Design
Designers often speak of design as a process. Typically, design thinking leads to design making, which leads to artifacts. Yet the design process also leads to something more—to new knowledge. Thus, we might characterize designing as a form of learning.
Curiously, the converse is also true. We might characterize learning as a form of designing. That is, the process of observing, reflecting, and making (and iterating those steps) may aid learning. Several designers and teachers have recognized the link between designing and learning and are bringing designing into curricula not just in college but also in high school and even elementary school. See, for example, a recent New York Times article, “Putting New Tools in Students’ Hands” [1].
I acknowledge framing designing as learning (without providing further explanation) may be little more than trading one black-box process for another, but if we can find robust models of learning, they might prove useful in designing and might suggest ways to improve the design process.
The connection between designing and learning was brought into sharp focus for me last summer while editing an article by Maurício Manhães [2], who wrote, “Design and innovation are both knowledge creation processes” [3]. What struck me about Manhães’s article was that he introduced the SECI model of knowledge creation and explicitly applied it to analyzing and improving the design process. I was further struck by the similarity or even isomorphism of the SECI model and the analysis-synthesis bridge model described in this forum in the March + April 2008 issue