Gulf of Creation
The concept of specialized division of labor has been persisting since the industrial revolution. There are also many divisions in the field of design. We see an increasing number of prefixes in front of the term “designer”: industrial designer, architecture designer, graphic designer, interaction designer, service designer, visual designer, web designer, landscape designer, hair designer, image designer, interior designer, fashion designer, furniture designer, packaging designer, and many more. These prefixes correspond to the objects of design, meaning that these design objects serve as the basis for classifying designers.
However, there is another group of designers who are not classified based on their design objects, and sometimes, the word “designer” does not even appear in their titles. Yet, they are indeed designers, widely involved in the design process. Such designers can be called user researchers, experience researchers, or requirement analysts. It can be seen that these designers are classified based on design activities (or stages of design process). These designers are mostly confined to problem finding, needs analysis, and exploration of others’ experience, which are common activities in the early stages of design.
The underlying logic of this classification is that design activities can be divided into two types: “exploration” and “creation.” Design is seen as a linear process that can be split into the sequential stages of “exploration” and “creation.” As a result, designers are also divided into two groups: one group inquires the problem space by exploration, while the other group uses the research reports submitted by the former to create the solutions.
This concept manifests in two forms in reality. One exists within the internal structure of a company’s design department, where the department might be split into several smaller groups. A typical design department of a tech-company might be divided into experience research, interaction design, and visual design groups. The other form exists between client and contractor, where the client, as the executor of the creative activities, delegates the explorative work to the contractor. In either form, the connection between the “exploratory designers” and the “creative designers” is often a written or oral report.
I believe that such division can cause a separation between problems and solutions, leading to what I call the “Gulf of Creation,” ultimately resulting in compromised design outputs.
Modern science is a good partner to industrialization. It likes to decompose things, define boundaries, study mechanisms of operation, and build models, in order to achieve standardization and process optimization, which is essential for the efficiency sought by mass production. Since the rise of design research, there has also been an effort to simulate design activities by reducing them to atomic activities (simples) combined according to certain mechanisms. This represents a mechanical decomposition and reduction of design.
D.school's Division of Modes of Design
The renowned d.school attempted to break down design into five modes of activity, where the design process is a combination of these modes of activities. Although d.school did not intend to reduce design to a linear activity, that famous image composed of five hexagons has led many people to misunderstand this concept. Another image that illustrates divergent thinking (Analysis/Diverge) and convergent thinking (Synthesis/Converge) in design is also highly misleading, causing many to believe that design can be simply broken down into two processes of divergence and convergence. Most critically, in a document published by d.school called Bootcamp Bootleg, designers are guided to reduce the problem space to a single problem statement during the “Define” stage, using a statement as the link between the problem and the solution. This represents an extreme form of reductionism.
Divergence/Convergence In Design Process
In the design process, as the problem is continuously explored, an image mapping the problem space is gradually formed in the designer’s mind. However, in this extreme process of reduction, much information is discarded, and an image is reduced to a single point. Astonishingly, the final design output relies entirely on this single point. This is exactly what is happening within corporates' design departments and between clients and contractors: the image formed in “exploration“ is reduced to an oral or written report, which then serves as the basis for “creation“ in the linear process.
The logic here is to reduce the understanding of the problem space into symbols, and then to restore these symbols back into an understanding of the problem space. Needless to say, we can see three limitations of this reduct-restore process. First, no matter how carefully written, a report cannot fully capture the “image” in the researcher’s mind. Second, the reduction turns the dynamic understanding of the problem space into static knowledge. Lastly, the restoration of symbols by different individuals can lead to further deviations in understanding.
Scholar Nigel Cross conducted verbal analysis research on the design process, attempting to explore the connections between problems and solutions. He referred to the bridging process of problems and solutions as “Creative Leap”. In his book Designerly way of knowing, he reveals through a case study of verbal analysis on “Creative Leap” process that there is a parallel evolution between the problem and solution (meaning that the understanding of the problem continues to evolve while generating the solution). He also highlights the close matchup-relationship between the problem space and the solution space (which he calls a “wonderful relationship”) . Although Nigel Cross borrowed from Rosenman and Gero’s mechanical model of design to explain “Creative Leap” process, he also expressed skepticism about the possibility of modeling design process through computing.
A designer’s understanding of the problem is a dynamic image in their mind, and it cannot be simply reduced to static symbols. An understanding constructed solely through static symbols is compromised and biased, as the designers responsible for “creation” lack the “exploration” experience, where the image is formed from very personal experience of “exploration.” In design, “exploration” and “creation” are inseparable. Designers are engaged in “creating” while “exploring,” and “exploring” while “creating.” Therefore, design cannot be simply divided into “exploration” and “creation,” nor can it be broken down into a linear combination of the two.
This mechanical division of designers and design activities has multiple causes, and I believe one important reason is the continuously differentiation of disciplines. We can glimpse this from the job requirements for designers: positions involved in “exploration” often require a background in psychology or sociology, while positions involved in “creation” typically require drawing skills by various softwares. Our design education did not integrate all the skills needed by a designer. Fortunately, many schools have recognized this issue. If dividing at first was for efficiency, integrating now is for effectiveness. I look forward to the unification of “exploration” and “creation” in the future.