LATENT PREPARATION Do Great Ideas Come from Out-Of-The-Blue?
Some designers have a knack of making design look easy, producing concepts, seemingly from nowhere. Other designers, suspicious of pie-in-the-sky ideas, prefer to design methodically. Are novel design ideas simply thoughts from out-of-the-blue, or are they insightful, resulting from deeper understanding? This paper reviews statements from a recent interview study of architects and designers, which assessed the extent to which conceptual designing is insightful. Most respondents stated that insights contributed to their designing, but two affirmed rational design processes and appeared skeptical of discovery based concepts. Analysis of the respondent statements generally, indicates that: 1) there are different levels of insightfulness, 2) insighful discoveries are also qualitatively different and 3) many appear to be an outcome of latent preparation (an incubation-like mental activity that ranges between active conscious designing and passive apparent unconscious activity), rather than arbitrary, out-of- the-blue inspirations. The paper concludes by considering prospects for further research and implications for both education and digital media.
Paul Murty Terry Purcell
Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition, University of Sydney, Australia
国际会议
南京
英文
509-517
2007-04-19（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）