Compare and contrast the following two articles (2 pages max). Use APA format.

92 she ji The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 2017

Merleau-Ponty’s view of perception as an interactive, whole body experience. Svanæs also discusses the importance of movement and the kinaesthetic sense for creativity in the design process.69 In the context of performing arts, David Kirsh studied the way expert dancers learn new dance phrases. He found that the imper- fect simulation of new phrases—a process called marking—is a better method of practicing than performing complete phrases.70 He likens this to the creation of a model or sketch. The notion that incomplete, analogue and gestalt representations are better for learning complex dance phrases resonates with our understanding of sketches and prototypes as representations of the implicit dimension of ex- perience. At the same time, Kirsh draws some of his views on perception from a different stream of embodied cognition than the one we have discussed. The finer points of this are beyond the scope of this article but would be worth exploring in future research. Some connections have also been made between the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics and HCI.71 These interdisciplinary connec- tions are fascinating and full of potential for further exploration, theoretically and empirically.

More broadly, a move beyond dualisms of objective and subjective, which necessitates dialectical thinking, is underway in many disciplines. This context is a theoretical movement, which philosopher Arran Gare terms “speculative natu- ralism.”72 Design thinking benefits from being situated in existing, well-developed theories, as already suggested by some.73 Today’s complex problems demand an understanding of human creativity that does not privilege any one discipline but explores the potential contribution of specific skills and paradigms. The fact that design thinking de-politicizes design for management74 is a problem. Humanity is currently facing genuinely complex problems. To even begin to solve these, we need to stop the jostling for position in pre-set economic agendas and seek possibil- ities for change inherent in our common humanity.

69 Dag Svanæs, “Interaction Design for and with the Lived Body: Some Implications of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenome- nology,” ACM Transactions on Computer-Human

Interaction (TOCHI) 20, no. 1 (2013): 8, DOI: https://doi. org/10.1145/2442106.2442114.

70 David Kirsh, “Embodied Cog- nition and the Magical Future of Interaction Design,” ACM Transactions on Computer-Hu- man Interaction (TOCHI) 20, no. 1 (2013): 3, DOI: https://doi. org/10.1145/2442106.2442109.

71 Shusterman, Thinking Through the Body.

72 Arran Gare, Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civili- zation: A Manifesto for the Future (London: Routledge, 2016).

73 Peter Dalsgaard, “Prag- matism and Design Thinking,” International Journal of Design 8, no. 1(2014): 143–55.

74 Kimbell, “Rethinking Design Thinking: Part I,” 285–306.

Commentary

Making Sense of Design Thinking Alissa N. Antle, School of Interactive Arts + Technology, Simon Fraser University, Canada

[email protected]

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.10.003

It is no accident that the word “sense” appears in the expression “making sense.” We traditionally interpret making sense as an activity that largely occurs in the mind. This is because the phrase is a metaphor, and like most metaphors, we instantly and uncritically associate it with a meaning. Upon careful inspection, the phrase betrays the bodily origins of thinking

and reasoning which are—in embodied accounts of cognition—grounded in the senses. While embodied cognition is a relatively recent addition to academic dialogue,1 the language we use to describe cognition suggests that we have always known that the senses are involved in thinking and reasoning about the world.

The stated goal of Karin Lindgaard and Heico Wesselius’s article2 is to make sense of design thinking by bringing the senses back into the understanding of how designers think and reason during design activity.

To achieve this, the authors begin by introducing several key ideas from an embodied account of cogni- tion. They introduce sense making processes including metaphor theory, visual gestalts, and felt experience, and suggest that these processes may be foundational in designers’ material practices. They situate their work as fitting into the academic discourse about design thinking as a cognitive style, as articulated by Lucy Kimbell, and take a stance on design activity as reflective practice as articulated by Donald Schön. The authors state that their contribution is “suggestive

93Once More, with Feeling

rather than definitive.”3 They suggest that the value that an embodied account of cognition may have for explaining design thinking is to provide an alterna- tive to the overly structured and logical accounts put forward by those like Herbert Simon. The authors state that the end goal of their article is to ensure that dialogue continues around this phenomena from a scholarly perspective, in contrast to accounts of design thinking from the perspectives of industry and management, which the authors suggest are often anecdotal.

I find it encouraging that more and more re- search domains concerned with human sense making are beginning to explore and apply theories of em- bodied cognition. The article does a service to those in the design community who are not familiar with embodied cognition. That said, an embodied account of cognition has been prevalent in the human-com- puter interaction and interaction design literature for some time now.4 However, the application of this model of cognition to understanding how designers work has been largely absent—and it is here that this article makes its greatest contribution.

Lindgaard and Wesselius provide a succinct and relatively clear introduction to the re-emergence in the twentieth century of the notion that the body matters in cognition. A notion that challenges the es- tablished dualistic theories that have been dominant in Western thought for much of the last 300 years thanks to Cartesian dualism and the mind-body split. The authors adequately explain metaphor theory and visual gestalts and then turn their attention to the de- scription of the feeling of bodily movement in a situa- tion as a sense of fit. In the latter account, they move away from established theories, and in doing so, they appear to struggle to provide a coherent explanation of how—and why—the body and mind work together during design activity. They touch on the relationship between emotion and cognition and put forward a hierarchical model in which preconscious processes including emotion guide action and set the tone for subsequent interpretation of sensory information and application in abstract reasoning. They define a sense of fit as when “feeling emerges—initially as the sense of how well an action might meet the demands presented by the situation”5 and then argue that this feeling informs subsequent abstract reasoning. The role of the body in this account is to offer simulations that precede perceptions that rise to the surface of consciousness and provide a feeling that something is a fit or is not quite right for a particular design situation. Upon reading this description, I found no account of how emotion might create an impetus to

act in way that would lead a designer to have a feeling about the rightness of a solution. It is possible that by “feeling” the authors are referring to qualia6—our subjective experience of how things seem to us in a particular situation—which may or may not involve action. It is also possible that this feeling or qualia that drives decision making around the rightness of a solution may be what Daniel Kahneman refers to as intuitive thinking.7 Intuitive thinking is grounded in perception. It is predictive, automatic, often uncon- scious, and associatively coherent. The challenge with rooting a model of design thinking in this type of experiential bodily feeling is that these processes may not be the best basis for decision making in design. As Kahneman warns, there are many problems with intuitive thinking, including faulty heuristics and unrecognized biases that impact judgment and result in cognitive errors.8 A second concern that I have with this section is that when the authors introduce Eugene Gendlin’s work, they state that “cognition has two sides—this felt sense, and symbols.”9 Here, the authors veer away from a core assumption of em- bodied cognition—abstract reasoning is inseparable from bodily sensations.

In the realm of interdisciplinary work, definitions provide a common language for readers from dispa- rate backgrounds. One of the challenges presented by Lindgaard and Wesselius’s article is that they do not adequately define what they mean by felt experience in the context of design thinking and design activity. Nor do they go far enough, when they describe em- bodied processes, to provide an account of how and why the body matters for design thinking. However, I think this can be addressed by extending what the au- thors started and clarifying why an embodied account of cognition matters for designers, design researchers, and design theorists.

If we begin with the work of Donald Schön—the scope set by Lindgaard and Wesselius for their ar- ticle—design thinking is reflective practice. This practice consists of iterative problem framing and solution generation in which materials—sketches, prototypes, storyboards, and the like—play a role in a designer’s understanding or sense making in the context of a design problem. We can then define design thinking by drawing on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work on metaphor theory,10 extending the ideas in- troduced by the authors.

Metaphor theory explains how bodily experi- ences lead to neural patterns called gestalts or image schemas, which we use to understand our physical and perceptual experiences. Image schema and ge- stalts are generalizations. They structure many of our

94 she ji The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 2017

interactions with the world and form the basis for many of our understandings of precepts and concrete concepts. Image schemas, elaborated on through metaphor, also form many of the structures we use to understand and reason about abstract concepts and non-physical aspects of the world. For example, in a world where we routinely experience more of some physical substance as up, we associate the image schema UP-DOWN with quantity. As Anna Macaranas and her colleagues explain, “‘Up’ is associated with ‘more’ and ‘down’ with ‘less.’ When we fill a cup or add objects to a pile, we notice the substance or object growing in height. The metaphor UP IS MORE is a cog- nitive structure based on these everyday experiences and used—unconsciously—to understand a variety of more abstract concepts.”11 For example, we use this metaphor to make sense of a conductor’s movements when leading an orchestra, raising the arms up and gesturing at the flutists, as a request for them to play more loudly. We use the same structure to understand and express the abstract emotion of happiness. For ex- ample, we might say “I felt so up today,” or conversely, “I’m having a really down day.” Metaphor unites the physical with the mental and the concrete with the abstract.

Taking this one step further, Lakoff and Johnson state that “Reason, at the very least, involves categori- zation, entailment, and inference. Imagination, in one of its many aspects, involves seeing one kind of thing in terms of another kind of thing—what we have called metaphorical thought. Metaphor is thus imagi- native rationality.”12 Lakoff and Johnson go on to say that “our everyday reasoning involves metaphorical entailments and inferences, ordinary rationality is therefore imaginative by its very nature.”13 Extending this to the realm of design thinking, we can say that understanding, reasoning, and imaginative cognitive processes—all fundamental to design thinking—in- volve the concurrent integration of bodily and mental elements of cognition.

Design thinking can also be viewed, metaphori- cally, as a process of making an argument for a way to change the world. This applies to designing buildings, spaces, products, services, interfaces, or interactional opportunities. Designers may form an argument by iterative inquiry into problem framing and solution generation and, as they do so, judge and make deci- sions by asking themselves, “Does the way I see the specifics of the problem and the emerging solutions make sense?” Taking Johnson’s view of reasoned imagination, designers are asking whether the way they are viewing the problem and solution fit with the reasoning anchored in their bodily experience

through metaphor. In this way, thinking is grounded in designers’ felt experiences, past and present. Unlike Lindgaard and Wesselius, who appear to frame feeling and reasoning as separate and sequential, I would argue that design thinking involves reasoned imagination; it is both rational (mental) and expe- riential (body-based). It is a holistic and inseparable process involving the body and the mind situated in the world. We may have an intuitive feel for the design situation—for example, based on intuitive thinking, which may be grounded in relevant image schemata or gestalts that guide perception and action. Or we may reason more abstractly about it—by, for example, unconsciously using the structure of met- aphors, or consciously building on prior knowledge that may also be grounded in metaphoric reasoning. Design thinking is then the interleaving of different cognitive processes—each involving the body and mind—working in tandem to make sense of a design situation.

Now, what is design activity? Lindgaard and Wesselius begin their article by framing that material design practices augment creative processes. Later, the authors argue that designers engage with analog representations including sketches during design ac- tivity to physically represent body-based simulations such as image schemata, gestalts, and metaphors. I’d like to suggest another account of cognition that highlights the need for designers to create design materials to engage with the world alongside their body-based simulations.

One of the benefits of interdisciplinary work is that a single article can provide portals to other works and new avenues for readers to explore. Another account that explains how and why design activity involves the mind, body, and world working together was put forward in a little-known work—Henrik Gedenryd’s 1998 Ph.D. thesis, entitled “How Designers Work—Making Sense of Authentic Cognitive Activi- ties.”14 Edwin Hutchins was a mentor to Gedenryd, and so it is not surprising that Gedenryd’s account of design thinking is grounded in Hutchins’s theory of distributed cognition15 which explicates how action and the world are elements of human cognition.

Gedenryd tackles the same issues as the au- thors—the gap between theories that prescriptively describe how designers work and the studies of de- signers that show how they work in reality. A gap between what he calls the ideal—how things ought to be—and the actual—the way things are, in terms of design activities and cognitive processes. In his introduction, he describes Simon’s heavily structured, logical design approach, and contrasts it with studies

95

that show how designers actually work, citing Chris- topher Alexander, Bryan Lawson, and Geoffrey Broad- bent. Drawing heavily on embodied cognition, he posits a new explanatory theory of authentic design as a cognitive style or activity.

What is interesting about Gedenryd’s work is that he explores some of the actual mechanisms and pro- cesses that are foundational to how designers think via interaction with the world during design activities such as sketching, storyboarding, and prototyping. He gives a clear account of how designers inquire into a design situation by creating, using, and interacting with the world through physical materials. His core argument is that design involves inquiry performed through interaction with concrete materials that designers create to understand the particulars of a future situation of use. They use these materials to interact directly with the world rather than cogni- tively simulating it. Gedenryd calls these types of design activities situating strategies, and suggests that the ways that they make the world part of cognition are foundational to how designers work. For example, he describes how lo-fidelity prototypes enable a de- signer to test out ideas with concrete examples that are unique to the particulars of the problem they are trying to address. I think that it is here that felt experience comes into play. As designers create and engage with materials, their prior felt experience and current bodily sensations—including motivations and emotions—contribute to their thinking about the design problem. They inquire into the particulars of the design situation using reasoned imagination to make categorizations, entailments, and inferences as they work from concrete specifics to imagined gen- eralizations. In his thesis, Gedenryd works through different types of materials. He examines and explains how sketches and sketching, prototypes and proto- typing, scenarios and developing scenarios, and sto- ryboards and developing narratives support making action in the world part of design thinking. It is a publication I would highly recommend.

By adding qualia and reasoned imagination to the situated nature of designing with concrete materials, I propose an account of design thinking in which designers think as they engage (act) with materials in the world to better understand both the spe- cifics and generalities of a design situation. Some of their interpretations and reasoning may occur quickly and intuitively through mechanisms such as gestalts and metaphors, which operate pre-con- sciously and pre-conceptually. Some interpretations may be grounded in qualia, which can be brought to conscious attention through introspection. And

some thinking may occur slowly and methodically through mechanisms of metaphoric abstraction, generalization, and application of prior knowledge. I suggest that all of these embodied cognitive processes constitute design thinking and may be operating concurrently in any given design activity as designers interact with materials using the body, mind, and the world together to iteratively understand the specifics of a design problem and generate solutions.

One of the values, then, of an embodied account of design thinking is that it may help designers under- stand how they work; enabling them to consciously tease apart the different processes, perhaps question some intuitive feelings because of the risk of biases, and yet trust the way emotion and past felt expe- riences guide exploratory action. I know from my and my colleagues’ research that bringing embodied metaphors to the forefront of our attention in interac- tion design helped us design new forms of interactive systems that end-users found immediately usable—in other words, intuitive—immediately understandable because they relied on image schemas, and in ways that bootstrapped learning in abstract domains.16 In part, I attribute this to the ways we consciously engaged with and de-constructed metaphorical elab- orations—embodied cognitive processes that often remain pre-conscious.

I thank the authors for re-opening a dialogue on design thinking and putting forward ideas about how embodied accounts might explain how and why designers work. This opener is just the beginning; I am hopeful that the result of ongoing exchange is an account of design thinking that may more accu- rately depict what designers actually do, so that they may improve their ability to create desired future situations.

1 The emergence of an embodied account of cognition in Western thought is often associated with the early work of Martin Heide- gger and Edmund Husserl. It is worth noting that several Eastern meditative and philosophical traditions predate the appearance of these ideas in Western thought by millennia. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962); Edmund Husserl, The Shorter Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, ed. Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2001); and Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgement: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

2 Karin Lindgaard and Heico Wesselius, “Once More with Feeling: Design Thinking and Embodied Cognition,” She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 3, no. 2 (2017): 83–92, DOI: https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.05.004.

3 Ibid., 85.

4 For example, see Lucy A. Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Paul Dourish, Where the Action

Once More, with Feeling

96 she ji The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 2017

Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

5 Lindgaard and Wesselius, “Once More with Feeling,” 88.

6 Clarence Irving Lewis, Mind and the World-Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge (New York: Dover Publications, 1956).

7 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).

8 For a summary of Kahneman’s work in Thinking, Fast and Slow, see Daniel Kahneman, “Of 2 Minds: How Fast and Slow Thinking Shape Perception and Choice [Excerpt],” Scientific American, June 15, 2012, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/kahneman-excerpt- thinking-fast-and-slow/.

9 Lindgaard and Wesselius, “Once More with Feeling,” 88.

10 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 1980).

11 Anna Macaranas, Alissa N. Antle, and Bernhard E. Riecke, “What is Intuitive Interaction? Balancing Users’ Performance and Satisfac- tion with Natural User Interfaces,” Interacting with Computers 27, no. 3 (2015): 358, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwv003.

12 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 193.

13 Ibid.

14 Hendrik Gedenryd, “How Designers Work—Making Sense of Authentic Cognitive Activities” (PhD dissertation, Lund University, 1998), available at http://portal.research.lu.se/ws/ files/4819156/1484253.pdf.

15 Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).

16 Alissa N. Antle et al., “Designing to Support Reasoned Imagination through Embodied Metaphor,” in C&C ’09 Proceedings of the Seventh ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition (New York: ACM, 2009): 275–84, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1640233.1640275; Saskia Bakker, Alissa N. Antle, and Elise van den Hoven, “Embodied Metaphors in Tangible Interaction Design,” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 16, no. 4 (2012): 433–49, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/ s00779-011-0410-4; Alissa N. Antle, Greg Corness, and Allen Bevans, “Balancing Justice: Comparing Whole Body and Con- troller-Based Interaction for an Abstract Domain,” International Journal of Arts and Technology 6, no. 4 (2013): 388–409, DOI: https:// doi.org/10.1504/IJART.2013.058285; Macaranas et al., “What is Intuitive Interaction?,” 357–70.

Thinking through Design is Creative and Inspiring: The Why and How Angela K.-y. Leung, Singapore Management University, Singapore

Lin Qiu, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

[email protected] [email protected]

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.10.004

The article by Karin Lindgaard and Heico Wesselius1

sheds new light on the psychology of design by applying theoretical perspectives of metaphor, em- bodied cognition, and visual thinking to explain why design thinking—or thinking through design—is an embodied process to induce creative solutions. It highlights that human cognition originates, in part, from sensory perception, bodily movement, and phys- ical interaction with the external world. These em- bodied experiences aid our understanding of abstract concepts, sense making of complex situations, and generation of meaning and insight. Design thinking engages individuals in activities such as sketching or prototyping to make ideas visible and tangible. These strategies naturally embody abstract ideas in concrete artifacts through physically presenting, manipulating, and simulating ideas, thus making it easier to materi- alize solutions to design problems. Such an embodied process explains why design thinking affords the generation and actualization of creative ideations.

This perspective of applying embodied cogni- tion and metaphor to understand design thinking is enlightening. In this commentary, we would like to add to the discussion in hopes of further enriching both the theory and application. We argue that design thinking is a potent source of inspiration, which is believed to play a critical role in the composition of many creative works and productions to date. To empirically study inspiration, Thrash and Elliot con- ceptualized the notion of inspiration-to-create as a composite of three core characteristics, namely evoca- tion, transcendence, and approach motivation.2 Inspi- ration tends to be a passive state, being evoked by an idea, a person, or a behavior that illuminates possibil- ities previously unknown. It follows that inspiration has the capability to transcend previously known ideas to better ones, as awareness or reflection of new opportunities comes to light. This resonates well with Lindgaard and Wesselius’s argument regarding “the discourse of ‘design and designerly thinking as a reflective practice.’”3 Inspiration is also energizing, giving people an approach motivation to express, materialize, or transmit the transcendent idea being evoked. This matches well with the motivational state in design thinking, which propels the materializa- tion and transmission of creative ideas. Indeed, it is interesting to know that the dictionary definition of inspiration gives a hint of embodiment as an act of breathing in illuminating ideas—“A breathing in or infusion of some idea, purpose, etc. into the mind; the suggestion, awakening, or creation of some feeling or impulse, especially of an exalted kind.”4 In addi- tion, the metaphor of gaining vision is widely used to describe creative inspiration.5 In this light, we posit