“From the literature of design, what we see is essentially the quieting of the designer’s anxiety and the quieting of the general philosophical anxiety of the field.”
This “quieting” Richard Buchanan notes in his 2007 Design Issues article ‘Anxiety, Wonder and Astonishment: The Communion of Art and Design’. Such quieting should not, however, be interpreted as an adequate resolution of design’s capacity to serve towards “enhancing the dignity of human beings in their daily lives, with all that this entails in social and economic matters.” As Buchanan points out:
“As design finds closer alignment with other disciplines, it also is forced to contend with jealous guardians, each seeking to characterize design in its own terms, and as an application of its own knowledge and practices. Thus, it remains a problem for design to explain itself among new friends and acquaintances, resisting attempts to appropriate design by other disciplines while, at the same time, resisting the simpleminded identification of design with art that many people still assume.”
Drawing on Buchanan’s reference to Harold Rosenberg’s response to the renunciation of the “intellectual and emotional ingredient in twentieth-century art” in the 1960s, we may find that the quieting of design’s anxiety today also “is bound to suggest the cheerfulness of a sick room.”
Indeed, in reading Buchanan’s account of the anxieties faced by the art and design communities through, in part, the complex relationship between them, Donald Schön’s discussion on ‘The Crisis of Confidence in Professional Knowledge’ in The Reflective Practitioner comes to mind. Schön’s concept of such a crisis of confidence refers to the uncertainty and self-doubt experienced by professionals when traditional frameworks and boundaries of their discipline are challenged or blurred.
Schön emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and learning in addressing the crisis of confidence. For Schön, traditional disciplinary boundaries often limit professionals’ ability to effectively address complex and uncertain problems. To overcome this limitation, he advocates for collaboration across disciplines to bring together diverse perspectives, expertise, and approaches to problem-solving. For his part, Buchanan does underscore the multidisciplinary nature of contemporary design practice, which incorporates insights from fields such as engineering, psychology, business, and the humanities. However, this integration also sustains tensions and negotiations as designers seek to assert their unique contributions amid competing disciplinary perspectives.
Again following Rosenberg, Buchanan points to the “quality of mind that both the artist and the designer share in the beginning of their work” as the basis for the “intellectual gravity” of this work—the basis on which design might distinguish (in both sense of the word) itself in its movement towards “deeper understanding of the problematic situation of the product and the processes of design thinking.” One aspect of this quality of mind which Buchanan raises is the capacity for wonder or astonishment:
“For all of their differences in direction and purpose, art and design share an intellectual gravity in their beginnings. In the contemporary world, where gravity is easily lost or submerged in the crosscurrents of popular media and economic pressure, we find the instant copying that appropriates art to mass communication or that reengineers a successful product in the imitative products of competitors. However, intellectual gravity remains in the best and most original works of art and design, and it is the source of wonder that we feel when we first experience such works.”
As Buchanan elaborates, wonder and astonishment “provide the power for sustained engagement—they are the source of passion and curiosity…they signify the initial moment in inquiry when a new idea emerges.” In this way, wonder and astonishment connect to that method of reasoning which, to nineteenth-century American philosopher and logician Charles Saunders Pierce, can alone incorporate new knowledge and insights: abductive reasoning. As Christian Madsbjerg notes in his book Sensemaking, “Peirce argued that abductive reasoning is the only appropriate process for messy and evasive data. It is where true creativity lies.”
Wonder and astonishment aren’t comfortable concepts for those disciplines with with design are today partnered. As a consequence (or perhaps cause) of the quieting anxiety noted by Buchanan, in both design education and industry “problem solving takes priority over problem finding.” Abductive reasoning is messy, as Madsbjerg points out. And yet, wonder and astonishment are moments of insight through which fragmented information is transformed into a meaningful and insightful portrayal of reality.
If designers lean into our anxieties rather than ignore them, design might come to distinguish itself as the discipline best positioned to make sense of our worlds—best positioned (perhaps to the chagrin of Madsbjerg) as the sensemaking practice which “shows us how to cultivate a perspective on how data fits together as an expressive portrait.”
Read the article here.
Works also mentioned:
Madsbjerg, C., 2017. Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm. Hachette UK.
Schön, D.A., 2017. The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action. Routledge.