Editorial: Designing in context

✍ Scribed by Peter Lloyd

• Book ID: 104289003
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 25 KB
• Volume: 24
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0142-694X
• DOI: 10.1016/s0142-694x(02)00051-0

✦ Synopsis

Previous Design Thinking Research Symposiums have focussed, naturally enough, on design thinking. Analysing the thoughts of designers has certainly proved fruitful for design research, but the view of design as an essentially cognitive activity is receiving increasing criticism, particularly as it seems to confer a level of omniscience on designers that an ever more distributed world would seem to deny.

The strength of the symposium series has always been its multi-disciplinary focus and this is reflected in this special issue with papers describing architectural, engineering, and industrial designing and with authors deriving from disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, and marketing. These papers also reflect key issues within the design study field: the development of design theory (Coyne), the role of memory and creativity in designing (Downing; Lloyd and Snelders), the description of design practice (Medway and Clark), and finally implications for design education (Adams, Turns and Atman; Bucciarelli). The DTRS is nothing if not a broad church.