ICT and Imagination

At the end a recurring question remains: What good are ICTs to design education and practice? To answer that, it is necessary to focus on imagination and the production of visual images as the core activity of design. What is imagination? And can ICTs “think” imaginatively and see visions? No, they cannot. Imagination is a concept with a long and shifting course of progression through Western civilization. In ancient Athens both Plato and Aristotle regarded imagination as mimesis or imitation of nature. For neither of these philosophers does imagination directly apprehend reality – only reason, they argued, can do that. But for Aristotle, imagination is necessary to intelligent thinking because imagination links sensation to reason, even more than memory, which can only look backward in time, is capable of doing. For Aristotle, imagination is a formal representation of both sensation and reason, and it is therefore an important mental power. The Classical conceptualization of imagination as imitation or “holding a mirror up to nature” dominated the philosophy of art until the European Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries. Then in the Romantic Age of the late 18th and early 19th centuries a new conceptualization of imagination claimed that imagination is not so much a mirror as a light that can actually apprehend and illuminate ultimate reality. The poet’s mind, the great Romantics believed, creates images of truth and beauty and goodness. Moreover, the modern philosopher Nietzsche in the late 19th century claimed that not only does imagination create visions of reality but it actually creates reality itself.

Design and Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) technology is a sophisticated high-tech form of ICT that has recently been enthusiastically promoted as having a great potential benefit to both design activity and design education. VR is a computer-generated visualized form of communication in which participants visit a fantastic world where they feel a sense of presence and interact with each other through the use of first-person perspective screen representations known as avatars. It is often thought that VR is created by computers, but it is in fact a creation of the humans who program computers with their own ontological assumptions, especially about cause and effect relationships. In other words, VR is not an accurate representation of reality. It may – as in VR games – be a gross distortion of reality. Unlike the real world, VR is not independent of human control, and it is nowhere near as complex as everyday life experiences. Therefore, the use of VR for educational purposes remains dubious, especially in regard to the transference of the behaviour of avatars in VR to the understanding users of the technology in real life. So too is the use of VR technology questionable for the work of design, for the simple reason that it does not provide accurate and thorough representations of reality. When VR is compared to the visual representations that human beings make by the mysterious co-ordination of brain and eye and hand, they fall far short of realizing their grandiose claim of being “virtually” real.

The Design Studio

The design studio is the prototype of design education, particularly for architects but more and more for engineers too – though engineers prefer the word “lab” to “studio.” Although the design studio is known today mainly through the “reflection in action” theory of Donald Schön (1984, 1988), this manner of education first developed at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the seventeenth century for the promotion of neoclassical aesthetic values, and it has continued ever since to be used, even by the Bauhaus in Germany in the early twentieth century after function had replaced form as the primary architectural value. The principal value of the design studio for Schön is that it properly emphasizes creativity for designers, instead of analysis and criticism, as preferred by the “technical rationality” of university culture as a whole. The university has responded by criticizing the design studio for being too subjective and therefore isolated within the academic world. In recent years the design studio has also been criticized for being elitist by focusing too much on aesthetic concerns, instead of promoting cultural sensitivity to social justice and environmental sustainability. Other critics complain that the design studio still relies on paper and hand drawings too much, instead of committing fully to ICTs and the virtual reality (VR) of cyberspace. Such criticisms, however, tend to be overstated, and the design studio is likely to continue in its present form for some time to come, because that is where most designing students learn the culture of design and develop a lifelong identification with their instructors and their fellow students.

Professionalism in Architecture and Engineering

Increasingly, pressure has been exerted on both architects and engineers to conceptualize their work in terms of economic demands on the one hand and communitarian ethics on the other hand – to be business people and cultivators as well as designers of visual images for the development of future buildings and products. Professionalism is seen to be a means of compromising among the demands of technical expertise, business imperatives, and social ethics. Thus the Mediation Modern of Design Professionalism is proposed as a method of harmonizing the various demands of the triadic forces comprising design as an activity in the 21st century. The history of design professionalism has been different for architects and engineers. Modern architects first regarded themselves as scholarly gentlemen whose work was high art, whereas engineers begin as self-made men who by learning science gained the knowledge they needed to make themselves valuable to society. For these reasons, architects resisted professionalization while engineers embraced professionalization. At the present time the original architectural identification with art and the original engineering identification with science are both being submerged beneath the demands of the marketplace and the political forum. Two things are certain in this new professional climate. Architects and engineers no longer come from different social backgrounds, and neither profession is dominated by white males as much as it used to be.

Conceptualizing ICT

It is necessary to conceptualize technology in general before it is possible to conceptualize information and communication technology (ICT) in particular. Like so many ideas in the Western world, the conceptualization of technology begins with Plato and Aristotle in ancient Athens, and ever since that time, philosophers have struggled with the idea that techne – translated best as “making” – involves a mysterious co-operation between imagination and reason, or, in modern terms, art and science. Technology, like storytelling, is a fundamental human activity, and technology operates at the core of all design, whether it be architecture, engineering design, or industrial design. Andrew Feenberg has established what is perhaps the dominant conceptualization of technology at the present time with his argument that technology is neither a handy tool for human mastery of the environment, nor an out-of-control external force that will ultimately destroy humanity, but a cultural phenomenon that we can employ democratically to improve our future existence. Aristotle argues that there is an essence or formal cause in anything that is made, and that this essence determines its end or final cause. Feenberg, however, argues that people determine the end of any technology by the way that they choose to use it. This difference – teleology versus democratic utilitarianism – is a theme that recurs throughout the book. This chapter ends by identifying ICT as the latest, computerized, globalized manifestation of technology’s recurring dream and promise of transforming the world that we are given into the world that we desire.

Complexity Theory Revisited

The fact that creativity is rationally unaccountable plagues design theory, and it tends to exclude the education done in design studios from the reputation of intellectual rigor enjoyed throughout most of the university. Design begins as a rational linear process of convergent thinking in which a problem and a task are defined, but then – often suddenly – a divergence of thinking happens as imagination visualizes an unforeseen creative solution. The problem is, no satisfactory account has ever been given of creative imagination. It just happens – more often in some people than in others. Creativity is a paradoxical combination of analytic and synthetic thinking, and this fact alone precludes computers from making successful designs. Computers cannot be programmed with sufficient algorithms to represent the full complexity of variables inherent in the design problem, and computers cannot make creative leaps of imagination to envision a creative solution, so they are irrelevant to the deepest work of design thinking. It has been suggested recently that a satisfactory theoretical accounting for design creativity might be provided by complexity theory, principally because the central concept of this theory is autopoiesis. Certain systems, such as those of living organisms, exhibit great internal complexity united with a single external goal, and the systems themselves, through interaction with the environment, create unique ways of achieving that goal.

Pedagogy and Curriculum in Architecture and Engineering

There are two controversies besetting design education at the present time. The first controversy is the question of whether the goal of design education should be the development of individual talent or the development of cultural and ethical sensitivity. The second controversy is whether the methodology of design education should consist of the transmission of knowledge or the construction of knowledge. Indeed, constructivism, based firmly on the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey, has recently become the standard paradigm for the delivery of education to architects. The “reflective learning” model of Donald Schön (1984, 1988) and the “experiential learning” model of David Kolb (1983) are exemplary, though both have had their critics. The principal criticism is that these constructivist theories are not academically robust, because they depend too much on tacit and evolving knowledge. Nigel Cross (2001) suggests that there is “a designerly way of knowing,” but he has not defined such an epistemology, though it might be found, as it was suggested in Chapter 3, in Frascari’s argument for Vico’s “universal images” as the language of design. It is possible, too, that positivism might be replaced by complexity theory in design education. Complexity theory has the advantage of relying strongly on autopoiesis as an integral part of the design process, thus making uncertainty more acceptable to academic accounts. The trouble with complexity theory, however, is that it eliminates individual imagination from the creative process, and neither architects nor engineers are prepared to make such a concession.

Architects and Engineers

As designers, architects, and engineers are united by their commitment to technological thinking with the ultimate end of their productions being determined, not by the architects and engineers themselves, but by the consumers and users of the products that they visualize. Thus, prudential and practical considerations distinguish architects from artists and engineers from scientists, but the purely formal intellectual values of beauty and truth, enjoyed by artists and scientists respectively, tend to haunt architects and engineers and inform their personalities and dreams. Equally important is the fact that the ideals of beauty and truth tend to separate architects from engineers. A typology of contrast is evident here. Yet, because both these occupations share an identity as designers, it is necessary for scholars to merge architects and engineers conceptually. The first architectural theorist, Vitruvius in ancient Rome, argued that architects need to possess both theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge – that is, art or science and technology – and it is clear that Vitruvius’s definition of an architect would include what we call an engineer. Vitruvius had an immense influence on architectural thinking, which for many centuries emphasized his ideals of beauty at the expense of practicality. This tendency is evident in both the works of the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and later the Beaux Arts tradition in France that lasted until the twentieth century when function replaced form as the core value of architecture. At the same time in the modern age, engineers split apart from architects and established an independent profession.

Articulating Design Education

Design as an activity may be conceptualized analytically by saying that it consists, first and foremost, in the ability to create visual images of new structures and products; secondly, in the ability to produce such images in a way that will balance the economic demands of clients with the cultural demands of society; and finally, in the ability to use and control various ICTs for the production of visualizations. At the core of design activity is the phenomenon of creativity, the most mysterious and problematic feature of design, because it is thought to emanate from the imagination in a way that precludes and defies rational choice and control. J. P. Guilford’s concept of divergent thinking helps to explain creativity, as does Donald Schön’s concept of reflection-in-action, contrasted to Herbert Simon’s argument that design thinking is primarily problem solving, but ultimately, creativity and imagination appear to be elusive and uncanny concepts. Aristotle’s insistence on the formally teleological nature of making suggests that there may be a difference between art, or pure creativity, and design, or technical creativity, with its emphasis on utility. Creativity has always been required of designers, but in today’s world cultural awareness is also needed, in order to comply with communitarian ethics, with its emphasis on co-operation and consensus building, directed mainly toward environmental sustainability. Finally, expertise in the use of ICTS is now being universally advocated for all designers.

Reviewing Engineers and Introducing Industrial Designers

Much of the analysis and argument in the first half of the book has focused more on architects than on engineers, simply because architects, with their fondness for art and imagination, often seem closer to the core of design activity and education than engineers, with their fondness for science and rationality. Moreover, industrial designers have not entered the discussion at all. Therefore, a review of the argument with a focus on both engineering and industrial design seems useful at this point. It is also time to look more closely at the relationship between imagination and rationality, since a full illumination of that relationship in regard to design is the ultimate aim of this entire project, culminating in Chapter 10. The key to achieving this understanding is Aristotle, who, it must be remembered, offered the first definition of design as techne, or knowledge gained by doing – as opposed to episteme, or knowledge gained by thinking. Aristotle also called this distinction practical knowledge as opposed to theoretical knowledge. It should be remembered too that Aristotle regarded theoretical knowledge – of which the beauty sought by artists and the truth sought by scientists are perfect examples – as “higher” than practical knowledge, because they are manifested as universal ideas and they exist as ends in themselves. Design, as we have seen repeatedly, is concerned with physical particulars, and it is mainly utilitarian. Just the same, Aristotle stated that the practical knowledge of techne, like the theoretical knowledge of episteme, is achieved through rationality. This is where the problem occurs, as far as design is concerned.