Episode 1 - Reflective Practice
This podcast features an interview with Kees Dorst, Professor of Design, at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. The interview is followed by a discussion between Peter and Mieke, who talk about some of the things in the interview that resonated with them. Below are some key references for you to follow up on the ideas that are talked about.
Kees Dorst is one of the best-known current figures in design theory and methodology and a former student at IDE. He has published many highly-cited papers, and one that is mentioned in the podcast is his early study of how expert designers think: Creativity in the Design Process: Co-evolution of Problem and Solution. He has written many books on design and the recent book that he mentions, Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design, is fast becoming a key work for designers. He is also a founding director of the Centre for Designing out Crime in Sydney and gives some examples of the work that has been done. The Centre produces nice animations showing the methods behind the work that they do in Frame Creation and Framing.
The major person that is talked about through this podcast is Donald Schön, who was hugely influential in design (and many other fields) with his book The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. The book is written in a very accessible way and is worth looking at (particularly the study of an architect and their student (Chapter 2) that Mieke mentions in the discussion). You can explore further aspects of Schön’s work on reflective practice through the following papers on: framing, seeing as, design as a reflective conversation, and types of design thinking. A lecture that Schön gave to designers in 1989 explaining his theory in detail with lots of interesting examples is also worth watching.
Another person that Kees mentions is Herbert Simon, a Nobel prize winning economist who was deeply interested in design in the 1960s and 70s. His classic book is The Sciences of the Artificial which Kees describes as more of a rational approach to thinking about designing and design processes. The book is an essential reference work for design theorists and is packed with ideas about design, human behaviour, complexity, and many other things.