FROM CHAOS TO CLARITY:
THE CENTRAL ROLE OF THE DESIGNERS APPRECIATIVE SYSTEM IN DESIGN THINKING

Despite design situations becoming increasingly complex designers still have the extraordinary ability to take ill-defined, open-ended design situations and give them clarity, enabling the design of meaningful and appropriate outcomes. Understood for many years as a problem solving process Donald Schön introduced the theory of design as a “reflective conversation with the situation” [Schön 1983]. This conversation is largely dependent, as is any conversation, on the phenomena the designer decides to “attend to” [Schön 1992].  As such this design conversation is largely directed by the agency of the designer. Recently Kees Dorst has advocated a similar construct within his new conceptual framework of design paradoxes in which, he suggests that designer can never hold a complete representation of the design problem in their minds because it is constantly evolving. As such, the ill-structuredness of design problems may not be an a priori quality of the problem but a result of the designers capabilities [Dorst 2006].

As Schöns conversation takes place in the action-present  [Schön 1995] the designer actively determines the situation and the solution in parallel, while remaining sensitive to the back-talk of the situation [Schön 1983].  Dorst similarly suggests design is a situated activity involving a social process. Schön notes that this style of activity requires the use of different types of knowledge to traditional problem solving, based on a combination of the designers repertoire [domain knowledge] and their appreciative system [personal knowledge]. Schön argues that when the problem is indeterminate (or unknowable) the designers ability to maintain internal consistency within a design episode, to move from chaos to clarity, is dependant on fidelity to their appreciative system.

It has been suggested that Schöns true legacy was that he legitimised informal knowledge in foregrounding the agency of the designer within the design conversation [Sanyal 1997]. This paper explores the correspondence between his work and contemporary theory including Dorst’s design paradoxes, by using initial findings from case study research and analysis, involving second year design students within the Bachelor of Design, at the College of Fine Arts,  at the University of NSW. These preliminary findings suggest that novice designers employ their appreciative systems in order to commence designing in the absence of repertoire knowledge and to direct and structure the acquisition of new repertoire knowledge.

The aim of the paper is to illuminate overlooked elements of Schöns theory in a contemporary context in order to offer a domain independent perspective of design activity that can facilitate new approaches within design research, pedagogy, and practice.