Nancy Hughes - Thinking in 'designerly' ways

This was the first of a series of lectures given by Nancy Hughes - a researcher with a background to graphic design. We were also given an editorial on Articulating Design Thinking - a book containing 13 papers from researchers based in 8 different countries. Here is a link, here.

This lecture focused on representing design ideas, whilst studying other designers and designing itself. Different types of knowledge were highlighted in a design context. These were:

• Episodic knowledge - based on experience.
• Declarative knowledge - rule-based and explicit.
• Procedural knowledge - Embedded through repetition, which becomes automatic.

We also had a quick mental exercise and were asked to draw an object based on the word alone. This involved drawing a chair, bird and house. The methodology behind design thinking was explored broadly, such as "seeing" an idea by sketching it in a book in order to make visualisation easier.

The next lecture in this series will look at representing our design ideas.