left to right, unlike for example Hebrew and Arabic. With people whose perceptions conventions of the direction of relationship between time and significance of our experience of manipulation.

have not yet been channelled by the writing, a more holistically developed space remains, reminding us of the space, with design’s responsibility in its

Boroditsky (2009) describes the Northern Australian Kuuk Thaayorre peoples’ bigger vision of this relationship. While exploring their use of language, Boroditsky asked people to order some cards that showed images of various instances of temporal progression. The Kuuk Thaayorre laid the cards out according to which cardinal direction they were facing, left to right if facing south, right to left if facing north, and when facing east, the cards came towards the body, the prime consideration about direction being the passage of the sun. They don’t use ‘left’ and ‘right’.

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Paechter (2004:449), in her work on metaphors in educational thinking, suggests that as part of the modernist project “Space is subordinated to time in both the theory and the practice of education” but she goes on to describe how much spatial metaphors structure ways that education is thought about. Particularly relevant in this study is how “metaphors of area space divide up knowledge, putting it and us into fenced-off boxes,” (2004:451), (which carries the implication that knowledge is some kind of stuff found in those boxes.) Students and faculty are heir to these historic divisions between fixed fields, areas of specialist knowledge that they can enter and explore much more easily than they can reconstitute them. Assessment too, wherever there are marks, inhabits the deep-seated idea that upwards is the right direction to be going. ‘Albertopolis’, home to the IDE students, is a good example of a spatial metaphor at a grand scale. The nickname refers to the square mile of educational institutions and museums in South Kensington, London, that was Prince Albert’s vision of the inheritance of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Along with museums and other institutions of learning, the headquarters building of the RCA and the sprawling mass of Imperial College with its many Schools sit physically close together in this space, but the work of configuring learning from the student’s experience outwards, rather than from the different disciplines inwards, takes more than pounding the pavements between the imposing edifices. At a different scale, a polytechnic building in south London built in the 1970’s used the cute idea of the underside of a tiered lecture-theatre as a rather grandiose canopy projecting out over the major entrance to the building. As students walked under this portal they entered a model of teaching and learning literally and figuratively cast in concrete. Metaphor uses terms that are rooted in the senses (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), often visual, and these linkages between tenor and vehicle usually work best when held in the mind’s eye (or mind’s body) rather than fixed to particular depictions, because of the rich associations we hold for the two images on either side of the bridge. It is at once a delicate and multi-layered process, but one example from the history of art can be used to explore the idea.

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Figure 29. Peter I Bruegel the Elder, 1560, The Fall of Icarus, Museé des Beaux Arts, Brussels © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. Photo: J. Geleyns/Ro scan.

Auden uses the medium of a poem, Musee des Beaux Arts, to explore the meaning of a painting of The Fall of Icarus, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1560). The disaster takes place in a pastoral scene beside the sea, apparently unremarked by the shepherd, the ploughman or the ship. There are different interpretations of the iconography of the painting (de Vries 2003), but Auden’s well-known poem has tended to foreground one reading. He refers to the universal truth that catastrophic events happen unnoticed in the midst of everyday life. The painting is complicatedly full of disparate and layered elements which may or may not be allegorical, but for me the painting does work metaphorically. De Vries’s description of the iconography as representing “the world landscape”, and its economic and social conditions in the middle of the sixteenth century, produces a multi-layered narrative of ideas that is beautifully translated into visual terms. While we are initially struck by the recognisable people and things in the picture, these have nonetheless been painted using graphic devices that also always carry metaphorical meaning.

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It may be a coincidence,1 but the picture also depicts the tenor and vehicle of an english metaphor often quoted as an example of the trope: ‘the ship ploughed through the waves’, which in this case would reinforce the idea of a world drama as a metaphysical unity where everything is a player in its own way. There are different types and usages of metaphor; with all of them communication depends on being able to participate in the connections made. Speaker and listener do not necessarily share meanings for the words used, or understanding of symbolism and metaphor used in visual work. Some accepted connections are tacit, or unnoticed. Reddy (1979) identified the ‘conduit’ metaphor, where words and phrases impute physical characteristics to abstract concepts (e.g. “I can’t get that tune out of my head”). Where their use is shared, itself a defining aspect of culture, people may go so far as to believe the physical reality of the concept. Schon (1979:144) discusses the serious communications problems that arise when language is assumed to be of neutral rather than metaphorical content. In his work on social policy making, he describes ‘generative metaphors’ as conduit metaphors that go on to shape how issues are approached in the terms of the original metaphor. For example poor housing described in terms of a ‘blight’ would attract disease-management policy thinking. Ortony’s (1993) concept of ‘saliency’ describes how much the topic and the vehicle have in common in comparison statements, and ‘saliency imbalance’ refers to examples where the vehicle’s properties are not central to the topic (these examples being more suitably described as metonymy). He suggests that better quality metaphors are those where salient qualities in the vehicle are linked to non-salient qualities in the tenor (the ship ploughs through the waves is arguably an example of this). Snodgrass and Coyne (1992:67) note that the: “component terms of a metaphor relate to one another not by overlapping similarities, but by what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls ‘family resemblances’… We pick up cues from the parts of a situation, which in turn trigger an 1

Dutch speakers, at least, are not familiar with this metaphorical turn.

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expectation of the meaning of the situation as a whole…therefore, our understanding of the meanings of the whole and its parts develops in an interpretive circle…allow(ing) the emergence of richer and more comprehensive interpretations.”

Tourangeau and Sternberg’s (1982) Domain Interaction model considers the idea that it is not just individual features of the vehicle and tenor that can map onto each other, but larger parts of the fields of the ideas involved. Finke, Ward and Smith (1992:106) report that Kelly and Keil (1987) have found that “understanding one metaphor can cause other components of potential metaphors involving the same domains to move conceptually closer together.” Lewis (1994) shows how our everyday experience of the physical world grounds this idea in our use of language. He notes how three physical worlds, the sea, the land and the sky become bound together, almost overlapping, by the use of images from one domain used to describe features of another, and how this relationship transcends language boundaries. For example the common English description of waves as white horses or mares’ tails, (moutons or sheep in French, and little goats in Spanish). As for the sky, a thin high cloud may be ‘cirrus’, the Latin for ringlets of hair, and sometimes dapples into a ‘mackerel sky’, while in French a fleecy-clouded sky is moutonée. It is Lewis’ contention that ‘the animal imagery for waves doesn’t occur in isolation, but within a bloc of metaphors having hair as the common genetic factor, a family so large…. as to suggest that the image of hair is a key metaphoric vehicle common to all languages.” (1994:7) He warns against the dangers of making false etymological links, but what is relevant here is how much the intense physical and sensorial experience and knowledge of the world we inhabit is such a rich source for attempts at describing it. Imagination needs an accessible bank of experience translated through all the senses, not just the visual, to feed it and to enrich the connection-making skills we already have. ‘The ship ploughs through the waves’ cannot work for someone who has never seen a plough at work in a field, or the bow of a ship in the waves. As

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Arnheim (1997:118) remarks in discussing ‘the imagery of thought’ people have varying abilities to give visual shapes to concepts. This is obviously affected by the reasons behind making the effort involved, in both interpretation and production, and is also influenced by early education and later trainings’ conventions of how different subjects are learned, for example creative thinking. The pros and cons of “unweaving the rainbow”2, by explaining creative processes, is much debated in the teaching of art and design. However on the new IDE course it was considered that curious intelligent adults would be motivated to understand more about creativity, to want to integrate conceptual understanding and personal experience, and this idea lay behind aspects of course planning and teaching. Creative thinking is often described as breaking down the categories that have previously structured ideas and objects, so that they can be seen in a new light. Bruner (1960:20) proposes “an act that produces effective surprise….as the hallmark of a creative enterprise”, saying that metaphoric effectiveness is one essential aspect of such an act. He continues: “Metaphoric combination leaps beyond systematic placement, explores connections that before were unexpected.” Bruner’s description hints at how imagination is an active and learnt skill, not just an automatically given faculty; one has to learn to ‘leap’, and to ‘explore’, in further physical descriptions of mental processes. Snodgrass and Coyne (1992:71) point out that metaphor reveals at the same time as it conceals; using the example of ‘the house as a machine’ they show that some features are privileged while others are excluded. The idea of ‘the machine as a house’ does not work, without some heroically creative and poetic explorations. An exception might be the case of boa-constrictors which are apparently an increasingly spreading problem on the Caribbean island of Aruba because of their preference for living in the engines of cars. (www.bbc.com/news/magazine32662173). 2

John Keats: Lamia Part 2, lines 234 – 238: “Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, Conquer all Mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine – Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender person’d Lamia melt into a shade. John Keats: Poems. (1905) ed. E. de Selincourt. London, Methuen

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Because each person’s prior knowledge and repertoire of ‘stored’ impressions and experiences inevitably varies, different people will see different aspects of ideas connected in metaphorical constructions. They are primed by experience, whether in use of words or use of images. In this way not only can sketch drawings be allowed to mean more than they were originally intended to, to the drawer, but in group work this becomes very useful, where graphic ambiguities lend themselves to different interpretations and fresh ideas. Rawson (1969:18) discussing drawing says that: “the processes of our experience, from the most commonplace everyday coping with life to the remotest conceptual reasoning, work through analogy. It seems that as we live our lives a continuous activity of scanning and matching what we have seen goes on in our minds. When we encounter a phenomenon, our mind scans and matches it rhythmically with others we remember and know. It then connects that phenomenon with yet others - also with graphic forms already stocked in our memory from looking at pictorial images. The sharing of a common form constitutes analogy.”

It is interesting to note that such a discussion about drawing also describes broader thinking and learning activities. A description of the importance of metaphor in learning comes from Gombrich (1963:14), also while writing about art: “The possibility of Metaphor springs from the infinite elasticity of the human mind; it testifies to its capacity to perceive and assimilate new experiences as ramifications of earlier ones, of finding equivalences in the most disparate phenomena and of substituting one for another. Without this constant process of substitution neither language nor art, nor indeed civilized life would be possible.”

As far as drawing is concerned art takes for granted that, whether verisimilitude of depiction is at issue or not, representation is about more than making a copy of the visual world. Visual symbolism has its own dense histories in different cultures, and metaphorical entities form part of that structure of allusions.

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Metaphorical thinking, beyond its inevitability, can enhance or obscure communication as the pervasive use of conduit and generative metaphors shows. Because we often cannot understand how the vehicle of the metaphor has been called up by the tenor, the process can seem mysterious or magical, and strongly attractive. Snodgrass and Coyne (1992:66) refer to Richards’ (1936) phrase ‘interanimation’ where he sees a certain tension between the terms and how they interact. Meaning “which is not just the sum of the meanings of the two terms considered separately, (but) results from the interaction of two thoughts of different things.” “Our system of conventional metaphor is “alive” in the same sense that our system of grammatical and phonological rules is alive; namely, it is constantly in use, automatically, and below the level of consciousness” (Lakoff 1993:245). Since Aristotle wrote in the Poetics: “the most important thing in style is to have a command of metaphor” (Verity 2007:283), poetry has been seen as the natural domain for metaphoric expression, in all its different forms. “The poet proclaims visual imagery in written word vividly alive with illumination. Indeed, poetry activates and squeezes the word to its utmost, using the pressure of contextual significance to release its richest potential.” Paivio and Walsh (1993:312) draw attention to Suzanne Langer’s term ‘abstractive seeing’ for the mind’s capacity to extend figurative meaning to ‘metaphoric fantasy’ and to her agreement with Arnheim that “the origin of metaphorical thinking (is) not in language but in the nature of perception itself.” These explorations of the sometimes subterranean workings of connection-making between concepts have been the main underpinning of my exploration of the role of visual fluency on the broader stage of thinking and learning. In design metaphor appears in at least two different ways, how designing is described, and in the creative processes involved in designing itself. A designer works to a brief, to resolve a story, in the sense that Bruner (1990:90) shows that the heart of a story involves a ‘trouble’. In design this difference between the existing situation and a more desirable one (Simon 1969) is often called the ‘problem’. (This generative metaphor masks the possibility, always at least theoretically available to the designer, that the

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‘solution’ rather than being some new thing, could be the decision that there is no problem after all.) Models of problem-solving processes are often presented in design manuals as flow-charts, where different stages in resolving the problem are seen as several sequential steps, sometimes involving feedback loops, using a metaphor of a well-understood and controlled mechanical production process. Something undesirable, maybe inchoate, goes in one end in the form of components, and after having been worked on, emerges at the other end as a recognisable and coherent product. Whilst widely accepted in teaching and in evaluating design projects, this is a very partial way to describe what actually happens. “the orderly segmenting of process, with the design progressing down (falling) through this linear sequence of stages, suggests a form of determinism” (Bucciarelli 1993:111). This is a strong example of a conduit metaphor, and where students find other approaches to designing need to be explored, they have to relinquish it, as well as approaching different ways of thinking, and possibly new conduit metaphors themselves. The mechanical process is the visual metaphor used in the IBM/Eames film The Information Machine, (described in My relationship to the study). It is drawn in black and white in stark contrast to the watercolour treatment of the designer’s freer metaphorical processes of creative thinking, both overemphasised for the point of the story, but recognisable. In the casting of designing as problem-solving, problems may be as illdefined as are possible solutions. A part of the designer’s work is likely to be constant re-definition and re-configuring of the ‘problem’ in the light of creative work in search of resolution. Here, analogical thinking can successfully be used in the search for possible ideas for moving forward. The various processes that can be involved in such connection-making are extensively discussed by Holland, Holyoak, Nisbet, and Thagard in their book Processes of Learning, Inference and Discovery (1989), both how this way of thinking can be achieved, and what may limit it. Gick and Holyoak’s (1980, 1983) work discussed in Holland et.al. used Duncker’s (1945) research about creative thinking that I have described in Learning and

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Epistemic development in Designing. The work involved in coming up with ideas to solve a problem reveals the importance of highly developed imaginative thinking and a robust engagement with the workings of metaphor if creative connection-making is to happen. While we will apparently readily explore scenarios to suggest ideas if a connection is pointed out to us, more substantial creative thinking is needed for us to be able to actively search more broadly for such scenarios, and then consider if they have analogical value to the problem. Next we can explore what aspects there are in common between the problem situation and the potentially useful analogous scenario, an example of where bearing in mind the ‘generative’ feature of the metaphor process may be put to positive effect. Such recognising of connections between two situations can bring an awareness of abstract categories or schema, in this case types of problems or types of solutions. Skill at this ‘schema induction’ is a major contributor to successful transfer across remote problem domains, where ‘spontaneous remindings’ can connect apparently disparate situations. As noted above by Mithin (1998), these may be where features of the initial analogy have moved from physical to abstract concepts, or even changed sensory modalities. For example the movement of having to bow down for the cheap version of the can of beans from the bottom shelf in the supermarket, away from its gaudier dressed equivalents at the normal eyeline, can reinforce the (probably erroneous) idea that the product itself is also somehow inferior. The common feature is this capacity and tendency that we have to make connections. Casakin (2007:32), however, in his work with novice architectural students found that they “lack the necessary analytical skills to reflect in-depth on design situations and therefore face some difficulties in using metaphors as a primary analytical skill.” For metaphor to work effectively at all we do also need a repertoire of ideas and scenarios in active memory, and these can be derived from, amongst other things, skills of observation developed through visual thinking and drawing. Paivio and Walsh (1993:323) describe another aspect of the workings of metaphor which may be relevant in the context of mature students having to learn to reconsider prior frameworks of connections between ideas. This is that “concrete” vehicles (i.e. sensorial ones) make for better metaphors than

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abstract ones, illuminating possible problems for students coming new to a learning environment, such as a design course, that foregrounds visual and haptic knowledge over abstract thinking. Keller-Cohen and Gordon (2003:28) show how in conceptualising a life story “metaphor enables a speaker to systematically foreground certain aspects of experience while simultaneously obscuring others”. As engineering is based on objectivity as a primary criterion, so its training imparts this as a value, and the metaphorical rendering of this version of knowledge is likely to pervade attitudes towards more intuitive approaches involved in some design work, and make it hard to modify the more mechanistic approaches to design process. An example of this amongst firstyear students was the common opinion that much of speculative drawing was about “playing”, and playing was often held to be non-negociably irrelevant to proper thinking about design. There are two aspects of learning that are relevant in this discussion of metaphor. The first involves seeing learning as a process of making effective connections between past experiences or knowledge, and a current situation, using the to and fro of accommodation and assimilation. Like the workings of waves on a shoreline, this is far from being a simple process. The layers of interpretation, perceptual, personal, cultural and social mean that a learner’s reactions may be inefficient and difficult to understand, for the learner and for others. Using metaphor as a way to add meaning to something means that the connections may be perceived at a very superficial, easily articulated level, or at a ‘deeper’ level, more indistinct and less easy to explain. Then a first “single obvious interpretation may make it more difficult to retrieve and actively consider alternative meanings” (Finke, Ward and Smith 1992:105), and anyway one’s first interpretations are likely to be conditioned by experience, itself highly context dependent.3 The second aspect of learning where metaphor is working refers to the ways epistemic development is seen as a process of changing how one interacts with 3

The ‘drawings’ used by Finke, Ward and Smith in their research are however so diagrammatic and unambiguous in nature that I think it would be hard to extrapolate the same conclusion to sketch drawings with a higher information content.

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and views the world. Most literature on development sees it not as a smooth continuous unbroken process, but rather as different kinds of experience, described in a variety of metaphorical terms - stages and transitions, ladders, journeys, bridges and paths, metaphors involving both time and space. Macfarlane (2012:31), describing his fascination with paths, refers their use to acts of reconnoitre, which links ideas of exploring with reknowing. 4 In this study I am concerned with students who are moving (a metaphor of time and space) from one culture of learning and knowledge to another - a physical journey as well as a mental and emotional one. “Metaphor has important potential … because it provides a conceptual framework within which components of experience can be tied together” (Keller-Cohen and Gordon 2003: 6). Ideas and images of ladders, cliffs and plateaux, steps and stages continue the spatial theme carrying with them associations of upwardness with its connotations of up equals better (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), echoing the norms of summative assessment. Many of these metaphors refer back to Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (discussed in A Researcher’s Journey). Uglow’s (2008) history of illustrations for the book describes how the constant theme is ‘ever onwards and upwards’5. Relinquishing these ideas, and exploring instead multi-dimensional profiling, pie-charts, spirals, stars, and other more spatial or directionally neutral concepts was not only difficult for students used to hierarchical marking schemes, but has also made me aware how deeply I have still assumed that development is this kind of selfevidently ‘good thing’, an idea increasingly criticised in economic development studies if not in education. ‘Fulfilment’ is of course yet another loaded term. 4

He also describes the etymological trail beginning with “our verb to learn, meaning ‘to acquire knowledge’. Moving backwards in language time we reach the Old English leornian, ‘to get knowledge, to be cultivated’. From leornian the path leads further back, into the fricative thickets of Proto-Germanic, and to the word liznojan, which has a base sense of ‘to follow or to find a track’ (from the Proto-Indo-European prefix leis-, meaning ‘track’). ‘To learn’ therefore means at root – at route – ‘to follow a track’.” 5 A recent production by the English National Opera of Vaughan Williams’ opera The Pilgrim’s Progress, directed by Yoshi Oida, has Pilgrim progressing on his path to the celestial City moving from left to right across the stage, recalling the convention described above for the development of human beings from apes.

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Figure 30. Artist unknown, 18th/19th century, A Plan of the Road from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City adapted to the Pilgrim’s Progress, etching, ink on paper. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

In all the examples of connection-making discussed above, one has to work at noticing the different dimensions and types of links in order to comprehend and explore the potential of such relationships, and this was a process Aristotle himself saw as a fundamental aspect of learning. Motivation, effort and resources are essential for making connections, but so they are in any learning task. Bucciarelli (1994) describes how very little of undergraduate engineering training involves the visible world outside the laboratory, whereas design training takes for granted that a rich visual vocabulary is essential (see Engineering education). Where undergraduate engineers have primarily learned about phenomena in the physical world through theoretical, paper-

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based work it may be difficult for them to transfer that understanding to new, more real-world environments. At interview for selection for the IDE course NN showed some work-sheets about the theory of cranes. Asked if this had made him look at cranes on building sites in a different light, he answered: “It never crossed my mind to think of the connection”.

Snodgrass and Coyne (1992:68) note that the metaphorical “process takes place within a context…(where) we pick up cues from …the situation in which they occur, so that the conceptual environment in which they function plays an important role in the ways we interpret and assess them. As the context changes, so does our understanding of the meanings of the models and metaphors we encounter.” When the environment changes, say from an undergraduate engineering degree to a postgraduate design degree in an art school setting, when metaphorical ideas are used, they are likely to fall into the traps of ‘generative’ and ‘conduit’ processes. A particularly relevant example in the context of this study is the use of the word ‘rigour’, which in engineering implies a necessary reliability, but in less technical, or unconstrained thinking settings has connotations of death (Shaw 2006). Rigour is also a very resonant concept in research, having particular connotations in comparisons between quantitative and qualitative approaches, and I have felt its questions in my bones. To explore the potential of metaphor and its different subtleties in visual and verbal expression, I ran a short project near the start of the IDE course. It was also the first of three projects introducing a user-centred focus to designing. After an initial seminar students wrote in detail about what it was like doing some ordinary activity involving the use of a tool or some other object. Taking one small part of the written piece, they then explored making a model that in three dimensions expressed the qualities of the experience. Shaving was a popular choice. A literal translation showing a little silver foil scythe on a field of short bits of wire stubble sticking out through a piece of fabric added nothing to the idea. A more dramatic interpretation, (and potentially useful design brief) involved a juxtaposition of elements exploring the uncomfortable but sensual experience of a razor shaving close to the lips. It showed a statuesque bright red column of lipstick pierced all

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round with shards of perforated metal. I asked the student if he was familiar with the ecstatic images of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian pierced with arrows.6 Although he said no, the connection, perhaps somewhere already made, was immediately recognised, recalling Lewis’ (1994) proposition of ‘genetic factors’ in the construction of key metaphors described above. Design theorists, and other writers using sociological approaches to writing about design explore the meanings objects have for us and how we interact with them (Winner 1985, Kopytoff 1986, Dilnot, 1993). As objects become animated, metaphor plays a key role in describing these relationships, as for example in Latour’s contested (2005) Actor-Network-Theory where he proposes that objects have some agency in that they affect us and our behaviour, as do other actors. Alexander’s (1977) Pattern Language study describes building elements in terms of our experience of using them, and thus the qualities they should include so we can experience them well. For example, porches are liminal spaces between inner and outer worlds both physically and psychologically. Fireplaces are hearths, places for sharing real and figurative warmth. Metaphor is present in all aspects of how we think and learn, and this is no less the case in design and designing, where it is an essential if unruly player.

6 For example see Salvador Dali, San Sebastian, 1972, bronze. (http://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/San-Sebastian---St-Sebastian/F554065A982 32720) and Andrea Mantegna, San Sebastian, 1480, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

DRAWING AND THE DRAWER’S STORY

On Looking at Cezanne’s work at the Paris Salon d’Automne in 1907 the poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes to his wife Clara: “One space spreads through all creatures equally, inner world space. Birds quietly flying go Flying through us. Oh, I that want to grow The tree I look outside at Is growing in me. Looking is a marvellous thing of which we know but little. Through it we are turned absolutely towards the outside, but when we are most of all so, things happen to us that have waited longingly to be observed; and while they reach completion in us….their significance grows up in the object outside.” (Rainer Maria Rilke writing to his wife Clara: On the painting of Cezanne, 13 October 1907, Hull 1947). Drawing is an activity fundamental to human action. It belongs with counting and speaking as being a primary form of cognition. A people that did not draw would be as unimaginable as one that did not count or speak, and, if not too pedantic about how drawing is defined, we may assert that the activity of making lines is a mode of thought. A line, as it extends, takes in the world, and because drawing may be both descriptive and prescriptive, lines can model possible worlds. The form used to represent the worlds (the objects) we seek to make is, pre-eminently, drawing. (Brett 1986:59)

Drawing figures in many areas of life, but it is important in different ways. In art practices it stands alone, or is a tool for exploratory work later to be developed in sculpture, painting or other media. In the enormous range of

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design practices sketch drawing is used as one of the exploratory processes accompanying creative thinking, and then for the most rigorous defining and specifying purposes where formal, more objective techniques record and communicate decisions. Drawing and diagramming are used in any intellectual or practical domain as partners in conceptual development, as much as in reverie. When children draw it is seen as an important feature of development, and children’s drawings are used as visual analogues for exploring what cannot be articulated in words. As a therapeutic tool for children and adults drawing can be a medium for release, reflection and reconciliation, using the symbolic to access the mythic dimensions of our innermost beings. .

Drawing’s ways of thinking, working and generating knowledge are newly being seen as a method and a process in academic research, not only within art and design practice, but beyond it. The extent to which this can work productively can be illustrated by combining the verb ‘drawing’ in various ways with ‘researching’: drawing (cooking, walking,) as research, drawing is research, drawing that researches, research that draws… Other sensory processes apart from the visual are also beginning to feature in social science research methods, complementing conventional text-based work. More traditional cultures of research may still see these approaches as inferior, if partner at all, to intellectual work. Such attitudes illustrate well how the practices used in the gain and use of knowledge influence the knowing itself, compartmentalising and necessarily limiting it, and I sensed this attitude towards the status of visual work in some of the IDE students. While there are signs that freehand drawing is now seeping into sciencebased subject areas, examples such as a Nobel chemist (Roald Hoffman) describing the essential use of drawing in his work, and a surgeon (Francis Wells) drawing instructive diagrams with the blood of his patients in midoperation1 are still sufficiently unconventional that they achieve wide publicity.

1

“The desire to communicate leads inevitably to the use of drawing. It is the most natural extension of all thoughtful activity. The process of drawing clarifies ideas, reveals misconceptions and allows critical appraisal by others now and for all time. The flow and

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Any discussion of drawing in the context of this study needs to include the feelings and experiences involved in actually learning and doing it. There are many things that trouble adults coming new to drawing. I have particularly focussed on ideas about representation, originality and expression. I have then explored my own thinking about drawing through two particular lenses – prehistoric cave drawing and painting, and illuminated manuscripts and the art of memory. Drawing used to be an essential part of a liberal education, where ‘disegno’ naturally embraced drawing as the essential means towards both visual literacy and invention.2 One example will illustrate how knowledge from different domains and modalities, brought together through the practices of drawing, can expand what is learned and understood exponentially. While Galileo was at the Accademia di Disegno as a young man, his drawing studies, under Ostilio Ricci, the professor of mathematics, included Chiaroscuro, or the accurate rendering of shadows. This work included the study of light effects on complex three-dimensional geometrical figures, enabling a mathematical analysis of the forms and dimensions of the cast shadows. Later in his life, in 1609, when he was looking at the moon through the newly produced telescope, Galileo realised that what he was seeing in the ragged border between the lit and the unlit sides of the moon could only be interpreted as shadows being cast by massive protuberances on its surface. (Its generally blotchy appearance had not until this moment prevented it from being seen as a perfect and immaculate sphere). Galileo was able to read what he saw as a geometrical project. He made copious detailed drawings, “remarkable not only for their precision, but also for their technique, using a brush to render the plasticity of the moon’s surface … in a virtuosic modelling” (Bredekamp 2001:172, 176). These showed what he weight of the line gives the use of ‘active’ drawing a power that speech alone cannot.” Francis Wells. Lines of Enquiry: Thinking through Drawing. Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 2006. 2 “For Renaissance artists and theorists, drawing (disegno) constituted the most direct connection between painting, sculpture, and architecture. The Italian word disegno refers both to the practice of drawing and to the theoretical conception of a project, or its design, and both of these meanings were considered fundamental to all the arts.” (Brothers 2008:3)

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understood to be the three-dimensional forms of mountains and craters that he saw. To emphasise the three-dimensionality of the moon, Galileo’s artistic training led him to include in his drawings the technique of simultaneous contrast, varying the darkness of the night sky behind the lit and unlit sides of the moon, a technical practice to support perception of three-dimensionality. A few months earlier, in England, a contemporary natural scientist Thomas Harriott also looked at the moon through a telescope, and he also made drawings. But because he lacked the technical vocabulary and perceptive skills Galileo had gained through his holistic training at the Accademia di Disegno, Harriott did not understand what he was seeing. When he later saw Galileo’s drawings, published in 1610 in Siderius Nuncius, he was immediately able to resolve the gap between what had been seen and what had been perceived. The traditional practice of the teaching of drawing went into terminal decline in art and design college training in the late 1960’s in England. This reflected a movement away from what was seen as the crafts-based and vocational identity of the sector, towards a more academic curriculum in line with proposals geared towards degree status qualifications. “The idea that drawing activity was crucial to the realization of the intellectual concept lost traction throughout the second half of the 20th century.” (de Freitas 2010). At the start of the 21st century drawing has started to re-emerge in some parts of the art and design sector, as well as beyond it. In the UK this is reflected in many different cultural, educational and technical initiatives, for example the Drawing Research Network, the Campaign for Drawing, Master’s courses in drawing at several universities, Loughborough University’s Tracey on-line journal and projects, the Centre for Recent Drawing, London3, the Aikon project at Goldsmiths, University of London4, ArtAccess’ Sketchbook conference, the use of ‘rich picturing’ as a management tool5, email discussion groups, and a growing number of blogs sharing drawing projects

3

www.C4rd.org.uk Aikon2 Project, Patrick Tresset, Frederic Fol Leymarie. Goldsmiths Digital Studio. 5 http://systems.open.ac.uk/materials/T552, 4

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of different types (the blog being a medium that lends itself well to drawing and drawn animations). Drawing has its artistic, technical and social histories in different academic and practical domains such as fine art, engineering and design. Bermingham’s (2000) observation, in her historical account of the sociology of drawing, that drawing’s conventions and practices change over time while it continues as a tool for subjectivity, also requires this study to be located in its own time and place. At the time of my study (circa 1994-2004) the conventional industrial design studio practice (professional and training) was of freehand sketching carried out in sketchbooks or on large pads of paper. This was done before or in conjunction with measured scale drawings of varying degrees of formality, these latter being carried out to British Standards specifications (BS 308) at fixed drawing boards. Changes were taking place in this traditional practice because of the growing use of solid modelling and other computer-based technical drawing software for the communication of dimensional information to computer-assisted modelmaking equipment, and to manufacturers. Some ‘sketching’ or heuristic graphic processes were later to be introduced into drawing programs. (Now these are extensively developed, and highly sophisticated.)6 During the time of this study individual drawing boards, primarily used for making technical drawings, disappeared from students’ work stations in the IDE studio. They were later gradually replaced by laptops, while an advanced computer facility appeared with its own dedicated staff as an adjunct to the studio. Despite the ‘sketching’ possibilities becoming available as software, the IDE studio culture continued to strongly favour paper-based freehand sketching as a partner for creative thinking, speculative ramblings, a way to fish loose ideas out of the imagination, whether done alone, or in conversation with others.

6 The artist David Hockney has shared his drawing discoveries using the Apple i-Pad; Andrew Marr (2013) writes with the practitioner’s insight about the difference in qualities of drawing line between conventional tools an the i-Pad stylus. In the right hands the former produce an infinitely nuanced expression of the subtle qualities of the subject, whereas the line quality of the i-Pad stylus is the same on both sides, and therefore necessarily produces a different effect from for instance a reed pen or chalk, responsive to the finest emotional expression through hand and eye.

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The IDE students had had very different experiences of drawing during their engineering education. Baynes and Pugh (1981:179) describe textbooks from the early years of the twentieth century emphasising the usefulness to the young engineer of keeping sketchbooks and notebooks, as well as instruction in technical drawing. By the end of the century this advice seems to have been edged out by the increasing demands of learning more easily examinable information, including technical drawing conforming to published standards. Technological developments in computer-based drawing did not immediately sweep away longstanding attitudes that underpinned ideas about teaching drawing where there was any. These ideas continued to reflect the debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about suitable subjects and approaches – working entirely from imagination, copying from existing work7, life drawing, working from observation, keeping a sketchbook, even questioning the place of skill itself8 (Goldstein 1996, Brett 1986). Agendas for drawing do overlap more nowadays, whether for a fineart context, or for more applied and constrained purposes such as the different fields of design. The open questions remain about how subjectivity and objectivity, experience and understanding, can be connected through the medium of drawing.

Drawing in IDE On the IDE course during this study we were concerned to teach visual thinking and drawing as they would be useful in designing, but we also wanted to emphasise them as ways of being able to open up to imagination and self-expression, especially for people who mostly had limited or no adult experience of visual work. As in any design course, the aim was that 7

Students frequently brought drawn copies of photographs to their application interviews, though never copies of drawings. Photographs being the more dominant medium of contemporary visual culture the incongruity was not noticed, nor the greater usefulness of following in the tracks of someone’s drawing in order to pause long enough visually to learn how things can be done. See for example ruskin.ashmolean.org/education/8989/9033. 8 Over the past 30 years the RCA has had a professorship of drawing, lost it, regained it and lost it again, all the while maintaining a dynamic drawing studio and programme for the use of all students. At the same time all departments included drawing tuition as seen fit for their particular purposes.

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sketching would be a normal partner in design development conversations, and that other ‘styles’ would also be mastered such as presentation drawings for clients and drawings for specifications purposes. The aims of on the one hand developing self-expression and on the other improving skill did not necessarily mesh seamlessly together for students, as they had not in the broader, cultural past. Which should come first – discovery through free expression, or the learning of skills which can then be used for richer self-expression and use of the imagination? The division is not so clean-cut, since free-hand drawing is by definition unique to each individual, and cannot help but include every aspect of how we know, cognitively and affectively, even if we do not yet have the perception to read the qualities of our own work. Drawing’s uniqueness can be exciting, or inhibiting when compared to the more apparently objective processes common in engineering such as writing reports9 or using formulas, where nuance is irrelevant or dangerous.10 RO: I think it’s a control thing, that engineers have to be in control of what they’re doing, and if you sort of go too far down the road, or through doing it for a long time, you are unable to relax and let things happen that you don’t deliberately control, and so that kind of constrains you because you can’t, I mean it’s hard to experiment, because you can’t just let things go, but you’re kind of thinking all the time what your parameters are, so “I’ve got to go from there to there” and that kind of naturally leads…. HM: I wonder if that only happens to engineers or anybody who’s never done something like this, like this visual representation or artistic kind of expression… …there’s two possibilities, either its our engineering background or it’s the fact we’ve never done this… …On the drawing classes on Tuesday night I went along once, and it was quite interesting to see people who are fine artists do something, umm, make a drawing of something, might not be a particularly brilliant drawing because obviously time is short, but the ideas they had behind them, immediately were very good I thought, ‘cos they’d been I guess trained in this method or attitude of art for the past three or four years whereas we haven’t. 9

Lynch and Woolgar’s (1990) study observes how scientific knowledge is negociated through the use of various kinds of inscriptions, created to describe laboratory processes. See also Winsor (1996). 10 Ferguson (1992:82) notes that “Drafters still construct perspective drawings when precise information must be conveyed, as in mechanical….drawings. Such drawings represent a rhetorical version of an object, with certain information emphasised.”

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All-importantly there is one’s preconceptions, as well as disposition. Drawing is notorious for being a problem for adults. People who say “I can’t draw – never have been able to” know they cannot draw. Those otherwise helpful, step-by-step, how-to drawing books ignore this starting point, and take the line that everyone can draw, which is off-putting. A Studio Vista guide (1967) called You Can Draw starts with the words “The title of this book means exactly what it says: you can draw. This is certain.” Much more helpfully the psycho-analyst Marion Milner admits she cannot draw and then, while setting off into tentative efforts at drawing, offers a profound exploration of the issues involved, in her book On Not being Able to Paint (1950). Near the start of the IDE course there were intensive week or two-week long workshops focusing on visual and haptic thinking. A course in drawing and colour was taught by Bella Green, an experienced educator and artist. Projects on metaphorical thinking, with 3D exploration and model-making were taught by myself, and other design staff. Later in the course there were several workshops exploring how drawing can connect between open thinking and design development, taught by Neil Barron, a practising designer. Tutors used drawing during discussions, establishing and signalling norms of practice. For IDE students the strategy needed to be about balancing challenge with confidence, and I knew the niceties of this from personal experience. I once attended a workshop where I followed step-by-step instruction on depicting a slice of lemon in watercolour. The mysterious verisimilitude I achieved produced a sense of empowered autonomy, which could then be loosed on experiment. In an art school there will be a powerful culture of selfexpression, but the idea of using a recognisable teaching approach from a previous training environment, (in this case where students have been relatively passive), may be relevant. Otherwise the challenge of both the subject matter and the preferred teaching methods of free expression may be counter-productive.

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RC: I think what I was expecting coming here, I sort of knew that in actual design skills, in terms of resolving appearances of things on the detail side was something that I wanted from the course, so it’s very much products and people.…I suppose I was hoping or imagining that there was someone that I could go to and they would say “OK to draw you do this, to paint you do this, to analyse shapes and forms you do this” and I sort of felt very much embarrassed as if I’d arrived and we were already expected to have those skills and using them and applying them to complete those exercises, so I was thinking I’m not really on the right course here, I’m not going to get the skills that I’m looking for – I’m actually expected to have them already and be able to exercise them already… …the pain did start to drop, I actually, I am somebody who is aware of those skills but in a much more indirect manner. I suppose where I am now perhaps is that I feel yes I am making progress with those skills but I feel someway that I just don’t know how much I can do that, I feel it’s a huge void in my life – outlook and experience and understanding which in some ways is like a huge cavity that’s quite frightening to look into – you sort of look over the edge and think oh my god I’m never going to get a chance to address this and get on top of it all. (About using a sketchbook) MR: I think the main problem is finding room for it. It’s the sort of activity that you have to find space for in order to fit it – your life needs to budge up and you need to become – its something you do out of habit: sketching. Whether you take it further than that, sit down for days on end doing detail things is another step on I should have thought. But the habit of just sort of having a sketchbook on you and stopping and using it as and when is the first major hurdle. PBD: And I think it’s well said that you need to squash other things out of the way because it takes a different type of time doesn’t it, it’s actually rather an open-ended type of time? It’s totally open-ended. And you have to… All you can see is the moment as well. You can’t say oh I’ll come back on Saturday and draw that. Yes exactly.. You know, you’re on your way and in a rush and you think ‘oh I’ve got ten minutes, I’ll probably only stand here waiting for the tube at the other end’ Perhaps because it involves a process where you don’t know quite what’s going to come out at the end of it, that’s another reason why it might be difficult to say…what you’re doing. Well it’s a very un-black and white. You might draw it and never use that drawing again, and you might draw it and end up with a collection of things and when you look back… So …. serendipitous?

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I think that sketching’s like that – you never know when a sketch is going to be useful, you don’t stop and think oh I must sketch this because I … I need a picture of three of these things. So it’s profoundly anti-commodity in a way isn’t it? Yes. You never know what you will end up with or how useful it will be. AT: It was very different, and I think I was looking for stricter... umm, when we went to the V&A with Bella in the first weeks and I remember straight away thinking OK we’ve got to pick up a product here that inspires us here – something, an artefact – where is it? PBD: Yes Something like that, and I’d say ‘no no, look you’ve got two, three hours, go and latch on to anything that speaks to you – mm that’s nice – kind of approach’. And that was strange and I kept thinking well you know I can do 3 hours and not do a thing you know not produce anything and if that was in industry you’d get sacked.

The basic assumptions behind the initial or remedial teaching were that drawing depends on being able to see things in detail, and this needs to be learned, because we normally get by with naming. There are basic conventional codes of drawing for translating what is seen, such as lines for outline contours, shading to show how light affects three-dimensional form, cross-hatching to reveal curving surfaces, a grasp of perspective for size and placing. These can then work with memory to increase visual vocabulary. Adults have more experience of the three-dimensional world than children but it does not necessarily mean they have a richer visual memory bank at their disposal if they have not developed visual memory skills. These four processes of seeing, developing dexterity, learning to use codes and sharpening memory can then become an iterative cycle of developing sophistication in drawing, but its success depends on maintaining interest and curiosity as part of independent learning. De Freitas (2010:2) discusses how “the revival of drawing as a valued activity can be attributed to a growing need for slow time. The slowness of hand sketching and particularly the slowness of sustained drawing activity can provide necessary time and reflective opportunity for ideas to be fully absorbed and transformed in the mind.” Brothers (2008:6) notes a similar principle at work in Michaelangelo’s practice: “(His) drawings, although often quickly executed, reveal the gradual formation of ideas through a series of small steps, none of which is

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in itself remarkable. In other words, the drawings reveal slow, steady work rather than sudden inspiration.” Once there is some ‘grammar’ the rules can be loosened, perception explored, and imagination’s imp can start to play with what is actually on the page, to notice and breath life into new ideas. Milner (1950:35), documenting her exploration into visual work through deceptively naïve questions wonders how life comes into a drawing and quotes Gordon (1944): “The true amount of mental sympathy that the student can give to the subject he wants to draw creates a sense of life in the picture.” In IDE the importance of building a visual vocabulary through observation and drawing was stressed in the designer’s drawing workshops, with advice for example to draw generic but differing everyday objects, or details of larger complex objects. This activity could contribute to developing skill in being able to access non-visual information from visual cues, a central activity in the productive use of sketching in design exploration (Suwa, Purcell and Gero 1998). This takes place through the mechanism of metaphor, but the drawings have to be relatively rich, especially to overcome what Suwa et al. report as design fixation, where replicated features tend to be specific to the discipline of the designer/drawer. In this situation the aim was to move perceptual habits outwards from any assumptions from the preexisting domains of engineering, relying on the fact that the students’ lives were as rich with associations as anyone else’s, even if the visual memory was not yet sharp. However, the natural tendency and capacity of everyone is to understand things in categories, even if we do not realise it, what Bruner (1957) calls perceptual readiness. (see Visual and Conceptual Thinking). The important skill is being able to move beyond unnecessary limitations on new concepts in creative thinking, for whatever degree of product innovation or modification is required Another way to expand the frames of reference of drawing on the course came through a series of seminar discussions with slides given for a few years by the then Professor of Drawing Deanna Petherbridge. These

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seminars were also designed to meet an often un-asked question – what am I looking at when I look at (and by implication make) a drawing? (About a drawing workshop at the start of the course) PBD: But I just wondered whether you could remember what for you was a good experience about it? LN: Well, not only had I not done anything for a while so it was great to get back into it, but I was longing for stuff like that anyway – a bit of practical, sort of real input or experience of drawing, of actually being taught how to draw and how to look properly and the whole thing. Was it for anything? Was it for anything? I don’t know if it was for anything. I think it was to be able to think about what a drawing’s about because I suppose up to then I never actually did. I drew a lot but I never really thought about it but I was effectively starting to draw ideas, which is good fun. It was a step up from what I’d done previously, even though it seemed quite basic. ES: Well I’m terrible with sketchbooks because I buy them and start off doing sketches in them and then I lose interest in the sketchbooks and I tend to just draw on scraps of paper and I just have big boxes of scraps of paper rather than books, I don’t… I have a problem with sketchbooks in that people tend to…. or I see people using them and every page has to be nicely done and you can’t make a mess of the page and tear half of it out and stuff. PBD: Problems…. I tend to be very messy, very sort of messy with my sketchbooks and rip corners off pages. So it’s as though the sketchbook becomes a kind of art object in its own right. Yeah, I mean it’s, yeah So it gets really difficult Yeah, when I buy a sketchbook that’s that big, by the time I finished with it, it’s that big – there’s less stuff in it after I’ve finished. Yes I think it is difficult because they appear to be products. Mmm, it’s like people have drawn them for sketchbook drawings for the sake of having sketchbook drawing, not for developing an idea.

Despite all these approaches drawing often remained a difficult area. Students who had basic drawing skills were reluctant to move on from preferred styles of work on the page, or a favourite medium, usually biro, which is unerasable and therefore limits interactions with the drawing. These reactions were perhaps about maintaining some sense of control in an already very challenging environment. Nonetheless it was obvious that

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productive conversation in group tutorials or meetings was considerably hampered for students who were not able to share visualisations of concepts, however fluent their verbal description of the scenario. When generative sketch drawing too became more fluent, explorations were much richer and more creative. Different kinds of drawing can enable such conversations to take on the natural tidal motions of generating and choosing, using different kinds of drawing, and knowing how to use them as effective partners for different aspects of designing. Ideas generation needs loose and ambiguous mark-making, deliberately open to multiple interpretations, while ideas resolution needs more accurate and unambiguous work. This distinction is however for curriculum designers. In practice here again things may not be so clear cut. Several studies (with architects) have followed individuals and groups, in ‘conversation’ with a developing idea, mostly in the interests of pursuing Artificial Intelligence’s analysis of how innovative thinking works for application in very complex design scenarios. Goldschmidt (1991), Schon and Wiggins (1992), Galle (1992) and Suwa et al. (1998), and Goel (1999), break down the sketch processes in various ways but find that in practice these processes are multilayered, if not quite synchronous. Indeed the traditional practice of layering translucent paper to select which parts of an idea to keep, and what to leave behind is a physical analogue to the developing thinking process. Tversky (1999) exploring how the order of producing a drawing reveals underlying conceptual structures, suggests that this can influence the mental organization underlying the design.

Drawing and knowing Leaving aside the aims of cognitive psychology to map creative thinking, the argument in this study is that, whatever our prior education, if we draw more and more, we can become aware of questions about our relationship with the world, how we perceive it and experience it, and how we conceive it and interpret it. This process then opens the way for us to be involved in it. I would claim that no one who has really looked at the expressiveness of line in, for example, one of Rembrandt’s youthful and quizzical self-portraits, with his wild hair expressing the confusion in his eyes, or his tender drawing of his ageing mother, or Ronald Searle’s drawings of starving prisoners of

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war11, could doubt that drawing (as process and as product) is a powerful medium for connection to the qualia or sentient complexities of being in the world.

Figure 31. Ronald Searle, 1943, Man dying of Cholera, Thailand. © Ronald Searle Estate. 11 Searle, R. (1986) To the Kwai and Back, War Drawings 1939-45. London, Collins in association with the Imperial War Museum.

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Drawing is, however, very slippery to describe, particularly freehand work. (Petherbridge 2008). Does a drawing have to have some intelligent intention behind it, or is it enough for some kind of trace to be perceived as drawing for it to be one – for instance a wind-blown scratch of grass on sand, or a jetstream vapour trail?12 Definitions involve and lead to evaluations, and this is always difficult if factual criteria cannot be used, as is the case with most drawing. This project is about the experience of drawing, and although within drawing there are canons for different domains, I decided that an approach of evaluating students’ drawings, for example by a panel of judges, was not appropriate. (It is nonetheless a well-established way of analysing qualitative research data, and it was of course used by tutors on the course when assessing a student’s progress in the use of drawing in a design project.)

Figure 32. Grass drawing, Lake Michigan shoreline, 2009.

12

See discussion on [email protected]

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There are debates on definitions – as process and as product. Where is the process of drawing located? The drawing product with its forms and conventions worked uniquely by each person is not content-neutral, something passively emanating from the drawer. Each drawing is unique to the drawer, based on a holistic combination of perception, thinking and use of the tools and media. To use a production metaphor, the drawing is not merely extruded from a hand/eye coordination, but produces meaning by the way it is drawn. The process of drawing is a dynamic, intimate and yet expansive feedback loop which engages and focuses the drawer with an insistence and intelligence arising from connection in attentive work. Apart from its graphic meaning, the verb ‘to draw’ in English also refers to pulling, and so has gestural and larger physical meanings, recalling Varela et al.’s (1991) concepts of embodied thinking. The artist Patricia Cain (2010:51) discusses this as the necessary explanation of her work in drawing: “Varela defines enactivism as embodied thinking. He questions the assumption that cognition is independent of the world and asks whether thinking is a matter of representation at all (Varela et al. 1991:150). Thinking is not a form of representation but a matter of enaction in which knowledge occurs through knowing through the body.”

This understanding of the gestural nature of drawing is reflected in traditional teaching exercises of drawing closed forms while standing with arm extended, engaging the tip of the drawing medium on the surface with the rhythm of the body, as in fact Leonardo advised. Complementary to this intention, and bringing in disegno’s other meaning of design, Lynch (2005) discusses how Michelangelo regularly draws fragments of the human figure in movement on the same sheets as building elements, as I have described in Engineering Education. Lynch proposes that this practice is evidence of Michelangelo’s perception of the seamless relationship between building spaces and the human body’s experience of them. Brothers (2008:10) observes that “Michaelangelo’s writings and poetry may suggest a vision of invention taking place in the mind, but his drawing implies an externalised, embodied form of invention.”

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There are other ways to connect drawing and drawer. Riley (2008:154) sees two aspects of visual work: conceptual intrigue, and perceptual intrigue, and suggests the degree of balance between them “as a useful criterion with which to assess qualities of drawing (as process) and drawings as outputs.” Goldschmidt (1991:131), in the context of (architectural) design suggests that pictorial reasoning evident in interactive sketching consists of two modalities: ‘seeing as’ and ‘seeing that’ which are in a dialectical relationship. The drawing may be seen as agentive, not just in terms of its role as a player in cultural or functional activities, but as actively promoting perceptual processes in the drawer. Fisher (2009:8) describes this engagement as one of drawing’s ‘prepositional’ qualities: “Attitude or approach becomes the first ingredient of the activity. More and more resonances appear while the drawing floats into existence, but the completed drawing is never finished in any relational sense. After the last mark has been made it continues to explore the space of intention, it finds sympathetic vibrations elsewhere in the world, and aligns itself to them.”

Gell (1998:45) refers to this process as the ‘generate and test’ sequence which is a fundamental feature of all complex cognitive performances. He continues by referring to Valery’s idea that it takes two to invent anything – one to make up combinations, the other to choose. This is an ideal way to describe the conversational relationship that needs to be developed with a drawing in the making. It is interesting to note the perspective of Suwa et al. (1998:4), writing from the Key Centre of Design Computing. “Freehand sketches tend to be very loose, not well-structured, and ambiguous. These properties, although they sound negative and undesirable as features of visual representations, allow sketches to play a significant role in design processes.” Experienced designers are able to sketch-develop ideas on paper at the same time as incorporating dimensional constraints and working on several viewpoints. Resulting ‘pentimenti’ are a natural part of this exploratory process, our perceptual ability to see the wood rather than the trees rendering any ambiguous information temporarily invisible when necessary. Henderson (1999:8) writing on the visual culture of engineering, agrees that creating drawings can be regarded as as important to design as the drawings

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themselves, although the emphasis on what might be found would no doubt be different. As Baynes and Pugh note in their history of engineering drawing (1981:5) “The best (drawings in the book) are not just demonstrations of high technical skill; they also have the excitement and tension that comes from an attempt to delineate and control difficult and novel concepts.” In current practice technical drawings need unambiguous details in the finished work, where process is rigorously constrained by conventions that are meant to transcend personal nuance, so that in theory at least the drawing product can be anonymous and detached from its maker. Against this background the neophyte freehand drawer may easily be confused while looking for criteria for a ‘good drawing’ in the new setting of enquiry through active visual exploration. In relation to the experience of drawing, the perspective of the drawer, these kinds of explanations and definitions do not necessarily resolve all the questions, for example those about representation, originality and expression, and they are troublesome.

Representation IS: If it’s straight from a book, the graph is representative of… you know exactly what the parameters are so it’s very controlled, so maybe you have to choose your parameters or not, or choose not to have parameters when you’re representing something in a drawing… um… If you want to represent a specific thing through your drawing, then you can probably do it, because you do in such a way that you manage to get what you’re trying to achieve, um…possibly, I don’t know, that sounds like it should be easy…but…

Apart from the fact that any drawing is only ever one of many versions of the subject depicted, mediated through myriad ways, the question of what is being represented still presents itself. It strikes to the heart of someone coming new to it. In a practical class, or in the studio, the student sets to with or without instruction about how looking and seeing work, or how the tools of drawing can be exploited. An object starts to appear on the paper, often in midair. The question arises – What am I actually trying to draw? What is jug-ness? Chair-ness? Radio-ness? There are so many stories to choose from. On a physical level the conventions and histories, styles and approaches and

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purposes crowd in, insisting that even representation has many meanings. There are questions of equivalence, and questions of interpretation, both technical and metaphorical, and answers which vary from person to person. Farthing (2008a:4) describes how Walter Benjamin, the early twentieth century social critic, talks about drawing: “Benjamin saw the lines and tones not as traces left on a surface, but as activators of a metaphysical space. In Benjamin’s work the paper left behind at the end was a necessary component of drawing, not a by-product.”13 This development of awareness depends on practice, as with playing an instrument, and this can get lost amongst other demands on time. Drawings shown in entrance interview portfolios were all too often dead portraits of objects that had not really been seen, almost as though there had been a suspension of consciousness. However, if observation of an object, or concentration on a mental image is acute, very quickly we can become aware of being seamlessly connected with it, as Rilke describes at the start of this section. Visual impressions and those from other senses, such as touch, sound or smell are evoked through memory and as a result experience is present. This then connects to the web of experience of being alive in the sensory and storied world. The process and product of drawing become the site for consideration of the widest ideas and questions. Moving through these steps at once depends on an openness of awareness, and reflects back into the continuing process of the drawing enquiry. Even as we know that this can only be a version of the thing seen, this tension, between connection and separateness stretches very deep, all the way back to the first depictions, as early man struggled to understand the difference between being at one with the world, and having a separate identity in it. (see Prehistoric cave drawing and painting.) In representation, we are also imitating, these being two interpretations of the Greek term mimesis explored by Aristotle in his Poetics. In imitation we explore the essence of what is being represented, and are confusingly diverted to questions of perfectibility. Rilke says:

13 Benjamin, W. (1996) Painting, or Signs and Marks, in: Selected Writings Vol 1 1913 – 1926. Boston, Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press

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“What distinguishes works of art from all other objects is the fact that they are, as it were, things of the future, things whose time has not yet come……..The future, from which they arise, is remote……... (it is) the home of works of art, those strangely secretive and patient objects, which have their existence among the things of everyday use, among busy human beings, working beasts and playing children.”14

We are not, in drawing, necessarily setting out to make works of art, but we are reaching out. KE: Well, I suppose, before I came here, every picture I did it was more or less you could tell what it is – sort of end of the path thing again. That’s what it’s supposed to be and that’s what it looks like. But since then just playing around or whatever I’ve done loads of pictures that aren’t…. or you look at it and you don’t really know what it is. Which I never thought I would get into that – you know what I mean. Like I can watch this programme on modern art now and see what it’s all about rather than thinking it’s a white piece of wood or something like that. TF: Yet again I’ve noticed that’s changing about me here, for example when Bella, when I first had to do marks and drawings with Bella… the very first day she said just pick it up and make marks and just go, and I was thinking what am I supposed to be doing here? I had to look around and see what everyone else was doing and copy them, and then halfway I just think well just do it, it’s for you, you’re not trying to fit in you’re supposed to be getting something out for you… …I never thought the first piece that I did at the RCA would be scribble. That was another thing, we had a little exercise in abstraction with Bella, I never did abstraction before and to be honest I thought it was a bit… at school the kids who did the abstract work were the kids who couldn’t do art, they’d do some scribbly rubbish and you’d think well it’s because you can’t draw. So I used to think it was a cop-out. But now I can see the thinking behind it. Now I’m going to go and have a look at the abstract artists that I always thought were rubbish before and sort of rethink it. PBD: See what it is they were trying to do. Yeah because there was obviously something there because everybody thought it was great but I don’t really like it, but now … I think, yeah it’s quite a lot about feeling.

14

Rainer Maria Rilke Works of Art, Samtliche Werke in zwolf Banden, quoted in The Sublime Void: On the Memory of the Imagination. Bart Cassiman, editor, (1993) Koningkliijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, Netherlands

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At this point there is no difference between drawing for what later might be seen as art or design practice. Willats (1997:5) remarks that “pictures can be so persuasive that it is all too easy to think of them as containing objects like people or tables, or shape features like edges and contours, wheras in reality pictures are made up of lines of ink or patches of paint. The central question in picture perception is: How do lines of ink or patches of paint come to represent features of real or imagined worlds?” Using concepts drawn from work in the 1960’s on attempts by the Artificial Intelligence community to understand visual perception, Willats makes a distinction between “scene primitives” as the most elementary units of shape information available in a scene, and “picture primitives” as the most elementary units of shape information available in a picture. From this basic premise he goes on to elaborate different systems and conventions used in drawing, which contribute to a broader meaning of what a drawing may be about. In different design disciplines there are highly codified conventions for project drawing, both for exploration and also especially for more finished work: the etiolated forms of fashion drawing; the go-faster curves and jagged edges of vehicle design; the multilayered outline and spatial definitions of architecture. These codes become infused with personal visual judgement as a significant part of the development and style of the objects concerned: graphic works, clothes, furniture, interfaces, etc. In all design disciplines visual exploration expands through use of any and all media; conventions can be explored from any source, so that form becomes part of content. Sketchbooks from fashion and textiles, those most haptic of disciplines, can no longer be closed flat but bulge as they compost ideas and potential connections, sometimes appearing to contain more than the ideas enclosed in mere text. The centripetal processes of communicating for persuasion and for specification inevitably close this down, although even engineering drawing while seeming to embody the most objective of coding of information also has its history of styles and conventions and evidence of personal touch (Baynes and Pugh 1981).

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Originality and Expression Originality has two aspects, something unique to the drawer/designer, and something that is not a reproduction of an already exiting piece of work. Handmade drawings are already unique, and therefore original. Paradoxically this is not necessarily a comfortable experience for someone starting out, the pressure being to dance before walking. A project at the end of the introductory visual studies workshop fortnight was a real strain for some people, exploring as it did how drawings themselves, however figurative, could become the abstracted source of entirely other ideas. Confidence, however, can open awareness that the drawing is its own subject. Its openness to interpretation is a challenge to engagement, paving the way to the productive aspects of ambiguity in exploring the ‘problem space’ of a design, or a wider subject. Goel (1999) has described two dimensions that the designer explores through sketch drawing – lateral transformations where movement is from one idea to a different idea, and vertical transformations where there is movement to a more detailed version of the same idea. This is similar to Duncker’s problem-solving hierarchy described in Learning and epistemic development in designing. Such different perceptions may occur through a shift in the experience of looking, or by reflecting on the idea that perception constructs meaning, recalling styles of thinking described by Kolb (1984). Evans (1997:160) throws some light on what might be pressure not to work too expressively in a predominantly rational culture of industrial design. He writes in the context of architectural drawing, seeing that it can include two options: “one emphasising the corporeal properties of things made, the other concentrating on the disembodied properties in the drawing, (and they) are diametrically opposed: in the one corner, involvement, substantiality, tangibility, presence, immediacy, direct action; in the other, disengagement, obliqueness, abstraction, mediation and action at a distance. They are opposed but not necessarily incompatible…the tendency is generally to place the abstract and the instrumental within the orbit of suspect, culpable

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professionalism, allowing the direct and experiential presence…. (only to) show up as so many sporadic episodes of resistance.”

Rather than it being a problem that drawings have this capacity to assert multiple possible interpretations, representing several different things at once, this can be of benefit for the creative drawer or designer. Again, the drawing is its own subject. Its openness to interpretation is a measure of its powerfulness, its ambiguity a challenge to engagement. Although we may choose to overlook complexity the opportunity is there for an openness to other meanings. IS: It’s funny, because sometimes… like with Bella, in one session we had to draw in a suitable medium the object in a way that communicated what it was like, and so I chose a bird, a curlew with a long beak, very delicate and fragile, and as I drew it, I found I could do that, I mean I did it in sort of dry brush ink; it was delicate, it had the form, so from life it’s possibly easier to represent; the difficulty comes when you’re taking, you’re taking sort of an abstract step further, so you’re not drawing something trying to represent you know that’s there in front of you….I don’t know whether it’s the way my mind is, I find it difficult to… well… to represent maybe more feelings or that kind of…Maybe that’s an engineering thing again, that engineers have that feeling, that its about “There’s the thing”, right well I’ve got to represent that it’s fragile, that’s a tangible …I can do that, but… PBD: plan section elevation! Yeah!

The ambiguousness of a presented idea recalls the idea of versions, and this leads to the way stories work. The painter Constable says: “It is the business of a painter not to contend with nature and put this scene on a canvas of a few inches, but to make something out of nothing, in attempting which he must almost of necessity become poetical”15. Any metaphorical content is not about an image of an object, but what that image suggests that is beyond mere depiction. Willats (1997) discusses Goodman’s suggestion that the qualities of expression in artistic pictures may include the symptoms of “repleteness” to distinguish them from factual images.

15

John Constable: letter to John Fisher, 24 August 1824

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An example is where Uglow (2008:112) in her book Words and Pictures describes how a tiny, deceptively simple woodcut illustration by Thomas Bewick “has a kind of sturdy power, a suggestion that these things relate in some untold way to our moral being.” The image presents several different kinds of story. Two cows are standing companionably in a marshy stream; behind them is a copse on a hillock, partially fenced in with hurdles, nature enclosed. In the sky above two crows chase off a hawk, watched by a magpie. Another magpie sits on the back of one of the cows, who is flicking her tail, perhaps in some reaction to having flies pecked off her. Bewick has created the whole scene, 80mm x 60mm, with contrasting use of black lines out of a white background, and white lines out of black, as a concentrated and harmonious construction. The tonal composition is complemented by another dynamic. The cows are a still and solid counterpoint between the horizontality of the lines of the stream and the marsh in the foreground and the airy verticality of the hillock and the wavy trees beyond, where the eye is led up to the drama being enacted in the sky above, the whole a picture of nature managed and nature free. Already there is enough for this scene to speak to us about how the world turns. Bewick uses the visual dynamics of his imagery, rather than more obvious signs of symbolism or semiotics to show how nothing can be separate from anything else, the fundamental moral position.

Figure 33. Thomas Bewick, 1797, Two cows grazing, wood engraving, History of British Birds. www.bewicksociety.org.

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Semiotics, what things stand for, has been explored in design, by designers and by design theorists. While promoting a kind of styling, which prioritised the stories and connotations that products have, the Cranbrook School of Design made useful contributions in the 1980’s to how products could be ‘read’ by users and others. The challenge of psycho-ergonomics is how they should be made legible, in all the subtleties that implies, (despite the provocations of some ‘design art’ and its iconoclasms). A toothbrush while being associated with cleaning does not have to unnerve us as a weapon in the hygiene wars, but any pushchair will tell a detailed story about its owner and user, rather different from that of someone using the average wheelchair. Some products have more usable metaphorical tenor potential than others. At the same time other trajectories of expression in products may be more about self-expression, and these establish a bridge between design as art and design as problem-solving. In the above discussion I have used issues stemming from Representation, Originality and Expression to focus my questions about drawing in this, perhaps any, design educational setting. I did this as an alternative to more conventional approaches. I have also found it necessary to attempt to put the students’ experience in an even wider context. In the next sections I look more deeply at two particular uses of drawing from the past. Both add to the breadth and depth of our understanding of the potential of visual work, and drawing specifically. Prehistoric cave drawing and painting enabled me to look more into mental images, and the deeper meanings communicated in visual work, while Ars memoriae and Illuminated manuscripts explores the use of allegory and metaphor in how we think and remember.

PREHISTORIC CAVE DRAWING AND PAINTING

I see many things through this lens: I have been profoundly moved on dimly seeing the traces of my distant ancestors’ visions deep inside the earth. I have felt connections between their work and my own questions about drawing, both personally and for drawing’s role in design. These begged a voice that did not try to present detailed arguments from all the professions who explore this field.1 The particular questions that arise for me are: what are people doing, thinking and feeling when they are freehand drawing? What meanings do drawings have, and how do people interact with them? The drawings in the caves threw light on these themes.

Overview Prehistoric drawing and painting is a province of enquiry not only for archaeologists and palaeontologists, but also cognitive and evolutionary psychologists. They are interested in the development of human intelligence and consciousness, one of whose manifestations is the image work, called ‘Cave Art’, found particularly in SW Europe and dated between approximately 40,000 and 11,000 years BCE (Upper Palaeolithic, UP). The work appears to have been done by homo sapiens sapiens (HSS), the same people as ourselves. While their ways of life as hunter-gatherers were different from ours, and in some ways simpler because lacking in those features of culture arising from complex societal life, their brains were the same as ours. In the absence of direct evidence, different ideas have emerged to try and explain how these peoples’ intelligence and consciousness developed and became more complex, so that they could produce this visually and conceptually refined work. What were its meanings? Some writers explore 1

For sources not referenced in this section I have noted (PCDP) after their listing in References.

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comparisons with contemporary San hunter-gatherers of South Africa, and Aboriginal peoples in Australia, and this avenue has its supporters and its critics. Increasingly precise dating procedures show that the work of the highest sophistication dates from all periods of this approximately thirty thousand year interval, implying that the skills would probably have been gained and lost and learned again during such a long time. Discussions about the development of intelligence and consciousness explicitly use a variety of metaphors to explain different models for what seems to have happened in HSS’ growing mental capacities before, amongst other things, the appearance of cave art. The underlying theme is that of the expanding ability of the human mind to make connections between information and ideas previously experienced as separate and unconnected. It is thought that developing language enabled this bridging. Fodor, in Mithen (1996:38) speaks of “cognition’s passion for the analogical”. Such a way of thinking means that visual work can function in several different ways. Firstly it can be a record or a reminder of an object, an animal or a more complex scenario. Secondly it can provide a metaphorical link to many other meanings, either previously known and here encoded, or which emerge in the process of the work, a mysterious process of the mind being drawn out of itself, despite itself. Some archaeologists, such as Colin Renfrew, focus on the idea of ‘materialisation’ as a making process that runs alongside and interacts with language. At this early stage, materialisation could be as diverse as imagery, tools or products. A growing awareness of being separate from the surrounding world is seen in mind development in early humans and in the modern child. How to reestablish connection with that world is the province of poetry, art and spiritual practice. Interpreting the world and one’s experience of it through the processes and products of depiction is one way of making that connection and finding meaning.

Interpretation We cannot know why the cave art was made. Nonetheless professionals and non-professionals find it compelling to try to understand why it was done,

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what the images mean. At the same time, some archaeologists suggest there is no point in trying to do this. I see this urge for interpretation as a basic human capacity and necessity, the deep-seated drive we have to understand the environment we are living in and interacting with. Some authors suggest this is what cave art is about too. There are two aspects of interpretation here. The first is that when we look at any kind of drawing we have to ‘interpret’ it, because it is encoded. Even the most objective of technical specifications have to be translated from the page. The second is more subtle; ‘meaning’ has more complex ramifications. When I am drawing something, from imagination, from memory or from observation, the idea of its having ‘meaning’ and what its meaning is, may not be a continuously running conversation. All the same, if sharper observation is alerted by curiosity, my visual thinking is enticed into the questions that arise. The qualia of the object are translated through the mediation of the tools used in the drawing (sharp pen, soft charcoal), and interpretation is offered back to the mind. This interpretation may be short and shallow (what does that hinge consist of?), or open-ended and bottomless (what kind of hingeing, joining and separating, does a thin drawn line imply between an object and its surroundings?). These questions of representation and expression, discussed in Drawing and the Drawer’s Story, were of concern to the IDE students as they are to anyone who makes a mark and leaves a trace of themselves.

The role of the surface The surface in cave art plays a very significant role in the image-making. Enquirers about cave art, when they discuss meaning, seem to agree that the location and surfaces of the work are a highly significant part of the content. Two aspects are relevant here, the features of the surfaces, and their location, deep inside caves where there is no natural light. In many cases the depictions make use of natural features of the rock surface to produce bas-relief images. As these images can only be seen (and could only have been produced) with some kind of light, the animating effects of shadows from flickering lamplight on these surfaces cannot be ignored.

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Great skill has been used to exploit the existing features of the surface to craft bas-relief images, a quality of the best of which is their capacity to enable us to suspend any real depth clues in order to read the image threedimensionally (see Shadow). In one sense a surface cannot speak back, but it does in the caves. In conventional drawing practices the surface is more or less silent, drawers choosing deliberately whether or not to incorporate the texture of a surface into the content of a drawing through the reaction of the tools being used. In technical drawing, whether it is done on a physical material or on a screen it is important that the surface plays no interfering part at all. In the caves, drawings can start to layer up on the surface. Discrete ideas (or images of animals and parts of animals) are separate but also synthesised. In the caves we do not know why this was done, or at what time intervals, but the effects are incontrovertible. There are single entities, many forms, some merging together, and the graphic and narrative effect is always of something that is more than the sum of its parts. This also happens with shared drawings in the design studio. Started by one person, the drawing can become a site of discussion with others, and ownership disappears. The drawing itself becomes a participant in the process as new ideas emerge in anticipated and unexpected graphic turns. An individual may layer up tracings of a drawing, abandoning some features and modifying or adding others. While these practices may be an accepted aspect of professional studio work, it is still something that the neophyte drawer has to accommodate during learning this new way of expression and exploration. Another noticeable feature of cave art is that the animals are not depicted in a physical setting or landscape. The terrain is never drawn, so it seems that a drawing of the animal in its environment is not important. (Some have considered that the images are of dead animals lying on the surface of the walls). In the design process sketches are rarely placed in the landscapes of the useage of the products, unless that is the issue under consideration. This lack of conventional context is not a perceptual problem; the conversation about the object is going on in the mind, and it only wants to focus on some things, not others. In design drawing this is one of the accepted graphic

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conventions, empty of meaning. The choice of no exterior physical context for the cave art does not seem to be so empty, and so it throws back a question to the design drawings. Is something of importance being lost about products as they are conceptualised and sketched into existence isolated from the narratives of how and where they will be used? Does this say something about the harsh effect and deadening experience so many of these objects induce when they finally land up as hardware sharing our living spaces? For design there is a sense of a fractured story, in the caves the drawings and the surface form a complete narrative. As to the locations of the most extensive work in the caves, authors seem to see it as reasonable to read symbolic significance into the fact that the work is found in deep caves and fissures in the earth’s surface, sometimes a long way from and very inaccessible to the outside world. It is proposed that this constitutes a metaphorical connection to a domain of ideas different from those of the physical world in the daylight, the underworld of the mind, where the imagination holds sway. Not only are these ideas deep in the dark, but they are also, it seems, beyond the surface of the rock itself. The surface becomes a veil or a membrane between the quotidian world and another one beyond it. Not least amongst the evidence for this idea is the widespread finding of deliberately placed bones and stone splinters piercing into and protruding from cracks in the rocks. Cave bears’ claw marks into clay surfaces are accompanied by hand and finger gouging and tracing. Garner’s (2012) clipped prose in his novel Boneland evokes the mind of the cave painter: “He cut the veil of the rock; the hooves clattered the bellowing waters below him in the dark. The lamp brought the moon from the blade, and the blade the bull from the rock. The ice rang.” Some see the stencilling of hands on the surfaces in a similar way. As the hand and its surroundings are sprayed with pigment, so the hand disappears into the surface, and yet leaves a trace behind. ‘Mark-making’ is a phrase used by drawing tutors to focus attention on how the choice of kinds of mark influences the creation of the narrative of an image. By their extraordinary variety of kinds of marks, carefully manipulated, cave artists make it clear

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they know this intimately. In his book Seeing through Drawing, Rawson (1979:22) notes: “The basic drawing unit which can convey analogies is the mark….What the spectator needs to do is to read back from the artist’s handmarks to re-experience for himself the inner movements of his mind.” The richness of the lived experience of the cave art can be hard to transfer to the cold light of the Drawing Studio.

Mental images, Images in the mind’s eye On the basis of comparison with practices of present-day hunter-gatherers who make cave or rock art it is proposed by some authors that individuals in these UP groups may have had ‘shamanic’ roles. They may have been individuals who through altered states of consciousness, were able to travel through the surface of the images to a more significant powerful world beyond (seemingly a reversal of the Platonic simile). This process is mysterious, but so, still, is the fact and behaviour of images we have in our minds, in our mind’s eye. Cave art must have been drawn from memory; it therefore required the workings of the mind’s eye. That altered states of consciousness were involved in the making of some cave art is evidenced by the universal occurrence of certain abstract graphic forms, of dots, grids, parallel lines, nested curves and zigzags, very similar to those seen in contemporary drug-induced visions, so-called ‘entoptic images’. These hunter-gatherers would have known their animals very intimately, as evidence seems to show that some were tracked over thousands of miles in seasonal migrations before being slain, and then butchered, and their flesh, bones and hides put to various uses. This was a whole body, even group experience (a relationship with its subject matter rare in drawing today), and may go some way to explain the extraordinary way the features of the animals have been accurately captured (even if some people may have learned drawing from the images themselves). It does not however obscure the fact that much of the drawing process must have involved communication with the inner eye of memory. We take this for granted, and yet unless we have reason to really know what something looks like in detail, we probably only have a hazy image of an object named,

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and rarely question what sort of perceptual processes are involved in having that floating image which can be ‘looked at’. According to how much our visual memory is trained we have a more or less extensive and detailed bank of visual imagery to play with. Several IDE students talked early on in the course about preferring to rely on images of designs in their mind’s eye rather than the uncontrollable, sometimes barren process of working up the three-dimensional visual features of an object through sketch drawing. They seemed to have an automatic respect for the status of these images, perhaps echoing that of the cave artists, even though it was difficult to see details in them. However they also discovered that the mental image can be very elusive, and that it did not often survive the download process onto paper or into a sketch model through mediation of eye and hand and tool. While networks of concepts and relations are learnt in experience, they are built in the memory, which along with metaphor plays a key role in developing imagination, richness of ideas, and thus more substance in productive thinking. As Arnheim (1997:83) describes memory, with almost poetic imagery: “Traces resembling each other will make contact and strengthen or weaken or replace each other. To put it in the terms of Kurt Lewin: memory is a much more fluid medium than perception because it is farther removed from the checks of reality.” Further, he says (1966:63): “If the memory image does not simply duplicate some scene of the physical world, what is it like?...The mind, it is said, can cut pieces from the cloth of memory, leaving the cloth itself unchanged. It can also make collages from memory material, by imagining centaurs or griffins.” Downing (1994:235), quoted by Malnar and Vodvarka (2004:22,23) says: “however powerful a mental image may seem in memory, it does not include all the environmental information contained in any particular place or event experience. Instead the mental image presents a version of experience that is most important to the individual or situation at a particular moment in time.” (her emphasis). Malnar and Vodvarka continue: “This suggests that sensory memory is selective as well as nuanced, a point that is especially apt when

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one is in a situation where precise definitions of time and space are not essential.”

These descriptions contribute to my understanding of the drawing approach of the cave artists. The aspects of drawing described above have been surfaced in my mind by reflection on visual work far removed from the design studio. Nonetheless they describe some of the essential features of cognitive and affective sophistication, and so I believe they form part of the agenda of learning tasks and approaches needed for the complex role of drawing as part of designing.

ARS MEMORIAE AND ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS

Freehand drawing is an activity involving intelligent awareness, but how can drawing be made a more effective accompaniment and support for thinking? The involvement of visual thinking and visual literacy provides a bridge to Ars Memoriae, a highly developed way of thinking in the post-classical and medieval world that relied on an acutely trained memory using precise, detailed and reliable visual memory images. In a society that assumes universal literacy and the cheap availability of thousands of book titles it is not immediately easy to see how the use of books was so different when they were very rare, before printing superseded hand-written manuscripts. Several features of illuminated manuscripts cast light on areas of enquiry in this study, in particular how they were designed and used to exploit the relationship in thinking between ideas and images, whether of words or of objects, in order that they could act rhetorically. As my intention is to look at the common ground between sketch drawing work, and the use of memory techniques, (sometimes supported by illuminated manuscripts), so it is important to stress the deep differences between reading a book in the early medieval period and now. Reading at that time meant repeating a text until it had been memorised, along with its image, and any other figurative forms on the page (Clanchy 1993). I sense that nowadays reading can be variously a more active or a more passive process. Actively, one may mine and trawl a text for information and ideas, ignoring the structure of the book or article. Passively, the complete stream of words, perhaps in a novel, is sucked into the brain and reconstructed as a running narrative, the story taken up and then left behind as new scenes appear at the turn of the page. Reflection is time taken away from this main activity. Trying to understand a different approach to processes of knowing I have had to notice what is taken for granted. One such difference, and central to the point of early books and illuminated manuscripts is the role and use of memory.

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Nowadays memory training as an aspect of learning is contrasted with more generative and personally expressive skills. ‘Rote-learning’ is an uncelebrated skill, generally having pejorative connotations, reputedly deadening to the brain. Memory has become less important too as the immediate experience of stimulation from the world crowding around us seems to be a more pressing and potent source of knowing. What is already in the memory plays a lesser part, a minor role, even though of course it is actually the source of how we make sense of what we see and know and notice. By contrast, before books were used as repositories of higher knowledge, and were more like memoranda, a very good memory with the capacity for recollection and reminiscence was part of the classical art of Rhetoric and other scholastic endeavour. As such it needed to be trained, and the training was detailed and extensive, working with our capacity for visual thinking. This was firstly to ‘store’ information in the mind, and secondly to be able to think robustly and creatively with it. Awareness of images in the mind has been with homo sapiens from very early times, as attested by the imagery in Cave Art, both abstract and pictorial. We are aware of visual memory as we can ‘see’ our surroundings when the eyes are shut. The sharpness and normality of this experience is in contrast to how limited is the understanding of how it happens. The art of recollection exploits the perceptual faculty we have of remembering in visual form what we have seen - places, objects and people. In classical times a system of ‘architectural mnemonics’ was in use described by, amongst others, Cicero in de Oratore in the 1st century BCE (Yates 1966). This involved putting, binding ideas onto objects and places in a scene which could then later be retrieved from memory by the orator or thinker along with the attached ideas. The metaphorical idea of memory being like an impression made by a seal on wax or clay writing tablets is preplatonic. Plato himself uses the Greek word for seal: séme-, meaning sign or mark by which something is known. In this way ‘inscription’ joins something incised into a receptive surface, with something being symbolised, a representation that serves a cognitive purpose. This is the same idea that we use when we talk about how much of an impression

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something has made on us, perhaps without thinking what this actually means. Carruthers, scholar of medieval thinking, points out that: “The crucial task of recollection is investigatio, “tracking-down”, a word related to vestigial, “tracks” or “footprints”. All mnemonic organizational schemes are heuristic in nature. They are retrieval schemes, for organizational schemes are heuristic in nature. They are retrieval schemes for the purposes of inventio or “finding”. (1990:20)

There were many metaphors for such systems of storage and organisation. A powerful and long-lasting one refers to a storage box, or arca in latin, often used for books. Carruthers (1990:43) quotes John of Salisbury: “The memory truly is a sort of mental bookcase, a sure and faithful custodian of perceptions”. Such an arca has to be built, and so is a kind of construction. Scholars were encouraged to create their own personal versions of these schemes, bright in the mind’s eye. The personally constructed arca enabled a very sophisticated system of memory training, of the storage of ideas classified in various structures. It was capable of being combined in many different ways. The notion of the arca links to the Ark of the Covenant, where the books of law are placed, and to the Noah’s Ark of the Bible, another kind of compendium. Other visual ideas were commonly used. Ladders, trees, woods, buildings with rooms and other devices refer to structures of knowledge and processes of thinking. Frequently seen are people, things and animals emerging from or being swallowed into others, which takes us into structures of ideas. “A common image for items associatively grouped in memory is that of the catena or “chain”; perhaps the very notion of texta itself, which literally means “something woven”, derives from the same mental phenomenon. And the language that describes the formation of associations as “hooking” material to other things leads to a metaphor of recollecting as fishing; as one pulls up one’s line, all the fish on one’s hooks come with it” (Carruthers 1990:62)1.

1 An example is the fish border from page 266 of The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, Pierpoint Morgan Library, New York, MS M 917.

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Figure 34. Suzanne Burke, Pulpit in St. Mary’s Forane Church, Champakulam, Kerala, India, 2012.

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This metaphor works doubly by reminding one that the image is the way in, and also illustrates the idea that there is a chain of ideas within an argument. It continues powerful today, as we describe something “fishy” as needing more investigation, which can be successful if we really get hooked into it. The use of this idea of summoning up so as to be able to pass on knowledge seems to have been introduced into the architecture of the Forane Church of St. Mary at Champakulam in South India, where the preacher’s pulpit is supported on a bracket emerging from the wall through the mouth of a fish. This Syriac church is said to have been founded in 427 CE, (following in the tradition that Thomas the Apostle travelled to South India after the death of Christ). While this pulpit is part of a later building (17th century) it is hard to escape the idea that the early practices of the art of memory have been translated into the fabric of the building and the purpose of the pulpit itself. Memory training recommended that bright and strong images should be employed, even an appeal to synaesthetic perception with references to other senses. Feelings and emotions in the images would give them more substance, making it easier to explore the varied meanings and associations in the recited or written texts. (This provides an enlightening explanation of the sometimes contrary and ribald imagery set alongside psalms and other sacred texts in illuminated manuscripts). The idea assumes the use of extreme images to pile in the ideas, to read in order to incorporate. The efficiency of the mind is that it can make images carry rich meanings if one allows it to produce them. But the work is in the interpretation not just in the mental production2. Later as books became more widely available through the development of paper, memory schemes could be transferred to the drawn page with visual treatment of words and other graphic images designed as aids to visual memorisation. Scholars however would be using the page as a prompt to the memory, not the other way round. This was the purpose of the book, probably difficult or impossible to carry around, while memory was always 2

An idea explored centuries later in the painting of a pipe with a text below: Ceci n’est pas une pipe, by the surrealist painter René Magritte The treachery of Images: this is not a Pipe 1928-1929. Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles, California.

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with one, and through a highly developed memory, a scholar could learn to inscribe and establish in his mind exact copies of many pages of such books. The concept of neutral words on the page did not fulfil the purpose of reading then as it does today. These graphically extended texts were tools to enable scholars to memorise and internalise their contents in a well-ordered inventory, so that the mind could later work on them in active hermeneutical dialogue with the earlier source. The showing of emotions as well as detailed physical information in the stories of the images confirmed that knowledge was holistic in nature, however rigorous might be the efforts involved in working through great intellectual, spiritual and moral problems in order to arrive at that knowledge. Thinking was not seen as an abstract rational process separated from the emotions, as it has been since the Enlightenment, but “an activity of animus, the sensory-emotional soul” (Carruthers 1990:197). Now that this separation has become so normal and pervasive, a real effort has to be made to re-synthesise these ways of knowing. PBD: “In my meditation practice I am instructed to still the mind by connecting with the mantra I have learned and just to listen to it repeating in my mind (rather than recite it out loud). This idea of connection summons up an image of an elaborate double buckle for a wide belt. I sense the belt as worn is a support and the idea feeds back to the role of the mantra. Two pathways open – one a chain of visual associations, the other a series of concepts about what support means in this context. I could easily follow either way, but in this practice do neither, using the image as an instruction to return to the simple listening devoid of other thoughts. Later when I realise I have wandered off it is enough to see the buckle and immediately return to the practice.” 2011

Recollection was not however just a process of working with what could be seen. By reading these sources afresh using the mind’s eye of memory, and boldly and extensively exploring the metaphorical associations of the graphic elements, arguments could be investigated in depth working beyond the surface of the page and the surface of the mind. Detailed reasoning and argument with these texts, and by extension their authors, could then be used for rational and creative thinking. Carruthers compares reports of the

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thinking processes of the thirteenth century saint Thomas Aquinas, and the twentieth-century physicist Albert Einstein, and finds them very similar. “Human beings did not suddenly acquire imagination and intuition with Coleridge, having previously been poor clods. The difference is that whereas now geniuses are said to have creative imagination which they express in intricate reasoning and original discovery, in earlier times they were said to have richly retentive memories, which they expressed in intricate reasoning and original discovery” (1990:4).

The mind’s capacity to make allegorical, metaphorical or symbolic connections between ideas and images underlines these practices. They are all very relevant to designers. Letting the mind dwell on objects and visual surroundings in an open and yet questioning way is not something that everyone naturally does, and becoming more aware of the richly storied world around us is a way for designers to become more aware of how design might be able to suggest improvements to it. Opening up these possibilities requires a move from passive absorption of the visual world to engaging with it through thoughts, ideas and questions about it, such curiosity being an essential link in the problem-solving models of design process. Carruthers notes the differences between prescriptive and iconographical understanding of images “if by iconography we understand the images to represent fixed, generally accepted meanings. Rather (the diagram) employs just that kind of associational heuristic which the scholastic writers distinguished from ‘universal’ logic.” (1990:233) For present-day designers observational drawing can be the additional activity that promotes this kind of awareness. It is especially valuable at this time, when our passive consumption of the world through visual media is so speedy that any contemplative interpretation is edged out of the frame. The visualising in the mind’s eye that we take for granted, and which was often referred to by the IDE students as a source of images of proposed product ideas, is a very thin shadow of what was achieved by the medieval trained memory. Carruthers makes the point that “what defines a mental image is not its pictorial qualities but whether its user understands it to represent a certain thing” (1990:23). This comment, made in the context of

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the personal nature of the mental images internalised by scholars beyond the information given on the page, goes some way to explain the disappointment and frustration of some students, for whom images in the mind’s eye were strong partners in the design development process, and yet who were not able to produce on paper what they ‘saw’ as objects in their minds eye, because they had had little if any visual training. The history of memory training has enabled me to explore how reflective learning and teaching links to visual literacy. In the art of Memory the use and interpretation of images is a dialectical activity with a cycle of hearing or reading works of earlier scholars, taking the material into memory, and then re-presenting it to oneself in an internal dialogue to make it one’s own. This process has parallels with the activities of reflection in Kolb’s learning cycle, and clearly can be experienced through visual thinking, especially with rich visual images one may have made oneself, either in one’s mind if one is well trained, or through drawing. Sketch exploration and development of ideas could be a much more powerful tool than it often is. It requires deliberate development through training. This assumption that one can use the drawn page for reflective conversation relies on the idea that nowadays the freely available paper surface will easily be the productive conversational partner. The well-attested problem of the blank page, and lack of drawing skill belies this. The skill is to interpret the image metaphorically rather than getting stuck in its specificness, making an imaginative leap, further in or further sideways. Sketching work when done with a certain kind of attention can be a portal to all sorts of ideas beyond the picture plane – rational, deductive, exploratory, contrary, resolving. There is an important difference between this kind of work which sets up and follows a train of thought using vital and close leaps between images and concepts, and the more sedate situation where images have been used merely to sit alongside and illustrate a text. The rich culture of modern day illustrated children’s literature is a liberation, a holistic source of learning to think using both visual and verbal media. As books became more common, but still before the use of printing, some were still seen primarily as aids to memory, for example the psalms or canon

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law, but others also became commodities that through increasingly prolific illustration displayed the wealth and patronage of those who were able to pay to commission them. The amount of text on the page retreated to provide more space for gorgeous and rich imagery, decorative values increasing as symbolic meanings and functions retreated. Scrolls and flourishes of fantastical beasts emerging from each other still appear, but are now purely ornamental, having lost the metaphorical message of the great chain of knowing.

Figure 35. Maker unknown, late 13th century, Page from a Gradual, with historiated initial R. Music for Easter Mass with image of Christ’s tomb and Christ in Majesty above, Arezzo, Italy, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The fish have survived as individuals, but the deeper concept of ideas hooked to each other to produce a chain of knowing may have got lost.

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Ars Memoriae links very closely to three more modern ways of using visual work. Art Therapy deliberately acknowledges how drawing and painting can be used to explore the affective aspects of experiencing and knowing. Second, the phenomenon of mental imagery and the evident trainability of its mechanisms is the subject of research in cognitive psychology. Thirdly, the processes of investigation used in active recollection in Ars Memoriae are similar to those heuristic processes seen in sketching behaviour which interests researchers in aspects of artificial intelligence, amongst others. My long view or aim has been to find how to make drawing a more potent activity amongst the welter of other competing and urgent activities a student might be beset by, activities which usually have an outcome that is quicker or easier to access, and which do not risk the depths of intensive and extensive exploration. Arnheim (1995:71) expresses the problem in an overarching way: “Drawing from mental images…relies on generalities, on the simplifications that remain in memory as abstractions from the multiplicity of individual experiences. Architects and designers, of course, rely on perceived models only in the more indirect sense of what they have seen of other people’s work, historical or contemporary examples. But unless they actually copy such examples…they, too, rely on more or less dim recollections, extracts of what they have seen. Something very similar holds for scientific problemsolving.”

INTERLUDE: BRIDGE

I stepped from plank to plank So slow and cautiously; The stars about my head I felt, About my feet the sea. I knew not but the next Would be my final inch, This gave me that precarious gait Some call experience. —Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)

The bridge metaphor appeared in my study while I was thinking about different aspects of learning and development, cognitive, emotional, personal. ‘Bridge’ is a feature of metaphors that use journeys, to represent aspects of the experience. I have used this ‘Interlude’ to show several examples of bridges and bridging, that (in all cases but one1) I have visited, looked at and walked over and around in the course of considering the use of this metaphor in exploring the complex ideas involved in learning. I was aware of the potential pitfalls of ‘saliency imbalance’ (see Metaphor) where the ‘vehicle’, the bridge’s properties, are not central to the ‘tenor’, Learning. However, visual thinking can assert its intelligence by looking into what have at first sight appeared to be irrelevant features to see if they offer new and useful interpretations, and this has been the case here. This has not been an exhaustive search for all the possible interpretations, nor are the metaphorical images pursued to their otherwise inevitable death. In order to keep a focus on aspects of the metaphor relevant to learning and change, much of the panorama of the meanings of bridges has been avoided,

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The Rock Creek bridge, British Columbia

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(though I note in passing that it is a conceptual bridging process which enables the connections of metaphor to function in the first place.)

Figure 36. The effects of weather and rain overtake and provide a replacement for a modest effort to ease a junction in a track across the moorland of Penistone Country Park, North Yorkshire, 2013.

‘Bridge’ contains ideas that are static and dynamic, the bridge a usually stable joining of two entities, requiring movement to use it. The features of the concepts that occur in drawing and in the management of ideas that I have used: line, shadow, perspective, frame and space also occur in the landscape of the journey, as do bridges, which also become part of the stories of the inhabited landscape. As such, a general scene is set by Baxandall (1985), (in the context of the difficulties of art-historical explanations of purposeful objects), who analyses the design and building of the Forth Rail bridge in Scotland, revealing the great diversity of social, political and technological stories involved.

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Figure 37. The magnificent second century roman bridge over the Afrin river near the ancient city of Nebi Huri, or Cyrrhus in north-west Syria is evidence of that town’s importance on the Silk Route, and the near perfect state of the stoneflagged Roman road on the bridge a reminder of the prime importance of road communications in the Empire. In 2009 the bridge had shrunk into something mainly serviceable for local farmers.

There are many ways to cross a gap, or other kinds of impediment, such as a river. Perhaps because bridges are sometimes such obvious symbols of the triumph of engineering over nature, they have an unrivalled capacity for demonstrating hubris, as many bridge disasters testify. If they endure, their original intention and symbolic message may have been left behind, but their fundamental practicality ensures their continuity. Even so, whether modest or magnificent, bridges are evidence of humankind’s problem-solving capacity in its richest diversity.

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Figure 38. Andrew Emms, 2009, Rock Creek bridge from above, British Columbia.

Figure 39. Eric Sakowski/HighestBridges.com, 2009, Rock Creek bridge from below.

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The most obvious purpose of a bridge is to close or remove a gap. This has great metaphorical resonance, for example referring to understandings and skills as well as other kinds of divide. The gap is seen to be an undesirable state of affairs; having a bridge brings sides together, evidence of some kind of progress. (‘Progress’ moves from being a neutral movement to a valueladen one). In this metaphoric reading separateness is not a good thing. The poet Cavafy warns us of the dangers of relying on the idea that there are barbarians beyond the gates,2 (the ‘other’ that reflexively enables some selfdefinition). However it is necessary to maintain some boundaries in many aspects of daily life, and so the metaphoric link is only partial. Turning to the point of view of the traveller, bridges take on a different character. A limitation on the ‘progress’ aspect of the metaphor, in terms of learning, is that in some cases the traveller may be completely unaware of what the bridge is enabling her to do, how her passage has been made easy. The road appears to carry seamlessly on, the goal unimpeded by any chasm or problem below. Another limitation is that travellers use bridges in both directions, rather than only going ‘ever onwards and upwards’. Sometimes a bridge has been provided to sidestep a morass that there is no point in entering. Thinking in terms of the bridge in learning, perhaps not everything has to be learnt first from direct experience. An alternative reading is that a mentor, as described by Daloz (1999), can provide the tools and advice for the journeyer, and perhaps as one who goes before, can smooth the path, or show that the bridge is safe. When one feels confident, then getting one’s feet wet can not only be enjoyable, but can reveal opportunities for other kinds of experience.

2 Cavafy, C.P. (1990) Waiting for the Barbarians. (1904), in: Collected Poems, trans. E. Keeley and P. Sherrard. London, Chatto & Windus, Ltd.

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Figure 40. Field footbridge, Fordingbridge, Hampshire, 2013.

Figure 41. Footbridge and ford, New Forest, Hampshire, 2013.

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Figure 42. Footbridge, Waterperry Gardens, Oxfordshire, 2013.

Where the bridge arches itself in its structure we sometimes find our line of sight impeded, we cannot see beyond, and we may become very aware of the bridge itself. This then is the opportunity to consider what might be beneath it, what dangers may lurk in the crossing, calling to mind the story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff who outwit the troll under the bridge in their path. Being on the bridge between different ways of being, doing, or thinking often involves some kind of struggle, as exemplified in the painting The Tribulations of Saint Antony by Hieronymous Bosch described above in Learning and epistemic development in designing. In complete contrast the bridge may become a social site in its own right rather than something almost unnoticed, or to be dreaded. It may be the site of trade, of ideas as well as goods, as is the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. Or, as for example is the case with the Galata Bridge in Istanbul, which crosses the Golden Horn, it may be inhabited by fishermen and restaurants living in

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a kind of symbiosis with what is being bridged. In this case the bridge has replaced another kind of social structure, the ferrymen who were the confidantes, advisors and oral historians of the city (Mak 2009:54).

Figure 43. Galata bridge, Istanbul, Turkey, 2009. © Gunold Brunbauer/ Dreamstime.com.

These few scenarios show that one’s learning journey does not have to be seen as solitary. St Antony’s exploration of his struggles involved a dialogue with the wise through the medium of the hupomnemata. Learning is perhaps always best seen as a social process, whether this is with others around us or with ourselves. This does not always have to be a struggle, it may involve a lively trade of ideas with other travellers, or a sharing of the treasures that being on the bridge provides. Using the bridge as an environment that itself exists to make connections, the traveller enters into an engagement with the other users of the bridge in co-constructing how to make sense of life and its goals.

LINE

“Eye gazelle, delicate wanderer, Drinker of horizon’s fluid line.” —Stephen Spender: Not palaces, an era’s crown. 1930 The moment (the observer) appreciates that …line can have a purely artistic function, at that moment the observer’s soul is prepared to hear the pure inner sound of that line….the line …is a thing which is as much of a practical entity as a chair, a well, a knife, a book, etc…thus, in a picture when a line no longer describes a thing but functions as a thing in itself, its inner sound is not muffled by other considerations. Its inner power is fully released. Petherbridge (2008:31)

‘Line’ starts this set of five ‘collages’, juxtaposing visually based ideas with wider underlying uses of their concepts. Line’s intent in images is about different kinds of definition, and its qualities include all feelings, tension, drama and play, contrast and complementarity, as it forms surfaces and boundaries in its wake. Line addresses relationships amongst elements and shapes in a drawing, and also ways of thinking. Here are found thresholds, liminal spaces and interludes, figure and ground, what is inside and outside, how things are joined, how they are separated. The more one experiences a line (or perhaps a border) the more it dissolves separation at the very time it is trying to define something. At the sea’s edge, how far does the ocean push into the sand, dissolving that edge between land and water? In thinking we articulate ideas by drawing lines and distinctions, and explore the confines of such boundaries and edges when curiosity arouses us. Line is one of the most obvious ways to describe how drawings are made, but it is embedded in an almost limitless array of techniques. Lines are hard and thin, soft and thick, single or multiple, supple or rigid, singular, parallel, overlaid, disjointed, busy or quiet. Line can be regular, of a continuous and unchanging style and width, or it can vary infinitely in the tiniest of details. Qualities of lines depend on the tools that are used, each requiring skill: the

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fineness of silverpoint on a smoothed surface, the spraycan of the graffitiist, the precision of incised turf for an ancient mizmaze, or piles of chalk for a downland regimental motto.

Figure 44. Australian Imperial Forces badge, Fovant, Wiltshire, 2013.

The line lying on the surface stimulates different reactions, partly through the associations attached to certain gestural effects: a ragged pastel outline for a ragged beggar by Watteau, the finest of curving lines for the softness of a Matisse nude. Our perception plays an active role. Line itself has so many variations and qualities that it might seem useless to try and capture them under one word. Line in drawing can perform to create the subtlest identities we might feel or imagine, and can also be the decisive element that is the technical means of transformation of an idea into a space ship.

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Figure 45. Drawing with chalk on a near vertical surface using wooden revetments for stability, Fovant, Wiltshire, 2013.

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We accept without thinking the code of line for edge and outline, this having been learned early, children seemingly finding it a plausible way to depict what they want to ‘say’. In sophisticated drawing outlines may be unbroken, or formed of ‘contour units’, as Rawson (1969:105) describes the different kinds of marks that cumulatively enable perception to lift and animate a three-dimensional form from a two dimensional plane. With contour as edge, the third dimension gains depth, maybe a fold, but possibly a precipice, between the seen and unseen, known and unknown. The contour line follows the figure, not the ground, until we force the shift to give priority to the context, a skill of judgement beyond that of mere physical survival in an earlier, hostile environment. Such categorisation and classification is the essential perceptual mechanism that enables us to make sense of the world and our experiences in it, but sometimes we have to go beyond the information initially given. We allow contour lines to tell us about three-dimensional surfaces, and different qualities of lines to tell us about the character of people, objects, scenes. These same lines can then escape such figurative boundaries to express qualities in entirely abstract forms. We can see this interplay in Matisse’s Jazz, his ‘artist’s book’ of figurative and abstract collages.1 Borrowing from music the analogy of ‘phrasing’, Rawson connects the senses of sight and hearing in describing how the draughtsman makes his lines and “shapes them by means of rhythms, subtly varied, by inflecting them, breaking them, and causing them to spring from one another.” (1969:95) Far Eastern and Islamic calligraphy inhabit the space between writing and painting, idea and image, as qualities of the line become deliberately figurative and are named for what they may be used to represent, or are expressive where sometimes imagery is forbidden or seen as redundant. This is a nice conjoining of line with lines of thought, which may be linear, or two- or three-dimensional as they sometimes are.

1

Printed as stencil-prints.

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Line as a figure of speech, as noun and verb, seems to stay with its more basic forms; the imagination, visual or otherwise, then being lent to what is being figured. Lines are for example those dividing forms which refer to the fine separation between what’s mine and what is yours, right and wrong, known and unknown, but a juxtaposition nonetheless2. PBD: Geoff was explaining something from the Cosmology course he’s following. We were talking about Big Bang and how difficult it is with language to describe before Big Bang. He talked about the limits of radio telescopy, currently able to map “only” what has been going on for the past 53.7 million years. On a paper bag he drew with a biro some dots for our galaxies, and then a little way off a circle enclosing them. Outside the circle on the rest of the bag it was blank. February 2011

Figure 46. Camille Flammarion, 1888, A medieval cosmology, wood engraving.

2

The word ‘juxtaposition’ has its roots in the Sanskrit ‘yoga’ which develops to encompass both ‘junction’ and ‘jousting’.

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Inside the circle we can map. Beyond that it’s unknown. In drawing it’s quite often expressed as a line, which divides one ‘thing’ from another. ‘Beyond’ is a preposition that links inside and outside, through time, and through space, both physical and metaphorical. ‘Beyond’ is also a signpost to metaphysical worlds, as in the ‘Flammarion’ engraving of the traveller poking his head outside the confines of earth to see the heavens beyond, from the known to the unknown. In this image the boundary is confidently described by a line. For ideas as well as objects Line confines as it defines or delineates, ideas as well as objects, and weighs down on drawings and on thoughts, defying challenge until it is broken. Architect Trystan Edwards’ (1921:172) Grammar of Design describes canons of form which parallel gestalt principles of visual perception which were being articulated at the time. He describes Punctuation as “the beginning or end of any boundary of a thing (that) has been given formal emphasis… things completely unpunctuated could not become the subject of thought at all, and it is impossible even to discuss them.” His wide-ranging examples come from nature, from architecture and furniture and from clothes. For example he draws attention to how collars punctuate the edge of a jacket, and cuffs punctuate the end of a sleeve. A shirt sleeve protruding from a jacket sleeve at once punctuates, but also ‘inflects’ (another of Edwards’ terms) in a particular way between the jacket and the wrist. Ignoring any kind of line that might conventionally be drawn between subjects of study, he notes: “The canon of inflection, like that of number and punctuation, provides a criterion of judgment which is applicable to both things and to ideas. When one examines the means whereby two or more objects can have a resemblance to one another and yet maintain an individuality of their own, one is burrowing at the roots not only of design but of thought itself.” (1921:193) Arnheim (1974:222) reminds us of the relationship between the size of a surface and its enclosing contour line: “The larger the enclosed area, the weaker the influence of the boundary line”, a drawing concept that translates directly to the history of empires.

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“The Line is a trace left by a moving point”, (Rawson 1969:84), the point being a tool that is a surrogate or prosthetic for the hand, and so the line records a movement made in space by the drawer, her physical engagement in the process. Sometimes the drawer’s moving hand and arm are used to record movement itself, sometimes something static, but the movement still transfers life into what is drawn. Along with ‘phrasing’, which connects to a sensitivity to rhythm, the gestural nature of drawing – hand, arm, body expresses itself through the trace of the line on a surface. This reminds one of its reflexive character as it interacts with its subject, drawing it out from nothing, through the thinking and feeling hand and eye, and introducing qualities deliberately avoided by more mechanical tools. Craig-Martin (1995) introduces an exhibition devoted to the use of line in art: “The flow and weight of line gives the use of ‘active’ drawing a power that speech alone cannot”. Klee (1961:105) goes further, asserting that Line has its own life on the page: “The principal and active line develops freely. It goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly for the sake of the walk.” Line gives us linearity, flow and directionality, maybe mainstream thinking on the high road, and in the tramlines. Our eyes are tuned to follow something, and it may instead be old tacit knowledge enabling us to notice and follow traces and tracks in the woods, a skill which can be transferred to lines of argument and lines of enquiry if we practice enough. Joining up the dots dominates perception, creating connection lines in thin air through the mechanism of closure, as our love affair with the constellations of the stars attests. We also transfer this skill of organisation to our thinking processes, where we look for connections between ideas as part of making sense of things, lines of sight being useful ways to map out territory. Carruthers (1990:20) discussing the art of memory as the art of recollection says that the “crucial task of recollection is investigatio, “tracking-down”, a word related to vestigia, “tracks” or ‘footprints’. All mnemonic organizational schemes are heuristic in nature.” This heuristic or ‘finding’ capacity means that we can be alert to the traps of premature closure, where the most obvious connecting ideas may not be the best or right ones.

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Figure 47. Early twentieth century cigarette card illustrating the constellation of Scorpio, 2014.

Sometimes Line’s expressive qualities and openness to inference need to be held in check, and it is then better drawn by machines, so it can be relied on objectively and consistently, often to be read by other machines. Lines on graphs, two or three-dimensional (themselves often rationalisations of scatterings of dots), and other technical data need to be read as unequivocal, even if rationalised for relative exactitude (Winsor 1996). Psychogeography finds rich metaphorical content in the line. Two drawing techniques – on and into the surface provide Ingold (2007:45) with a scenario that lends itself to descriptions of developmental, or learning journeys. “Cracks show no respect for traces that may have been drawn over a surface. Thus cracks interrupt traces rather as in the landscape, a path of travel may be interrupted by a precipitous gorge in an otherwise level plateau. To get across, you have to construct a bridge, whereupon the trace becomes a thread.” Topographical complexities can be calmed into linear diagrams of railway routes and connections. Family histories can be codified into family trees,

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asserting bloodlines of descent. However, as I discovered learning archaeological drawing, exactitude and expression can work together. Graphic conventions for texture need to be accompanied by traces showing that conscious attention has covered every spot, and ways found to indicate materials, and the effects of time passing. Line will always have narrative content, but how it is used will produce different stories. The twentiethcentury artist Ewen Uglow’s precisely measured nudes hover between life and statue, while Rembrandt’s wife taking a bath is a world of love entirely figured in caressing lines. Lines that become figure, rather than defining it, may be those that are inhabited like Matisse’s lines that are both a dance and the dancers. The Thin Red Line was a line of soldiers, all that stood between victory or defeat of the Russians at the 1854 battle of Balaclava in Crimea. Another poignant image is the assault on and retreat from Moscow of Napoleon’s army, depicted symbolically as a line of dwindling thickness as its soldiers perished on the journey. Sometimes ideas can slip between the contour units to alternative interpretations. Behaviour may not be beyond the Pale if viewed from a different vantage point. Used cumulatively for modelling shape defined by light and shade, line dissolves into Shadow, and its potential for shifting interpretations, multiple new ideas and points of view.

From the conversations PBD: And did your ideas change on the (IDE) course? WR: Yes And are there ways in which by sheer mechanics of getting through the course, some of these things don’t get sufficiently watered and weeded? I think – there’s probably a couple of things that have changed most – first there’s a confidence in what I’m doing, I’m much more prepared now – maybe this is going to sound very contradictory - but the first thing is I’m much more prepared to say ‘I think this is right, this is the way you should do it’. But secondly, though, I’m actually quite prepared now to listen to other people’s ideas. Probably needs a bit of explaining. I’m more receptive to other’s ideas now and I’m much more able to work in a group with other people and feel less threatened I suppose. I managed to struggle with this old engineering way of where you suggested an idea you had to be pretty

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bloody sure that it was going to work before you opened your mouth. Now I’m prepared to offer up suggestions, listen to other people’s thoughts about it, discuss it and I know that we’re going to get a better solution out of it, a better quality idea will come out of three people than you ever would from one person. But when it comes to saying I think this is the way we should do it, I have no other strengths than to say let’s face it, this is the way it should go. Yeah, it’s paradoxical but it sounds like life. Yes. MG: Yes you can play with words as much as you want without feeling uncomfortable with that, but once you go down a path where the words no longer have a bearing on what you’re doing that’s when you start heading out. PBD: But what if you’ve got the words and then what if you make something or other and you start making an idea. What about the problem where because you’re making this idea, you’re not making those ideas, you have committed yourself to one of several paths? You have to commit yourself at some point though don’t you. You do, but some people find that really hard - they don’t know if it’s the right path.

SHADOW

Shadow might seem to be very different from the rest of the features I have chosen: it is very ‘other’, at once insubstantial, transitory, even negative, and yet full of alternatives. Shadows are often exemplified by Plato’s metaphorical description of the human condition where wretches in a cave assumed the shadows were reality. This unreality is easily associated with the unknown shades of ourselves after death, and from this, generally with undesirable attributes, less than the real thing. However, another view of shadows is that they are an essential aspect of what enables us to see and understand forms around us, as the associate of the light that enables us to see in the first place. We have specialised mechanisms both physical and perceptual for interacting with varying light. Sometimes however we are deceived – the moon’s changing shape is caused by our usual inability to distinguish the shadow on its surface from the surrounding ambient darkness. Some electroluminescent fish have adapted themselves to use this phenomenon as a mechanism for survival, changing the tone of their colour to match the background luminosity of the sea so they cannot be seen. Light and shadow work together to model three-dimensional forms so we can understand them. In European culture light has been a widespread metaphor for truth, embedded in the word ‘enlightenment’. Lack of light is assumed to be its opposite. Art has however explored the use of shadow for many more purposes. Western art at the time of the Renaissance had different opinions at different times about the point of depicting of light and shadows, unshaded light contributing towards the idea of an overall unity of what was depicted (Gombrich 1995). When shadows are used in images which are caught moments standing for timelessness they become a significant part of a narrative. In the Western tradition the use of shadows enables infinitely

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complex explorations of forms, and also by their shapes on flat surfaces the evocation of analogical responses to those shapes (Rawson 1979:94). The significant results of Galileo’s technical understanding of shadows has been described earlier. A complex system of names has developed to describe different kinds of shadows, including cast, self and projected. These acknowledge the considerable animation of light and shade bouncing around and off surfaces, producing a space almost of conversation about Shadow’s identity. Since the earliest history of art, bas-relief has been a technique all of its own, the surface rising out of itself and enabling the judicious use of shadow on a shallow relief to evoke a totally convincing perception of three-dimensional depth and meaning, and drama. I am interested in these positive features of shadows. Two aspects identify those features that connect with thinking and learning. The first is about moving out of the bright light into the shadows, where things are much less clearly defined. One of the dictionary definitions is about obscure and vague indications, hints, or versions of something, something less than sharply seen. While this is often presented as a negative feature, this is not always the case. Pallasmaa (2005:11) in his exploration of how “significant architecture makes us experience ourselves as complete embodied and spiritual beings” affirms the importance of the work of shadows: “The imagination and daydreaming are stimulated by dim light and shadow. In order to think clearly, the sharpness of vision has to be suppressed, for thoughts travel with an absent-minded and unfocussed gaze….the shadow gives shape and life to the object in light. It also provides the realm from which fantasies and dreams arise. The art of chiaroscuro is a skill of the master architect too. In great architectural spaces, there is a constant, deep breathing of shadow and light: shadow inhales and illumination exhales light.” (2005:46)

Further, he reminds us: “In emotional states, sense stimuli seem to shift from the more refined senses towards the more archaic, from vision down to

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hearing, touch and smell, and from light to shadow.” (2005:49) Despite the connotations of that metaphorical “down” in the quote, putting vision aside can leave the stage open for learning and knowing through embodied cognition, the haptic and other sensory processes that are central to design. Alexander (1977:1162) describes how pools of light, defined and enclosed by shadows, produce spaces of intimacy and relaxation, hard to achieve in uniform illumination. Tanizaki (1991:25) describes how the traditional Japanese home, with delicate illumination from lamps that enable lacquer to glow, and patinated silver to shine softly, is harmonious whereas the harshness of electric light produces agitation with its indiscriminate illumination of everything. In such shadowy places things become less well defined, more open to new interpretations, to reverie. Microshadows produce another kind of softness where they snag on textured surfaces such as stone or paper or fabric, breaking down the light which at a larger scale makes forms out of shadows. PBD: “I am Shadow within a spiral staircase in a room painted by Rembrandt. I am velvety and I do not move. I am at home in my shape and in my space although some might say I am trapped, because the staircase is between me and the light which would destroy me! It does not really destroy me because I am part of the definiteness of the staircase - it is the light that is so capricious - and in fact the light, the fire or perhaps whatever is coming in through the window, annoys me. I feel independent of those fairies, I am relaxed and embracing; in my softness everything relaxes and edges slump. Things can change because they are not clearly illuminated; they can take on different forms, different identities, but what am I doing in this? I have soft sides and edge bits. The edge bit is just where the steps go zigzag up and down; the soft bit is where I lie on the floor. My main feeling is of warmth, welcoming and relaxing. These definitenesses dance around a bit at the edges, moved by that pesky light I can’t get at. Perhaps the things that can happen within me are a bit shaped by the objects I am part of. I don’t see any entirely new thing rushing out of me, I relax here holding doubt and movement, unknown things.” 2010

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Figure 48. Rembrandt van Rijn, 1632, Philosophe en Meditation, © Musée du Louvre, Paris.

The second feature of shadows that interests me is their ‘antic’ quality. There are opposing meanings to shadows – something that is unreal, and also something that lends heightened reality to whatever it is attached to, and therefore part of. In product design rendering the shadow is usually as unrealistic as the way the object has been drawn, but the shadow’s role is to provide drama to a concept car, or a humble electric heater. Shadows do this by adding apparent depth and thus meaning to what is depicted, accessing our most basic and primitive perceptual mechanisms originally used to read and interpret the landscape where we lived, realised in what may have been part of the culture of those who made Cave Art. “Without a shadow of a doubt” is a familiar turn of phrase but we have developed beyond its more urgent earlier usage by our primitive selves.

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Another example of opposing meaning is that shadows cannot be touched so they are not real, and yet they heighten the drama of three-dimensional reality, especially when the casting object cannot be seen, evidence of things elsewhere. The widespread myth, (said to originate with Pliny the Elder), that the origin of art was a maiden tracing the shadow of her departing lover on a wall reinforces the concept that the shadow is less than the real thing. Without the image, the shadow would depart with the young man, (unless he was already one of those unearthly beings who cast no shadow themselves.) Stoichita (1997) describes a Soviet Realist painting of a statue of Stalin being caressed by a sinuous nymph, his head casting a similar shadow, but the narrative intention is very different. The world-wide tradition of shadow puppet plays is further evidence of the power of shadows to provide mystery, to animate ideas and transport the imagination.

Figure 49. Sun-dried cod, Lofoten Islands, Demons from the deep, 2009.

Precise personal silhouettes also became fashionable in the eighteenth century, the particularity of the profiles of the shadows leading to the study of physiognomy or reading the character from the features thus revealed. This technique required a hard and close-up light source so that the shadow profile would be sharp (Gombrich 1995). The medium can however use a range of subtleties, from sharp to diffuse, by manipulating the relative placements of the light, the object and the surface the image is projected

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onto. Sfumato is the term used in painting to depict the soft edges of shadow, Leonardo’s use of this technique being considered particularly fine, as he draws attention to the subtle transitions between what is seen and what is obscured. Our innate ability to know the position of the sun by reading shadows is often exploited in landscape painting and literature, to introduce associated feelings about what the times of the day may mean to us. Cast shadows change their forms as they move away from their sources, and as they accommodate themselves to the shapes of the surfaces they lie on. They have acquired new life since early photography’s predominant use of black and white imagery. Demos (2008) remarks of Marcel Duchamp’s photographs of his readymades: “what goes unnoticed is the readymade’s transformative power…for (him) the readymade designation would also extend “new thought” to a stultified object….Cast Shadows projects this conceptual dislocation into visual terms, showing readymades as luminous ghosts caught in a snapshot during their process of becoming something else.” Sometimes we use shadow to try and identify the form that is casting it – we use our skills of perception in an active attempt at interpretation; we use skills of analysis, testing of ideas, speculation, we change our ideas. Paradoxically, it seems that nowadays we do not notice the ever-present shadows as we survey our environment, the laws of constancy apparently making this a redundant skill in familiar surroundings (Baxandall 1995:127). Somehow this further reinforces the idea that they have a dramatising life of their own, and for me are places where new things can happen. In all these instances it is clear that interpretation is involved that goes beyond how shadows are used as part of the basic perceptual process of identification. Shadow offers an opportunity for redefinition, where boundaries become indistinct and things that were certain are no longer so, where new ideas can happen. Shadows are not always the sinister alternative to illuminated definiteness; going into a shadow to escape identification can provide a safe space to experience change and growth as crabs and lobsters know.

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From the conversations (About engineering as principles and design as practicalities, and the difficulties of doing specific design projects, about exploring boundaries of what real work is while learning ): SS….In Greece I was an engineer in a not ‘dirty hands’ way. PBD: More analytical? Yes the opposite of designing with nuts and bolts. When you want to know something about an area you have to learn the basics…I did nothing in my entire years of engineering training but learning basics….By not having to learn particular things about anything, but being able to generalise all the time, you become more clever, but it’s not in any way grounded – you don’t really know what you know. …… So when you arrived here, was it noticeable that the structure of knowledge was different, it was coming from the practical world, individual cases rather than general statements? That was very noticeable in the beginning…I had huge problems with this…almost none of my projects were thought to be something complete within the timescale. …I always find it tempting to go on with pursuing a route that might reveal something rather than finishing and forgetting about it. Finishing it and saying it’s good enough. Yes, it’s good enough, which is very critical in design, and at some point I had to treat this as a disadvantage of mine…. …..So again it was perhaps looking for absolute answers in what was a relative field? I think that it was a big early struggle in the first year. Trying to figure out these absolutes, the new system of absolute values that can guide you. Yes I suppose that’s what one does, if in the new field you still use the old system, you bring what you know, what you feel comfortable with, you bring that into the new situation and try and make it fit. I think that’s something one tends to do…. (About science education and problems with open thinking): MG:…I said I’d found it difficult when I was set a task or I had to develop a brief, I found it difficult to then plunge into trying to explore that without having a set solution in my mind already. PBD: So does that come from personal experience in your previous life? It’s hard because I’ve always done things and been taught to do things – that’s how things work really if you do a science degree or you do science for A level, especially because you’re always trying to prove theories so you’ve already got something in your mind’s eye that you’re trying to get the data for that adds up to the final point. So when did you get hit by the new way of doing it?

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At the beginning when we were working (on a drawing project) at the V&A …and abstracting ideas…and it felt really alien… What was the hardest part about it? I felt I had no direction. I didn’t know where I was going and was going into the unknown and it’s a bit unsettling when you’re used to having something to aim towards. (About reflection, trying to soften the edges of habits): NG: I didn’t really sit down and think right now is the time for reflection, I guess after projects I did it naturally without thinking OK now is the time for looking back, and I think in each of those times that I have done that I have moved on. PBD: So say you compared two projects…ways in which you did them differently, or ways in which you did bits of them differently? I was quite aware at one point of actually making the same mistake over and over again. Because I felt that although the feedback we got was good, I think it came too late, and although I could see that there were some bits that I didn’t work very well at, I did feel that I did exactly the same thing in the next project.

PERSPECTIVE

“Perspective is fascinating for many reasons: it is unencompassably complicated as a metaphor, it is ghettoized as a technique; it lives in a limbo between disciplines, using many discourses and not belonging to any one.” —Elkins (1994:269)

“Perspective” is one of those metaphors in such common use as a way to describe how we construct ideas that we hardly pause to consider where it comes from – a family of projection systems used to represent objects, people and environments. While seemingly grounded in the point of view of the drawer, the geometric and metaphorical meanings perform an elaborate dance around each other for those considering visual thinking as a way to expand the mind. The idea of reflection is present in both the literal and the metaphorical setting. Perspective is the geometrically regulated version of the imagery we perceive from light reflected off objects in our surroundings. Vision is joined by the other senses and our minds to process experience, which we reflect about using different perspectives, some explicit, some tacit. Childhood studies show that even though vision is accepted as the dominant sense (at least in modern societies), an accurate version of what is seen has to be learned. We continue to identify things through our eyes as objects through naming them, this information taking precedence over the perceptual stimulus. This explains why people or dangerous animals in the distance are not smaller than ones close up, and in the latter case the intelligent calculation of the convergence of the eyes can translate into effective decision-making. The Ames1 illusion of an extremely distorted room appearing to make people seem smaller, because rooms are not normally distorted, breaks down when someone well known to the viewer is in the room; the room then relinquishes its perceptual hold, revealing the 1

Adelbert Ames, 1934

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strength of deeper tacit personal knowledge. Size and shape constancy are part of how we make sense of our surroundings, but can interfere with drawing what is seen rather than known, and so systems of projection are used where the intention is to produce images relatively easy to comprehend in an uncomplicated way. Because it is commonly thought that we ‘see’ in perspective, confusion can arise when one starts drawing as an adult. Retreating horizontals above one’s eyes seem to go upwards, but in perspective drawing they go down. Following the Middle Ages, perspective became the dominant system of projection used in the West until the arrival of Modernism. It was developed as a mathematical and geometrical art during the Renaissance, and afterwards spread into widespread use. It differs from how we actually see for several reasons. We use two eyes set at slightly different positions to have stereoscopic convergent vision, rather than one ‘cyclopean’ viewpoint, and we constantly move our eyes to refresh the chemistry in the retina, and to perceive the three-dimensional nature of what we are looking at. Without realising it our focal vision for sharp focus means that peripheral objects are not perceived with the same comprehension. We achieve that by turning our heads. Perspective drawing can include things in wide angle in equally sharp focus, as well as placing very large objects such as buildings in the same view as people, whereas such scenes in real life require us to swivel our heads. Objects can be placed accurately relative to each other. When distortions are introduced the effects can be dramatic. A good drawing exercise is to draw objects from different points of view – the humble electrical plug can become the power station of nightmares by the flick of a viewer’s position and the vanishing points. Latour (1987) proposes that Brunelleschi’s (circa 1425) accurate perspective drawing of the Florence Baptistery meant that the image, as ‘an immutable mobile’, could be used to reproduce the building elsewhere, or anyway its exterior. This starting point was elaborated in complex ways by subsequent artists, and perspective was seen as revolutionary in the context of

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developing ideas of Humanism. But such a view is not always how we see or know. There are other ways to use drawing to communicate ideas.2 The convention of the face-on plan, elevation and section of the working engineer derives from the practice of producing such drawings along with accurate scale models for the British Navy Board in the eighteenth century, to reflect the required exactitudes not only of building but also of costing, repair and modification. (Baynes and Pugh 1981:32). In and after the industrial revolution explanatory kinds of drawings, or templates used in workshops with personal communication, were no longer enough to reflect the kind of precision needed to communicate unambiguously with distant toolmakers, equipment, constructors, and financiers, and today CAM3 equipment. Standardisation of drawing conventions became essential. (Even so designers will want to supplement such communication with face-to-face meetings and shared sketching even on the other side of the world. Mark Sanders: personal communication). CAD processes4 have greatly facilitated the ‘portability’ of drawings, leading to the ease and reliability with which components for products can be manufactured all over the globe for later assembly in one place. IDE students versed in engineering drawing could find perspective drawing puzzling for several reasons. It does not immediately conform to how we see and experience the world, what Willats (1997) describes as the difference between object or viewer-centred systems. It also means moving from a knowing to more of a seeing centre of experience. Nonetheless basic perspective is the system that is conventionally expected for drawing objects in the product design development process. They are not often drawn in their context of use or place, unless that part of their story is very significant. This is perhaps a faint echo of the Renaissance position, as described by Elkins (1994), which was to regard space as a philosophical idea, while picturemaking was object-centred.

2 As for example minutely observed by George Sturt in his father’s cart-making workshop, described in “The Wheelwright’s Shop” 1963. 3 Computer Aided Manufacture 4 Computer Aided Design/Drawing

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All drawing systems are part of what they depict, as conceptual knowledge is bound into language. Rawson (1979) and Dubery and Willats (1972) describe how Chinese and Japanese systems of projection reflect Taoist beliefs about eternal processes of movement and change, where things are not locked into relative size by distance from one static viewpoint. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century Marwar painting of northern India many events in a narrative may be depicted as going on simultaneously, and from different viewpoints, ignoring the dominance of sequential time experienced by the viewer. In one, Valmiki the writer of the Ramayana, sits in a wood telling its story to twin boys who are themselves part of the story he is creating. In another part of the painting, still inside the story, Valmiki and the boys are reunited with their parents Rama and Lakshmi before Rama knows he is their father (British Museum 2007). Borges (1966:47) describes these events while discussing stories that find themselves inside their own structures (Partial Enchantments of the Quixote). Design students and designers can find themselves in this position too, and need the exercise of other perspectives to keep an open mind. Perspective can perceptually enter our lived experience in many ways. Gazing out of a window to the scene beyond we follow the pragmatic rather than geometrical perspective process of using a gridded ‘window pane’ as seen in fifteenth century manuals. This enables the painted surface to be a window into another world. In the Renaissance, inlaid wood (intarsia) panelling became a virtuosic technique to exploit this idea. Perspective had become a cultural commodity, seamlessly marrying geometry with the arts of living. Brotton (2002:152) writes of Federico da Montefeltro’s studiolo in his palace at Urbino: “The deceptive illusionism of the studiolo plays games with perspective and foreshortening, revealing ‘open’ cupboards full of books, scientific and musical instruments, political portraits, armorial devices, and panoramas of ideal cities of the type envisaged by Alberti. The message is clear. Federico’s mastery of the arts, architecture, science and military matters reinforces his political power and dynastic authority. His authority is given shape and form

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Figure 50. Fra Raffaello da Brescia, 1513-1537, Intarsia panel with various woods, Bologna, Italy, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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by the objects that vividly portray himself, his wealth, his learning and his power to shape and control his own environment.”

The quintessential exterior perspective view is the avenue, a word now associated with rows of trees but previously referring to the experience of being in a spatial activity of approaching a particular spot (a-venue). When there are multiple viewpoints or vanishing points in an image we are invited into a particular narrative about how to notice what is going on, so how we draw carries its own deliberate storying. In naming and moving in such an environment we introduce narrative accounts that use and explore points of view. The same thing takes place with different writing forms. The active and passive voices of language hint at other points of view. The epistolary novel uses writings from different characters in the story. There is no omniscient author, and the reader is drawn into what is implied by what is not seen by the protagonists trapped in their points of view. The ‘figure’ of the accounts summons up the ‘ground’ of the actual drama. This device may be a way to solve the problem of the inexpressibility of qualia – our subjective experience of the world, perhaps achieved in drawing by European cubist and Eastern masters. They were not bound by the paradox of perspective drawing which prioritises the unique stance of the viewer/drawer at the same time as trapping her there. Cain (2010:74) notes how the psychoanalyst Marion Milner in her book On not being able to Paint writes about ‘narrow focus’ and ‘wide focus’ to distinguish between connectedness and the lack of it in what Cain describes as ‘the enactive process’ of drawing. The potential rigidity of a point of view can be balanced by ideas of situated cognition – that mind, body and place form the basic unit of comprehension and action.5 The analogy is easily extended to scenarios of trying to design for people whose lives are not at all like our own.

5 Nothing could be more ‘situated’ in my view than Dürer’s woodcut explaining the perspective window as a drawing device, where the eager draughtsman appears to be looking through the gridded window straight up the skirts of the reclining woman ‘model’, one of whose hands is draped in very suggestive pose.

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Figure 51. Beech avenue, Tollard Royal, Wiltshire, 2014.

Once we have learned to see in central perspective its metaphorical meaning and potential becomes very obvious, but there is always the danger of overextending the metaphor. In images involving extremes of perspective such as ‘corridor spaces’, the eye is trapped and cannot rove about as it prefers to, and the virtues of the technique are lost. Elkins (1994:177) describes how “a sixteenth-century print of Christ Curing the Blind Man shows the man marvelling at a vista done in perspective. The engraver uses perspective to symbolize sight, but it is particularly energetic, intensified seeing, and it cannot last. Soon the newly sighted man will return to lazier, more normal seeing without the rush of orthogonals and rigid transversals, more like the scene of his curing which we witness to the right, or the blank landscape picture that takes the place of the vanishing point.”

The viewer/drawer looks out at the world from her eyes, from her point of view, her experience, her expectations. The perspective of immediate experience is joined by other dimensions such as time and significance,

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personal, social, and cultural, with the activeness of the processes of looking and seeing and understanding hopefully holding any excesses of perspective in check. However, in a different usage, we consider getting things into perspective as a way of organising priority, getting unruly experiences back into the orderly grid where things are in some kind of right place. When we take a different perspective we deliberately leave the imprisoning cone of our own interpretations and perceptions, and can know it for one of many versions or stories. This is about mind-sets, which can be dissolved through learning. “Professional competence is not achieved by simply applying clear, technical, and universally applicable solutions to practical problems but by being able to make evidence-based decisions that emerge from the consideration of multiple perspectives” (McAuliffe 2006:477).

From the conversations NH: I think exposure and experience is really important, developing a creative flair, and I like the idea when you have group work and you see the work of other people and you learn from them, and there’s been a couple of times this week when we’ve touched on things and you think – “that’s really good I would never have approached it that way, I’d never have looked at it that way, I completely ignored that and moved to a channel”, and that is a really big learning experience, because the next time you approach something similar you’d perhaps go back to that last scenario and think there is an alternative approach for this and you might not find it but you’d certainly explore all those avenues. PBD: One of the things that people sometimes say is that it’s confusing when you get different advice from different tutors. What do you think about that? ES: Well I don’t have a problem with that because I think if you got the same advice from all the tutors it would be worse, I think it’s nice that you get different opinions, I think, and you don’t have to, it’s not that you necessarily have to do everything the tutor says, but you have to take on board everything they say and assess it. I think if you talk to say four tutors and they say different things that’s great. So what do you mean you take it on board? What do you do with it? I listen to it and mull it over and think about it ‘yeah I agree with that, no that contradicts what they said, not sure about that’. It’s difficult, you can’t,

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it doesn’t necessarily give you answers, it just gives you, it makes you think about it more. (of previous university training on a multi-disciplinary engineering course) WR: I tried to get…was getting the broader picture, and my own passions, my own beliefs were coming through and I was questioning the course – ‘Why isn’t there anything about ethics on this course? Why don’t you contextualise this engineering I’m doing – why am I doing it? What is it for?’ I managed to encourage some people on the course to come along to these other lectures. I organised a trip to the microscopy unit. There were all these other facilities in the university which were there and we weren’t seeing what it was all about.

FRAME

“Learning occurs in one of four ways: by elaborating existing frames of reference, by learning new frames of reference, by transforming points of view, or by transforming habits of mind…We transform frames of reference – our own and those of others – by becoming critically aware of their assumptions and aware of their context – the source, nature, and consequences of taken-for-granted beliefs.” (Mezirow 2000:19, quoted in Hoare 2006:212). JM: “About learning physics: first you start thinking with the rules that are out there, only much later do you need to think about the rules out there.

Points of view, however diverse, imply frameworks. ‘Frame’ as noun and verb is a pervasive metaphor in how we live and think, with physical and psychological meanings and connotations, perhaps because they are associated with structure, and by implication order. Frame applies to the structure of our dwellings, and to objects and utensils where a frame or border is structurally important for holding work or a mechanism (knitting frames, embroidery frames). ‘Body frame’ is the term used when healthy weight and constitution are being discussed, and as we shape our actions and our thoughts, we frame them, and adopt and grow and share frames of reference, to create some structure and coherence. So strong can these structures of ideas be that when someone has been framed, the implication is that it will be hard to escape. Arnheim (1974:380) says that perception starts the story of the frame, as a framework. We spontaneously organise our visual field so that some objects are assigned the role of framework, usually immobile, on which other objects depend. The mosquito is attached to the elephant, not the elephant to the mosquito. Bruner (1990:56) discusses framing as schematising: “Framing provides a means of ‘constructing’ a world, of characterising its flow, of segmenting

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events within that world, and so on. If we were not able to do such framing, we would be lost in a murk of chaotic experience and probably would not have survived as a species in any case.” He continues with the proposal that framing experience takes a narrative form, and so is part of the culture one inhabits. What doesn’t get structured narratively suffers loss in memory. Furthermore framing is a social process, designed for the sharing of memory in a culture rather than to ensure individual storage. Arnheim (1974:239) traces the development of the frame from the Renaissance “emancipation of pictorial space from the wall”, when “a clear visual distinction became necessary between the physical space of the room and the world of the picture.” The frame became the figure to the endless ground of the picture outside what was thought of as a window, which at the same time provides some kind of physical and metaphysical closure. Central perspective paintings, of for example avenues and roads, in their rectangular frames, have a mesmerising effect, drawing the viewer into their single pointed depth. By the nineteenth century this idea had extended to paintings (for example Degas) where the frame could cut across bodies and objects, emphasising its arbitrary character. As painting became more concerned with surface, the figure moved to the canvas and frames retreated and diminished, and became part of the ground surrounding the painted surface. In the same way one could become aware that frames of reference have not been created, but adopted by oneself, and a distance can be introduced from the boundaries of such framings as new ones are sought, perhaps in new configurations that continue to be used as a metaphor for thinking rather than just a way to bound a vision. Rawson (1979:15), discussing frames in painting, talks about the pervasive convention of the rectangle in Western art, and how liberating it would be to draw on a wall or a tree, or in a cave. Fisher (2009:2) describes meeting the painter Josef Albers, who started wondering why frames had to be on all four sides of a painting. Why not opposite sides, or one side, or even a corner? “Frames signal the beginning of context, but perhaps this can be done without creating a barrier. Simple awareness of a relationship is all it takes to distinguish context in a radically different way.” Painters may use a frame in front of the eyes, made with the hands with thumbs outstretched, in

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order to train the eyes to see the picture plane. This can be used as a way to see the wood for the trees, to perceive the gestalt of a portion of the whole visual field. It can also be used as a way to override the dominant effect of experience over sight in some situations, for example when looking down a stairwell it is almost impossible to perceive the horizontal elements as going ‘up’ on the picture plane rather than downwards. Collette (2010), as she traces the relationship between drawing and tapestry weaving, notes how Renaissance tapestries (such as those made to the Raphael cartoons), in order to compete with the rise of painted pictures freed from walls, started to include the depiction of frames, often very elaborate, in the tapestries themselves. These could not only considerably enlarge the area of the tapestries, but also the ‘frames’ were presumably to be seen as signs that tapestries were of the same status as paintings. They become part of the content. This recalls the perceptual fact of the contour following the figure in figure and ground images. If the contour is also seen as a frame, then one can start to notice the animating effect of the frame, that it is not a neutral boundary but lends itself to the image, as frames of reference become self-justifying to the ideas enclosed by them. Alexander (1977) in his book A Pattern Language, says that windows are essential to well-being in a building, whether house, office or classroom, because people need to be able to see outside, and see beyond themselves, to the borderless ground within and beyond the frame. The window, of whatever form, provides just such an opportunity. Clark, in his close analysis of Poussin’s painting ‘Landscape with a Man killed by a Snake’ (discussed in Visual and Conceptual Thinking) notes that there are many viewpoints within the picture that could be used to read it, understand it. The effect of this is to place the viewer at a distance, outside the picture, far enough way to see it “as a finite rectangle, but all the same set down in a space that seems to us as being provided by the scene we are looking at – conjured up by it, implied (ideally) by it.” (2006:134) So we can be inside the frame of reference, and at the same time be aware of its effects as we become semi-detached. He notes that the effect works even when one

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Figure 52. Susanna and the Elders, tapestry, wool and silk with embroidery, Tournai, Belgium, circa 1500. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

is not in front of the picture, just as we may hold frames of reference for different areas of interest in our lives, this being another description of perceptual readiness.

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A (2007) installation by the artist Andy Goldsworthy, Dung River, explored this idea inside a large pavilion at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. One wall was glazed from floor to ceiling. All the glass had been rendered lightly opaque, except for a wide snaking line moving across it horizontally. This revealed different parts of the landscape coming into view as one moved backwards and forwards and along it, an entirely new set of connectivities being revealed at each step. Rather as the surface is a gateway or window to another world in ancient cave drawing and painting, and sacred illuminated texts, the proscenium arch in the theatre provides another kind of frame beyond which disbelief must be suspended and stories become a kind of truth.1 The mind is freed from its habitual patterns, and new ideas can be entertained. An example central to design both because of its process and its content is the scene in the film ‘The Dam Busters’2 where the RAF pilot Guy Gibson is at a Music Hall entertainment to escape from the problem of how to fix the right height for his plane to drop the bouncing bomb on the lake in front of the dam. Watching the dancers lit by the spotlights that follow them around the stage he suddenly sees a solution he would not have otherwise thought of: the angle of incidence of two lights determines the height above the surface. I saw a metaphoric example of the dissolution of the frame and what it stands for in a seventeenth century self-portrait of a painter. It is an octagonal picture in an elaborately carved and gilded rectangular frame. He looks out at us over his left shoulder, momentarily diverted from his palette and canvas, brush in mid-air. He is in a curiously formed room, a play on perspective ideas. In the safety of his studio, he is painting a stormy landscape, which because it takes up most of the wall, might instead be a window. A retreating wall to his right is simultaneously behind him while its top nestles up against the octagonal edge of the image such that it is also on the picture plane. The painter himself floats outside and inside the picture, as he knows his work does too. 1 This device is frequently found in paintings of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, where the Virgin and the Angel are placed in adjoining ‘frames’ of a colonnade, so they are not only separated from us, and also from each other, as belonging to different worlds. 2 The Dam Busters, 1955, UK, director Michael Anderson, Richard Todd as Guy Gibson.

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Figure 53. Anonymous Self Portrait, Flammand or Hollandais, Italy 1620 – 1630, Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille, France.

In front of him screwed up paper sketches also tell a story of the ephemerality of images. Henry James describes the paradox from the point of view of a writer: “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so. He is in the perpetual predicament

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that the continuity of things is the whole matter, for him, of comedy or tragedy; that this continuity is never, by the space of an instant or an inch, broken, or that, to do anything at all, he has at once intensely to consult and intensely to ignore it.”3

Frames and boundaries are significant structural elements in design and research practice. They help to produce coherence in the writing and management of design and research briefs, but these framings need to be conscious decisions, and the shapes of the frames may become anything but rectangular. At the very least choices can be made between breadth and depth. Framing is an essential aspect of the design craft of brief writing. Schon (1987:4, 218) describes how: “the problems of real-world practice do not present themselves as wellformed structures…through complementary acts of naming and framing, the practitioner selects things for attention, and organizes them…so problem setting is an ontological process – in Nelson Goodman’s (1978) memorable word, a form of worldmaking.”

‘Frame conflict’ occurs where players in a situation have different ways of framing it, or use different aspects of a generative metaphor. Working on the project itself, representatives of different professions (for example medical practitioners, architects or designers, and engineers) “tend to pay attention to different sets of facts, see ‘the same facts’ in different ways” using different criteria. “If they wish to come to agreement, they must try to get inside each other’s points of view…their ability to come to substantive agreement will depend on their capacity for frame reflection.” (his emphasis). Schon (1987:219) describes how in the teaching situation “student and coach are initially in a situation of frame conflict, (where) meanings held by coach and student tend to be incongruent.” (This is the Meno paradox described earlier in Learning and Epistemic Development in Designing.) However “the frame conflict of student and coach differs from other kinds, in that these two parties come together with the manifest intention of resolving their

3

Preface, Roderick Hudson, 1879

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conflict…so their dialogue can be seen as frame reflection - unidirectional, at least, and reciprocal when coach and student try to make it so. All these examples point to the idea that however framing is configured, it plays an essential part in how we may understand ideas, and that at one and the same time it may be necessary for comprehension, but sometimes limiting for exploration. Framing seems to work at different depths. I have used examples from visual culture to point to different ways that framing is embedded in our ways of thinking. However it is important that the worst effects of a generative metaphor process do not lead to imagining that the kinds of unsolvable problems Schon described as ‘frame conflict’ in social policy making are considered on a par with how to put a boundary between reality and a depiction of it in a visual image. The removal of frames makes way for the dynamics of space.

From the conversations (Relaxing the boundaries around subjects): PBD: What’s the relationship of the integrity of your engineering training in all this, what’s happening to that? MG: It’s sort of took a back seat for a few months because I had the opportunity to do something else. I was really immersed in learning a new side. But now you move on, and on to other projects and it’s surfacing again now, coming back to... now that you have to think in an engineering way as well. And do you still have the same idea of what that world’s like relative to this other world? It’s odd, it’s almost like standing outside of that engineering world and looking in on it but having a bit of knowledge of what it’s like inside. There are points when you can almost feel it slipping away but you need to pull it back sometimes. Yes; what is that that’s slipping away? It’s the sort of the perfection of it all, the rightness of it really, the accuracy, some of the knowledge that goes with it as well, you almost feel like the knowledge, although what you’re losing is not so much important for perhaps what we’re going to be doing as a designer, it’s not going to influence me so much…how a factory operates on a factory floor level… what’s is important is the overall process. (Using drawing to open up ideas and concepts):

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PBD: the object changes at different phases of its use, doesn’t it? KP: Yes. It’s not something that I use to actually explore what the object might look or feel like. It’s more trying to capture its context and how and where it would be used. Are you stopping short? It’s already looking rather nice, but that’s not an object is it, it’s an idea, really. Yes, but I’m not using this to explore the object, I’m just using this to, I suppose, present the idea that a particular kind of object might be used and that kind of goes into phases where there is, I suppose a bit more expression into what the object might be. But I’ve tried to find the usage of it first, and then… so I see it almost as an evolution, tried to kind of define it in some more global systematic sense and then tried to define the object on a more microscopic level. This is quite different to the way you were drawing this time last year. I think it tends to vary, I do find myself trying to, at certain times, push for more ambiguity. I can see that what’s happening here is some kind of plant pot, that then developed into a rain drop and that reminded me of a shark fin for some reason and then the flow went that way, so this fed this, but there are points where I do feel that the drawing helps to evolve the form of it, but it does often tend to be a bit of a struggle. What sort of a struggle is it? It’s me realising that I can achieve this through drawing and so it’s being caught in this habit of trying to present what I’ve thought of and stopping there, rather than continuing. That’s an interesting point. It’s… I’d be on the bus sometimes and I’ll think of an idea and I’ll jot it down in a little sketchbook and then I’ll get home and draw it and perhaps leave it and it will remain that way. Sometimes, this is probably like an afternoon of thinking and not really thinking in certain stages, so it varies on my mood. So, one of the things that may stop you from carrying on with this, I think you said, was that it’s easy just to be working towards something that you present. Yes. Rather than delving further into it….

SPACE

I chose to include space as one of the concepts that are acknowledged in drawing, and are useful for forming concepts about how we understand and learn. I needed to move beyond the activities of framing, even when frames were dissolved, or reflected on, which would imply some detachment from them. In other words, there are ways of conducting oneself that are outside and beyond our mental framing activities. Bruner (1986:109) hints at this when he says: “We know the world in different ways, from different stances, and each of the ways in which we know it produces different structures or representations, or, indeed ‘realities’.” I associated space with those stages or areas of developmental models, which, aiming to describe the maturing of thought and behaviour, often indicate ‘final’ or ‘advanced’ stages that are largely unattainable in daily living, however much they may be goals of some people’s learning. These stages or positions refer on the one hand to depth and integration of cognitive and emotional skills, and on the other to an increasing use of those skills beyond oneself, for the common good. Space and how we experience it is written about in many disciplines, including psychology, architecture, art, psychogeography, phenomenology, mathematics, physics, and yet by its nature is hard to grasp. I have used ‘outside and beyond’ above to refer to changes in thinking but these are spatial metaphors, recalling space’s relationship to place, as the ground to place’s figure and all the objects and thus events that make up place. Latour (2008:8) draws attention to problems for design prompted by using the preposition ‘in’. He introduces the concept of ‘envelopes’: “We are enveloped, entangled, surrounded; we are never outside without having created another more artificial, more fragile, more engineered envelope.” People cannot help but experience space mediated by the products of design: environments, places of interaction, systems, tools, clothing.

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Although space’s metaphysical features do not have the immediate and measurable qualities accessible to and appreciated by the senses of the other terms I have used in this series (Line, Shadow, Perspective, Frame), its metaphorical links to our experience of time brings it into the picture in the following way. Sadock in Ortony (1993:45) describes “the widespread occurrence of spatial metaphors for temporal relations” with the use of prepositions such as within (the hour), toward (the end of the month) etc., and Lakoff in the same volume (1993:218) notes “We’re getting close to Christmas”; “there’ll be trouble down the road”, and others. In modern societies these metaphors may perhaps be dead, however pervasive. Abram’s (1996) discussion of the relationships between space and time as experienced by oral, indigenous peoples, reminds where these relationships came from. With such people: “space is no longer experienced as a homogeneous void, but reveals itself as this vast and richly textured field in which we are corporeally immersed, this vibrant expanse structured by both a ground and a horizon. It is precisely the ground and the horizon that transform abstract space into space-time…As long as we structure our lives according to assumed parameters of a static space and a rectilinear time we will be able to ignore, or overlook our thorough dependence upon the earth around us.” (in Malnar and Vodvarka 2004:216)

This holistic image is entirely relevant to design’s evident responsibility for the effects of its interventions, both social and ecological. It provides a ground on which to sense the role of space as metaphysical metaphor for experience. Massey (2005:61) proposes that “if time unfolds as change then space unfolds as interaction. In that sense space is the social dimension…It is the sphere of the continuous production and reconfiguration of heterogeneity in all its forms.” Here is a necessary hint to design to get out from under the impress of the dead hand of branding. She warns (2005:83) of the dangers of globalisation, and particularly capitalist globalisation, being seen as synonymous with interconnectedness. Technologies of moving information and people around the globe (the products of design) have transformed the meaning of space as experienced, at least by those who can benefit from these inventions. The discrepancies involved further emphasise

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the political dimensions of design, expanding its remit for quality of life into relational and locational politics. Some painters have understood this idea of experience and space. Looking at space in painting Gombrich (1960:202) notes that traditionally it has not been that which has been represented, but rather, familiar things in situations, recalling the Renaissance understanding of space as a philosophical rather than a painterly concept. When space is seen, not as ground but as part of what is being represented, it acquires extension and becomes part of the painting’s subject, with its own identity, to be explored and understood. Recalling for me the Dürer wood engraving illustrating the mechanics of perspective, described earlier, Berger (2005:123) asks: “Where are we, during the act of drawing, in spirit? Where are you at such moments – moments which add up to so many one might think of them as another life-time? Each tradition offers a different answer to this query. For instance, the European tradition, since the Renaissance, places the model over there, the draughtsman here, and the paper somewhere in between, within arm’s reach of the draughtsman, who observes the model and notes down what he has observed on the paper in front of him.”

Alexander (1979:88), in his book The Timeless Way of Building, further breaks down this distinction between figure and ground when he says that we are involved as inhabitants of three and four-dimensional space in patterns of relationships that are the events and elements that go to make up place and places. This fine concept links the intentional fusion of experience and context, of our implication in the ‘events and elements’ involved. Such implication can be registered as consciousness development and perspective transformation, the beginning of wisdom, and what Perry (1981:96) saw as the necessary dialectical struggle between being wholehearted and yet tentative in commitments based on mature personal and social values. Arnheim is always able to make the link between how we experience the world, and how we act on it and make it. In discussing architecture he says: “The words ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ reflect a dichotomy in direct experience. Inside and outside cannot be seen at the same time” (1996:45). A parallel observation about thinking comes from Taylor (2006) in her discussion of

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transformation of consciousness and self-directed learning. She refers to Kegan’s (1982:203, 216) assertion that we cannot “reflect on or observe (question, challenge, describe, examine, perceive, explore, recognize) our worldview, because it is our worldview. Only when we have begun to grow beyond its limitation…can we begin to see those limitations.” Kegan’s fifth order of consciousness is the self-authorizing and self-transforming mind, which “recognizes the limitations of ideology – even its own ideologies” (1982:216). A powerful link between the ideas of Alexander and Kegan is provided by the allegory Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by A. Square (the mathematician and theologian Edwin A Abbott, written in 1884). A visitor, a Sphere, comes to the two-dimensional world of Flatland, and tries to persuade the narrator, A. Square, that there are other dimensions to life. Despite being a clever mathematician, A. Square cannot conceptualise the three-dimensional world, because he can only use the frames of reference he and everyone else lives by in his very rule-bound society, where nothing has depth. A brief visit to the other world shows him what is possible, but no one believes him on his return. The allegory demonstrates how limited our thinking may normally be, and how difficult it is to move to another level which encompasses and moves beyond what was previously known, as well as how it was known. It was suggested reading for the long break between the first and second years of the IDE course.

From the conversations ES (after graduation) I like to think I’ve sort of seen the bigger picture in a very real sense, so if there’s been part of projects where I’ve not really enjoyed them well eventually you start to think well it’s important because of everything else, so it’s all been a very holistic… … It’s nice on the course that we have the opportunity to get out of the studio and go places like Wales and New York and stuff which is great – it’s just really, really important and the trips to see factories and stuff, and there’s always the chance at the beginning of a project to take a bit of time and go and look at things and stuff, all the galleries – there’s all this mass of material. And I always find it quite disappointing when you see some of the fine art stuff that’s been done completely within the confines of the College – like someone’s made an installation in the lift or something, why do it in this lift?

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Why not do it in another lift? It’s quite, it’s very sort of insular. I think it’s just important to get out - whatever they are. PBD: Well that’s interesting because that brings us back to the thing that we were talking about in the beginning - here we’re talking about it’s really good to get out and look at things, and at the beginning we were talking about how it’s not so easy to get out and talk to people. Are these two things related in any way? Yeah I think so, because on the one hand you’re looking at things you wouldn’t normally look at and trying to do something with that and the other thing is talking to people you wouldn’t normally talk to and trying to do something with that and it’s all just about trying to broaden you on life in general. So what’s going to happen next with this broadening, big expanding universe? Well there’s plenty of stuff still to see, but it’s now a lot easier. How are you going to incorporate it? I don’t know. I mean one of things you realise is that all this talking to people and going out and looking at things is all part of the design process, all so important; it’s your weakest link scenario again: if you don’t go talk to people, if you don’t look at things the product will be a weaker product because of it. Well what’s it like trying to – I mean given that you know you can’t find out everything – either from things or from people - what’s that like? Well I mean I don’t think I’ll ever assume that I can find out everything, it will still eventually come down to your brain power and on how you resolve issues. I mean you can’t find all the information, but you can certainly kind of put a bit of meat on the bones of your project by doing it. And it will always, it will always come down to some assumption or stuff, some personal thought “I think this is better because” I mean that’s part of your role as a designer to have that thought. So in a way one of the things that we can see is there’s been quite a shift in the year from working in technical areas where those kind of processes weren’t valid. Definitely. NH: I think in terms of the way we came on the course and we all had a similar background, I felt the most interesting thing was the way we all went off and found our direction, especially at the beginning of the second year and we were all selecting projects for our own reasons, and mine was not to end up with a piece of work that I could take to companies and they would say this is an amazing concept - that didn’t come into it for me at all, it was about developing me as a person and as a designer, and having the opportunity to go on from that. I may not want to pursue it but I’d done that and it was almost a platform - to go on from that, and the thing I found

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interesting was the way that people on the course found their direction some people didn’t have a very clear direction, but a lot of people did. PBD: It’s a very personal agenda isn’t it? Interestingly enough, I mean I think it’s very good, it’s sort of silent. You’re not saying at the degree show I’ve done this work because of the way I wanted to spend my second year, you don’t say that at the show, the work stands for itself. (Of final year graduation projects): PBD: Some people one can see on the course have a lot of difficulty getting into projects because they don’t really feel comfortable setting off down the path unless they know what’s at the other end of it. My impression has been that that’s not a way that you look at things. TS: No, I quite enjoy not knowing. Has that always been the case? No it hasn’t I don’t think it’s always…I’m always just going out there and going for explorations; but sometimes I have had sort of a clear idea but I quite enjoy starting out somewhere and then turning around and saying how did I get here? That’s quite amazing. I think that’s important as well because the whole process is used rather than it being a pure modelmaking exercise or a pure engineering exercise where you’ve kind of already guestimated where you’re going to be and you damn well make sure you actually do get there. By working backwards? By working backwards; and I don’t feel as though I did that in either project. DY: It’s about perceiving and actually looking… …I look at everything so differently now…it was actually looking, rather than thinking of everything product oriented, it’s actually looking at how people live, how people work, how people think, how people interact with other people… PBD: And those are kind of ‘soft’ subjects aren’t they? I’d say that’s still something… that they’re the most …they’re to a designer probably one of the most important things. TF: It’s quite disconcerting because you realise – not that the way you see things is wrong but the fact that there isn’t any sort of core truth to the problem you’re identifying and probably the best thing you can do is just to ask and do proper, a proper amount of research around it, see how many different people see the problem, but you can’t just have one person looking at a problem and say right this is how it should be done, but at the same time you’re never going to get right to the core of the matter because if you interview a infinite number of people for a design project you’re not going to get there.

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ER: I think if you’re not personally confident you’ve got this inner thing to deal with before you can get beyond that into your subject. If you’re relaxed about your own state of mind when you go into any kind of interaction or presentation or whatever, you can totally focus on what it is – your goal and actually start to enjoy it. PBD: If the product matters to you, so it in a sense its almost like, it is in some way an extension of yourself….Is it qualitative time that you need doing something before you have this sense of ownership? I think so, when you manage your own time and work on your project at your own rate that you feel comfortable with and you grow as the project grows…maybe that sense of ‘mine’ takes time to grow… … (of the visual studies workshop at the start of the course) I think if I’d had a bit of time to play around in it, make more mistakes, and not feel I had to produce something good and completed at the end…and there’s a sense at the end of the day of ‘God I’ve got to complete this blasted orange.’

Figure 54. Situated Self.

CONCLUSIONS

“We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about ‘and’. —Sir Arthur Eddington, Astrophysicist, 1882 – 1944 I set out to explore, now it seems rather baldly, the relationships between drawing and epistemic development in design education. Visual thinking links these two subjects, and I used it to explore the metaphor of bridging, of bridges, which revealed what seemed to be the nature of the epistemic challenges engaging the students, and then myself, in the study. It also revealed the significance of engagement, of connection, and these became the concepts that tied together learning, epistemic development, designing and drawing. The metaphorical leap that enabled the connections to be made then also fed back into the research process itself. Freehand drawing and visual thinking are relevant to designing beyond their conventional role in generating and developing design concepts. Visual thinking transcends the identification of features of the world around us. It proposes narratives, if we notice. Interpreting features of the visual world leads us to comparisons, categories and connections, and these are the foundations for metaphorical thinking, leading to new understanding of relationships and connections. Skill in drawing, in a symbiosis with sharpened observation, builds this process of developing the imagination. It is a form of embodied cognition that connects us to the spaces we inhabit, and the people we share them with. Thus it can become a powerful source of ideas that inform our understanding of the world around us, much as the taken-for-granted word-smithing necessary for the exploration and articulation of verbal concepts. In the context of design this process of heightened noticing can then also suggest new ways to intervene in it as more radical problem solvers and creators.

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I see design as a highly political activity, as it engineers and constructs our environments and provisions for living. Access to the tools and products to enable us all to lead better quality lives is determined by design, which always functions within particular economic frameworks. A cycle that turns out to be irresponsible can, however, be broken by awareness and empathy in designers, who can then pursue initiatives with goals that are better for the world. Activities that support the development of such awareness and empathy, the conative dimension of learning, are fundamentally necessary. What the imagination becomes aware of then needs to be linked to bringing ideas to reality. Freire, the radical educationist, actually uses the metaphor of ‘blue-printing’, in his vision for new kinds of learning: “The imagination that takes us to possible and impossible dreams is always necessary. It is necessary to stimulate the learners’ imagination, to use it in ‘blue-printing’ the school they dream of.” (Dubins and Prins 2011:25) As he uses it, this metaphor evokes the idea of going beyond a fantasy, turning a thought into a plan for action, and returns my argument to the drawing board from where, metaphorically, anything can be achieved. Because drawing is so easily expressive through the ways that lines and other media are used, drawing and its products can be used as a pool or a magic mirror in which the unfamiliar can be found, when one lets go of conventional or immediate perceptions. However Latour (2008:13) poses this as problem: “What history shows is that we are a long way from being able to provide for things, that is for matters of concern, a visual, publically inspectable space that is as remotely rich, at least as easy to handle, and as codified as what has been done over four centuries for objects conceived as matters of fact….Where are the visualization tools that allow the contradictory and controversial matters of concern to be represented?”

Unfortunately the time and attention needed for gaining the benefits of freehand drawing – the peace, quiet and attention in the present moment, the genuine openness of noticing and intuition, is often at some odds with the pressure of closure on some new product concept – whether driven by the

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market, by a college timetable, or an urgent human need. Unless the dominant culture favours such work it is hard for it to flourish. Challenges to engagement with visual thinking ironically also come from the visual world. As discussed in Visual and Conceptual Thinking, the pervasiveness, transformability and transience of visual imagery do not necessarily act as gateways into the depths and riches of visual culture. In fact they are more likely to obscure such connections. In so doing the slow craft of observation and drawing can get lost, as several students noted. Narrative Inquiry enabled me, as the researcher, to move on my journey over a bridge from thinking of the enquiry as being about concepts and ideas described as learning, to realising these were the experiences of particular people in their lived lives, an integral part of their life stories. I moved to the idea of learning being consciously and purposefully involved in engagement with the world in the sharpness of the present moment, where all choices are potentially available, in a field of contrasting concepts, attitudes, strategies, approaches, desires, habits and bewilderment, resistance, boredom and delight. The interview transcripts were visited several times over. As Riessman (2008) found, different things were noticed at each reading, confirming the involvement of the researcher’s own perspectives. Different things that the students said became more visible or heard. The most recent close readings made me aware for the first time how much issues of confidence and reassurance were referred to by students as they developed design ideas; noticing and resonating with this maybe reflected my own frame of mind as I was coming to closure in this study. The transcripts showed that all the students’ relationships with drawing were different, as they were part of their individual stories. Rather than try and abstract the exact features of these relationships, I have set the extracts against the text of the study, as partial profiles. While, for reasons of space, this may not do sufficient justice to the extent of their experiences, features have emerged which I think otherwise would not have done.

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The struggle, or troubles in their stories about learning design, learning drawing and being in a postgraduate environment in a subject with new values, appear again and again as efforts to deal with contrasting ways to think, behave, create and learn, two sides of many different bridges. A growing list shows that these contrasts all feature as part of the conditions for learning, and thus hint at the breadth of the agenda for what epistemic development involves. As ways of thinking: analytical/synthetic, intuitive/rational, cyclical/linear, serial/holistic, systematic planning/bricolage, deferring closure through tolerance of ambiguity/precipitate closure, tacit/explicit, deductive/intuitive, mental only/involving all the senses, sometimes synaesthetically, hand/eye. As ways of finding out: seeing/knowing, through texts/through visual thinking, using one method/using many methods, through practice/through theory, using imagination/using known information As ways of judging: quantitatively/qualitatively, for absolute answers/for contingent answers, for oneself/for others As different contexts: people centred/abstract, on one’s own/with others.

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As different dynamics: superficial/substantial, in haste/in reflection. My use of the forward slash is a deliberate way to avoid using ‘and’ or ‘or’. The ‘conjunctional’ turn narrows the description of the process as it is experienced. Sometimes it is ‘and’, sometimes it is ‘or’. Sometimes it is an integration of the two poles, another echo of Kolb’s dialectical processes resulting in the transformation of thinking, as relationships between ideas are newly seen by understanding them from a higher level of thinking that contains them both. The metaphor of the bridge is explored extensively in this study. It enabled me, with the idea of learning being a journey, to see that stages, or going over some kind of a bridge, was a less true to life idea than being ON the bridge. The risk of describing the students’ journeys from the world and values of engineering to those of design as a rehearsal of the pantomime of The Two Cultures evaporated. Instead the continuous management of the contrasts in ways of knowing described above becomes a foundation for transformative learning and wisdom. Wisdom is openly discussed as a desirable ‘subject’ in education at many levels, and is increasingly being seen as a necessary characteristic of any professional today. It may be seen as the ability to recognise and participate in a process of understanding structures of knowing, and to think dialectically. It may be to direct understanding towards intentions that reflect our shared belonging and responsibility to the world. Where learning is understood as a situated process, the getting of wisdom is also linked to an increased connection to awareness of the holistic workings of mind and body in a larger ecological system. Identifying the importance of drawing as an aspect of learning to learn does not make the provision of education and professional training any easier. It does however provide an agenda which shows that social dimensions and quality and quantity of time are seemingly essential for substantial learning,

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and as part of that, the appropriate training of designers for a better future for all of us. The five terms that I chose as part of drawing, which also figure in our management of ideas, confirm the importance of vision and the other senses whose workings pervade the wider way we interpret and construct the world. The potential of two of them, Line and Space, have already been explored by psychogeographers, and the others Shadow, Perspective, and Frame, by philosophers and cultural historians. Always with the caveat of the ‘generative’ tendency, these metaphors can be a rich source of further exploration into how visual thinking can inform the furthest reaches of our interpretation of experience, and so our actions in and on the world. I see there are implications for education and professional training which are applicable in many domains. Substantial learning needs a rich social interaction amongst peers and respected mentors. Both quality and quantity of time are seemingly essential for reflection, as a foundation for creative and responsible knowledge making. Skills are essential, not least those that use the senses, attention and ingenuity, as in drawing and bricolage. These observations require that attention is constantly given to counter the tendency for education to be seen and sold as a matter of configuring and extruding concepts into curriculum plans, which will take as few resources of time and people as possible. Surprisingly, drawing, the Cinderella of grown-up knowledge turns out to be an important if still enigmatic figure. In a series of transformations released at the closure of this project I see Cinders changing her party shoes for the winged boots of Mercury, the god of poetry, communications and journeys. She looks down with Antoine de St. Exupéry on his first night flight over Argentina, as he writes: “It was a dark night, with only occasional scattered lights glittering like stars on the plain. Each one, in that ocean of shadows, was a sign of the miracle of consciousness. In one home people were reading, or thinking, or sharing confidences. In another, perhaps, they were searching through space, wearying themselves with the mathematics of the Andromeda nebula. In

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another they were making love. These small flames shone far apart in the landscape, demanding their fuel. Even the most unassuming of them, the flame of the poet, the teacher or the carpenter. But among these living stars, how many closed windows, how many extinct stars, how many sleeping men… We must surely seek unity. We must surely seek to communicate with some of those fires burning far apart in the landscape.”116

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Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1995) Wind, Sand and Stars. Translated by William Rees, London, Penguin, p3.

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INDEX

‘A’ Levels 165 Abbott, Edwin A 306 Abercrombie, M.L.J. 189 abstraction 235 adult learners 109–14; adult development 88; drawing 223 Agricola, Filippo, study of the Laocoon 180 Albers, Josef 295 Alexander, Christopher 175, 176, 215, 279, 296, 305–6 Allman, Paula 110 Ames, Adelbert 285–6 analogy 199 anthropology 15 apprenticeship 102–3 Archer, Bruce 101 Argyris, Chris 125 Aristotle 161, 208, 213, 234 Arkhipov, Vladimir 54 Arnheim, Rudolf 7, 13–14, 247; frame 294–5; images of thought 206; influence of boundary line 272; inside and outside 305; language 189; memory 194, 247; mental images 193, 258; perception 208; visual dynamics 179; visual thinking 13–14, 174–7 artificial intelligence 90, 236 Ashton-Warner, Sylvia 24 assessments and examinations 35, 105–8, 168–9 atelier system 32–3

Athavankar, Uday A. 191 Atkinson, Robert 132 Atzmon, Leslie 186 Auden, W.H. 182, 203 Australian Imperial Forces badge 268 authority 168–9 avenue of trees: at Middleharnis (Hobbema) 43; beeches 291 Barner, Robert 123, 133 Barron, Neil 223 bas-relief 243–4, 278 Baudelaire, Charles 54 Bauhaus 13–14 Bauman, Zygmunt 76, 185 Baxandall, Michael 261 Baynes, Ken 101, 221, 233 Benjamin, Walter 72, 234 Berger, John 183, 305 Bermingham, Ann 220 Bewick, Thomas 239, 239 blindness 172–3n2, 187 Bont, CJPM de 191–2 Booth, Shirley A. 75–6 Borges, J.L. 288 Boroditsky, Lera 201 Bosch, Hieronymus 138; Tribulations of St Anthony 137, 265–6 Boulton, David 71 Bourgeois, Louise 46 brain hemispheres 181–2 bricolage 50–60, 164, 315; self-bricolage 66

Index bridges 68, 260–6, 314; between drawing and epistemic development 310; footbridge, Oxfordshire 265; footbridges, Hampshire 264; Galata Bridge, Istanbul 266; Nebi Huri, Syria 261; Ponte Vecchio 265; Rock Creek, British Columbia 262 Brothers, Cammy 57, 225–6, 231 Brotton, Jerry 288–9 Brown, Michelle 184 Bruegel, Peter the Elder 203, 203 Brunelleschi 286 Bruner, Jerome 7; creativity 121, 131; development 102; frame 294–5; metaphor 206; Narrative Inquiry 75–7; perception 188; perceptual readiness 226; space 303; ‘trouble’ 68, 75–7, 208 Bucciarelli, Louis 7, 147, 156–64, 213 Buchanan, Richard 101 Buchli, Victor 54 CAD and CAM 287 Cain, Patricia 64, 231, 290 calligraphy: Chinese 182–3; Islamic 270 cantilever (Galileo) 157 Carruthers, Mary 51, 64, 177, 184, 251, 254–5, 273 Carson, Rachel 11 cartoons of engineering education 149, 150 Casakin, Hernan 210 Cavafy, C.P. 262 cave art see prehistoric cave drawing Cezanne, Paul 216 chalk 269 Charmaz, Kathy 75 Chase, Susan E. 73 chess players 176

339 chiaroscuro 163, 218, 278 Chinese art and calligraphy 182–3 cigarette card 274 Cinderella 315–16 Clandinin, D. Jean 20, 67, 69, 72 Clark, T.J. 178–9, 195–6, 296 Claxton, Guy 19, 103, 132 cod drying in sun 281 Collette, Cresside 296 Columbia University (USA) 167 commerical practice 101–2 conceptual thinking 172–97 connection-making 205, 208–10, 213 Connelly, F. Michael 20, 69, 72 consciousness 306 Constable, John 172, 238 cosmology 271 Coyne, Richard 91, 99–100, 119, 124, 204–6, 208, 214 craftsmen 125, 161–2; woodcuts showing surroundings 158–62, 159–60, see also hand-tools Craig-Martin, Michael 273 creative thinking 206 crits 105–8 crystalisation 50–1 curricular developments 154–71 cybernetics 11–12, 93–4, 147 Daloz, Laurent 118 Dam Busters, The 298 de Bonardis, Carlo 166 de Freitas, Nancy 219, 225 de St. Exupéry, Antoine 315–16 de Serres, Olivier 160 De Vries, Lyckle 203 Demos, T.J. 282 Deniau, Francoise 149–52 Denzin, Norman 20, 50–2, 55

340 Descartes, René 174 design: definition 5–6; learning designing 89–97; model showing constraints 99; as political activity 11–12, 311; as research lens 48–50 design problem 90 Deutsch, Hans Rudolph Manuel 159 Dewey, John 69 dialectical processes 313–14 Dickinson, Emily 260 Dorst, Kees 90 Downing, Frances 247 drama 20–1, 42, 48 Drane, John 27, 29 drawing 1–9, 216–40, 311–12; broader definition 230; disegno 218; drawing workshop 227; ‘good drawing’ 233; as heightened noticing 310; history in art and design training 219–21; in IDE 221–8; interpreting meaning 243; originality and expression 237–40; plan, elevation, section 287; as representation 233–6; shared 244; students’ comments 80, 312; ‘to draw’ 231, see also frame; line; perspective; prehistoric cave drawing; shadow; space Duchamp, Marcel 130, 282 Duncker, Karl 100, 237 Dürer, Albrecht 290n5 Eames, Charles and Ray 16, 209; Charles on the best 62n13 Eco, Umberto 61n11 Edan, Y. et al., engineering education 141 Eddington, Arthur 310 education: cartoons of engineers 150; curricular developments 154–71; and

Index employment 147–54; formation 141; implications in many domains 315; practical and theoretical 142–3; process 141; purpose of 19 Edwards, Betty 181–2 Edwards, Trystan 272 Ekphrasis 177 Elkins, James 285, 287, 291 employment 147–54 engineering education: curricular developments 154–71; distinctions between disciplines 153 envelopes 303 environment 79 epistemic development 4–7, 15–19, 40, 172; list of contrasts in learning design 313–14, see also knowledge; wisdom Eraut, Michael 33, 107–8, 118 ergonomics 30, 95–6 Erikson, Erik 136 ethnography 30 ethnosemantics 71 Eureka! 45 Evans, Robin 237–8 experience and experiential learning 67, 97n2, 114–19; concrete experience (CE) 120–7 Farthing, Stephen 234 Federico da Monefeltro 288–9 feelings 195 Fenwick, Tara 128 Ferguson, Eugene S. 222n10 Filofax 61 Finniston Report 141, 143, 152, 154 Fisher, John 188, 232, 295 Flammarion, Camille, medieval 271 flaneur 54

Index Flatland 306 Fodor, Jerry 242 footbridges see bridges Forth Rail bridge (Scotland) 261 Foucault, Michel 64–6, 138 Fra Raffaello da Brescia, intarsia panel 289 frame 87, 294–302 Frascara, Jorge 105, 112 freewriting 69–70 Freire, Paolo 15, 167–8, 311 Fry, R.E. 7; experiential learning 115; learning cycle 7, 42, 116–18, 256 Fuller, Richard Buckminster xi, 15–16 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 73 Galata Bridge (Istanbul) 265–6, 266 Galilei, Galileo 157–64, 157, 218–19, 278 Galle, Per 228 Gardner, Howard 14, 173n3, 199–200 Garner, Alan 245 Gauguin, Paul 58–9, 183–4; Femme Cueillant des Fruits et Oviri 58 Gell, Alfred 232 gender bias 95–6 Gestalt school 13–14, 177 Gibson, James J. 192 globalisation 304–5 Goel, Vinod 228, 237 Gogol, Nikolai 178 Goldschmidt, Gabriela 228, 232 Goldsworthy, Andy 298 Gombrich, Ernst 57, 207, 305 Gordon, Cynthia 199, 211 Gordon, Jan 226 graphicacy 15 graphological qualities 179–80 Great Exhibition (1851) 31

341 Green, Bella 223; working drawings 56 group dynamics 33–4 Hadot, Pierre 65 Hall, Edward T 172–3n2 Hammersley, Martyn 71 Hammond, Claudia 172–3n2 hand-tools 59–60 haptic intelligence 187 Harpur, Patrick 158n4 Harriott, Thomas 219 Hayakawa, Samuel 13 Hegel, G.W.F. 114 Heidegger, Martin 128–9 heliocentricity 158n4 Henderson, Kathryn 232–3 Heron, John 117 hierarchy: Alexander 176; Waddington 175 Hiles, Dave 45–6 Hinton, Christopher 143 Hoare, Carol 88, 136 Hobbema, Meindeert, The Avenue at Middleharnis 42–3, 43 Hockney, David 220n6 Hodgkin, Howard 183 homo sapiens sapiens 241–2 Horace 177 Hudson, Liam 116 hupomnemata 64–5, 137–9 IDE (Innovation Design Engineering) 21–3 ideas 275–6 Illich, Ivan 15 illuminated manuscripts 249–58 images, mental images 192–3, 246–8 imagination 311 imagining 173–4

342 IMechE 168; pamphlet 149–52, 154 Indra’s Net 46 industrial design 3 Industrial Revolution 142–3 information 146–7 Ingold, Tim 274 interdisciplinary work 25 interviews: doing 70–4; transforming the field of comments 82–7; translating comments 80–2; using 75–7 inventors 51–2, 54, 164 James, Henry 299–300 John-Steiner, Vera 114, 195 Jones, J Chris 89 journeyers 263 journeys 68 judgement 133 juxtaposition 120, 125 Keats, John 120, 206n2 Kegan, Robert 306 Kekulé, F.A. 193–4 Keller, Heidi 136 Keller-Cohen, Deborah 199, 211 Kelly, George A. 82 Kelly, M.H. 205 Kepes, Gyorgy 13 Kiel, F.C. 205 Kincheloe, Joe 52–4, 57–8 King, Patricia M. 18, 40, 130–1, 133–4 Kitchener, Karen Strohm 18, 40, 130–1, 133–4 Klee, Paul 14, 182, 273 knowledge 10; drawing as Cinderella 315–16; drawing and knowing 228–33; practical and theoretical 142–3; ways of knowing 143–6

Index Kohlberg, Lawrence 93 Kolb, David A. 7; concrete knowing 120; dialogue 73, 134; experiential learning 97, 114; learning cycle 7, 42, 65, 116–18, 256; learning process 125, 128, 131, 165, 314; learning styles 116, 237; LSI 127–8; Reflective Learning Model 49 Kvale, Steinar 71–2 Lakoff, George 199–202, 208, 304 Langer, Suzanne 208 language 174, 189 Latour, Bruno 163–4, 215, 286, 303, 311 Lave, Jean 33 Lawson, Bryan 53, 99; model of design constraints 99 learning 15–19; bridge as metaphor 260–6; with colleagues 24; frames of reference 294; how to learn 2, 314–15; teaching awareness of 35–6, 127–8; to learn 212n4, see also adult learners; project-based learning learning cycle 42, 116–18, 117, 256; with design-related activities 119 Learning Styles Inventory (LSI) 127–8 Lees-Maffei, Grace 185–6 Leonardo da Vinci 57, 231, 282 Lessing, Gotthold 179 Levi-Strauss, Claude 51–2, 54, 58 Lewin, Kurt 116, 194, 247 Lewis, Nigel 205, 215 light 277 Lincoln, Yvonna 20, 50–2, 55 line 87, 267–76 linguistic see words Locke, John 62n12 Lodge, David 183 Lofoten Islands, sun-dried cod 281

Index looking 216 Luttrell Psalter 184 Lynch, Michael 222n9 Lynch, Patrick 83–4, 231 McAuliffe, Garrett 292 Macfarlane, Robert 212 Mahn, Holbrook 114 Malnar, Joy Monice 247–8 mark-making 245–6, see also line Marr, Andrew 220n6 Marton, Ference 75–6, 104, 116 Marx, Karl 11 Massey, Doreen 304–5 mat-making 78 materialisation 242 Mathewson, James H. 196 Matisse, Henri, line 268, 270, 275 media 195 memory 246–8, 194–5, 200, 249–58 mental barriers 171 mental images see under images Mercury 315 metaphor 7–8, 194, 198–215; in learning 211–15 Mezirow, Jack 94–5, 106, 111, 132–3, 294 Michelangelo 83–4, 225–6; staircase in San Lorenzo Library 84 Michelson, Elana 95, 129, 132, 134 Milner, Marion 223, 226, 290 mimesis 234 Mitchell, W.J.T. 174, 184 Mithen, Steven 199, 210 monastic practices of thinking 184 mood boards 55 moral dilemmas 93 Moustakas, Clark E. 44–6, 66 multiple intelligences 14, 173n3,

343 199–200; haptic and spatial 187 Munby, Hugh 132 music 257 naming categories 191 Narrative Inquiry (NI) 67–70, 76, 312 notebooks 46, 139; comparing processes 139; Galileo 163n8; notebook as process 61–6 originality 237–40 Ortony, Andrew 204 Osborn, Alex F. 12 Osgood, Charles E., semantic differential 108 Packard, Vance 11 Paechter, Carrie 202 Paivio, Allan 208, 210 Pallasmaa, Juhani 49, 278–9 Papanek, Victor 11 Pask, Gordon 116 Pasteur, Louis 60 Penistone Country Park, North Yorkshire 260 pentimento 55–7, 232 Perkins, David 113 Perry, William 17–18, 39–41, 111–12, 118, 136, 305 personal development 17–19 perspective 87, 222n10, 285–93 Petherbridge, Deanna 226–7 Pheasant, Stephen 130 phenomenography 75–6 Piaget, Jean 105 Pigrum, Derek 128–9 Pilgrim’s Progress 68, 212, 213 Plato: learning 102; séme- 250; shadows 277; simile 246

344 poetry 177, 197 Polyani, Karl 103, 121, see also tacit knowledge Poussin, Nicolas 195–6, 296 prehistoric cave drawing 241–8; drawing surface 243–6; images 246–8; interpretation 242–3; overview 241–2 Prime Design (Buckminster Fuller) xi problem-solving 208–9, see also bridges process: notebooks 61–6; research process 42–5 product design 3 professional role of designer 2–4, 19 progress 40, 263 project-based learning 32–7, 97–105 proscenium arch 298 Proxemics 172–3n2 psycho-ergonomics 240 psychogeography 274 psychophysical forces 179–80 Pugh, Francis 101, 221, 233 pulpit of church 252 punctuation 272 Pye, David 59 pyschology, cave drawings 241 qualia 183 qualitative research 55 Rabinow, Paul 66 Rawson, Philip: analogy 207; drawing marks 84, 246, 270, 273; frame 295; Taoism 288 Reddy, Michael J. 204 reflection 10 Rembrandt (van Rijn) 228, 275, 279, 280 Renfrew, Colin 242

Index Renn, Jürgen 162 reportory grid 82 representation, in drawing 233–6 research: bricolage as tool 50–60; cycles of qualitative research 38; data 80–2; design as lens 48–50; development of research process 42–5; development of research question 39–42; interviews 70–7; notebook as process 61–6; Scientist undertaking an experiment 166; structures 45–8, see also Narrative Inquiry (NI) research methodology 38–40 Richards, I.A. 208 Richardson, John T. 71–2 Richardson, Laurel 49–50, 77 Riessman, Catherine Kohler 312 ‘right answer’ 18 right brain thinking 181–2 Riley, Howard 232 Rilke, Rainer Maria 174–5, 216, 234–5 Rittel, Horst 42, 53, 123 Rogers, Carl 17–18, 73 Rogers, Jenny 113 Rogers, Russel R. 129, 131, 135–6 Rosiek, Jerry 67 Rowson, Jonathan 113–14, 134 Royal College of Art 2, 21–32, 22, 102–3; Albertopolis 202 Russell, Tom 132 Rust, Chris 121 Sadock, J.M. 304 St. Mary’s Forane Church, Kerala 252 saliency imbalance 260 Saljo, Roger 104, 116 San Lorenzo Library, staircase 84 Schama, Simon 61n11

Index Schon, Donald 7; backtalk 135; designing and discovering 98–9; employability 148; frame 300–1; interconnections 101; mentors 102, 300–1; metaphors 204; reflection-in-action 64, 131–2, 168; seeing 187–8; sketch process 228; theories-in-use 125–6 Schumacher, Ernst 11 scorpio 274 Searle, Ronald 228–9; Man dying of Cholera 229 seeing 187–8 self, situated self 309 self portrait, anonymous Flammand or Hollandais 298–9, 299 semiotics 191, 240 Seneca 65–6 Sennett, Richard 125 setting 20–37 sfumato 282 shadow 87, 243–4, 277–84 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 60 silkworms 160 situated cognition 192 situated learning 33 situated self 309 sketch drawing 186, 193, 220, 232 sketchbooks 224–5, 227 skills 315 Smets, Gerda 189, 192; geometrical changes 190 Snodgrass, Adrian 91, 99–100, 119, 124, 204–6, 208, 214 Socrates 102; Socratic enquiry 103 space 87, 303–9; surface in prehistoric caves 243–6, see also environment; setting Spearman, Charles Edward 189

345 Spender, Stephen 267 staircase (Michelangelo) 84 Stanislavski, Konstantin 115 Steinbeck, John 45 Sternberg, Robert 136, 205 Sterne, Laurence 182; lines in Tristram Shandy 47, 47 Stevens, Wallace 195, 197 Stevens-Long, Judith 123, 133 Stoichita, V.I. 281 storytelling 67, see also Narrative Inquiry studio 23–32, 102–3 Susanna and the Elders, tapestry 297 Swann, Cal 102–3 systems management 184–5 tacit knowledge 34, 44, 46, 103, 120–7, 154 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas 69 Tanizaki, Junichiro 279 tapestry 296, 297 Taylor, Kathleen 105, 111 technical drawing 220–1, 244 tekne 161 Temple Grandin, Mary 182 Three Billy Goats Gruff 265 time 172–3n2, 304, 311–12, 314–15; slow time 225 Toibin, Colm 183 Tollard Royal, Wiltshire 291 touch 187 Tourangeau, Roger 205 translucent paper 228 travellers see journeyers triangulation 50 Tversky, Barbara 186–7, 228 Uglow, Jenny 212, 239

346 user-centred design 30 Valéry, Paul 64–5, 232 Valleriani, Matteo 162 Varela, Francisco J. 174, 231 Veblen, Thorstein 11 Vincenti, Walter G. 154, 167 visual thinking 12–15, 172–97, 310 Vodvarka, Frank 247–8 Vygotsky, Lev 102, 114–15 Waddington, C.H. 175; simple hierarchy 175 Walsh, Mary 208, 210 Watteau, Jean-Antoine 268 weather and rain 260 Webber, Melvin M. 42, 53, 123 Wells, Francis 217 Wenger, Etienne 33

Index Werchan, Anne 136 Whalley, Peter 147 wicked problems 42, 53, 123 Wiener, Norbert 12 Wiggins, Glenn 98, 101, 187, 228 Willats, John 182, 236, 238, 287–8 windows 296 wisdom 130–9, 314 Wojecki, William Andrew 66 women 95–6 wood engraving 239, 271 woodcuts 159–60 Woolgar, Steve 222n9 words 178–9, 185 working drawings 56, see also drawing process World Health Organisation 14 Wroe, Ann 60 Wyss-Flamm, Esther 120, 125