Design Scenarios: Water based Design Opportunities

Image: A visit to Calico Museum as part of the DCC course in 1999 by Debashree in an assignment created to teach scenario visualisation, learning by doing.

Background: Scenario visualisations in Design
Scenario visualisations can be made at any stage of the design journey. In the early stages these are typically rather abstract and with a low content of details, although some parts may be vividly expressed if these components or parts are already clearly conceptualized due to either historical reasons or if the larger scenario is being around this part which is already. Design visualizations can cover many attributes of the system that is being modeled. Some could show the structural and formal attributes of the system while others can go on to include an expression of several intangible aspects as well as those that can be seen and felt. These can also include the relationship between the components of the system and help give us an overview of the total system which is a perspective that would need to be considered when taking major decisions at the design stage itself. Many strategic decisions need to be taken at an early stage and these scenario visualizations provide the framework for appreciating the particular solution that is on offer. Several alternate scenarios can be examined before taking a particular decision and some decisions may not be reversible without incurring a huge cost or effort and therefore these need to be subjected to much advance planning and participatory modes of decision making in a democratic framework. Our cities and its future can be determined by a design process that is both visible as well as informed by expert action if we were to adopt a way forward that could accommodate such processes that may be required to make visible major infrastructure offerings as well as details of cost and impact assessments, all done in a manner that can be appreciated by the common man in the street. This means that the language of discourse would need to move from economic models in an abstract mathematical formulation to a more visibly appreciated modeling system that can show and tell the intended structures and the affects on our lives. It is here that scenario visualization in the form of picture stories or rich picture representations can make a huge difference to our understanding of the complex phenomena that go into many such projects of public good.

In our attempt to teach the art of scenario visualization we devised an assignment that could get the involvement of an entire class of design students at a high level of motivation while undertaking these experiences. The introductory phase of the scenario visualization assignment has the student sharing with the class, in one composite rich picture, an introduction to themselves in an attempt to show who we are. This assignment is the first of many visualization tasks done by the design student jn the DCC course and here they are expected to introspect and identify aspects of their lives that have significantly contributed to shaping their attitudes and abilities as they are today. Students are them asked to express their imagination in the form of images in juxtaposition on a single sheet of paper which they could use to tell their story of themselves. This is a first experience in show and tell about something that they are very familiar with already, themselves. The next stage is the experiencing of an interesting space or event in the city which can be done as a group and after the immersive experience the students are aslked to represent the experience in all its facets, again as a single rich picture representation that can be shared with the whole class. This time the event or space that is visited is common for all the students but it becomes clear that each student brings back their own point of view that is unique and which is shaped by their past experiences as well as their belief systems and cultural roots when it comes to styles of representation chosen. Going from a familiar but usually ignored representation of the self to a common space with different points of view are quite revealing when taken together for a discussion.

Image: DCC2008 students admiring Debashree's 1999 scenario artwork in my office today.

Calico Museum Visit and the DCC Course
The students are then given topics that they could examine in depth through the processes of group brain-storming and modeling in order to make sense of the complex interplay of factors that influence the situations that are being studied. These processes too lead to visual modeling of a variety of kinds and at the end of these collective journeys the students build a model that helps categorise the forces that influence the situation as well as discover a metaphor that can give meaning and a memorable setting for the structure that is discovered by the group. These structures are not sacred truths but are tentative offerings that can be discussed and debated leading to appropriate modifications, but as they stand they represent the current understanding of the situation and this does bring a great deal of clarity to the complex situation that is being handled by the group. In the DCC class of 1999 we asked the students to visit the Calico Museum of Textiles in Ahmedabad and after an immersive experience of that visit they were asked to make a rich picture scenario of their visit with all the details shown in one large format picture. The experiences that were sequential are now represented in a spatial manner with images juxtaposed and expressed on one single sheet and the variety of expressions were truly staggering. At the end of the major assignment the students are once again asked to show the design opportunities that they had imagined and this time they are to express a scenario of a pure imaginative landscape and an expression of the possible future with all the associated details that would make it both viable as well as desirable. This is a great introduction to design scenario visualization that can be used in all attempts to model the future solutions and make these visible to an interested and informed audience with a certain degree of credibility.

Image: DCC Blackboard with the assignment description as a structure model.

Water based Design Opportunities for India
This year we have assigned the mapping of Design Opportunities with Water in each of five geographic regions of India. Each student from the respective group would choose one specific design opportunity in which they have a personal conviction and through a process of imagination, dreaming and exploration build a visual scenario that can be shared with the class as an image in a show and tell mode of presentation. Each group would meet in a round table presentation for a per review and feedback session where the visual scenarios would be presented and based on the feed back from the group members each student would send in a 200 word email to describe their scenario and the specific design opportunity that they have developed for the future keeping a 15 year time horizon for having built an enterprise to roll out the design into the real world. We look forward to seeing all the presentations and to sharing it with the world through this blog in the near future.

For further reading look at this paper on Design Visualisation from my website. (pdf file 691 kb)

Design Journey: Styles and modes of thoughts and actions in design

Image: Design Journey: Thoughts and actions in design
The design journey starts in the mind and in the senses with the first perception of an interesting relationship and pattern that is triggered like the “stone in the pond” metaphor suggests. The ripples that are generated by the impact of the first sensations start a flow of excitement and this results in a dual process of exploration and inploration, an outward looking and pattern seeking behavior as well as an inward looking insight seeking behavior, both working in tandem. Exploration is much like that of an explorer wandering in an unknown territory and the search and research is done with a high degree of motivation seeking insights and nuggets of knowledge with all the curiosity and motivation that drives such a search for new knowledge. The inward journey which I call inploration is not just made up of a string of images being manipulated in the mind but these include numerous sensory inputs and information that is drawn from all the sensory sources of touch, smell, taste and feel as well as being informed by memory and prior knowledge that is made available in a non-verbal mode, with deep feeling and sensitivity.

Each surge of exploration is accompanied by a corresponding set of inplorations and these together produce a number of insights that are gathered and held in what I call the designers antennae, a a collective phrase for the reservoir of sensory and imaginary information that collectively leads to produce a degree of conviction in the direction and content of the design journey. The nature of design thinking goes through a variety of phases and these thinking styles and modes would change according to the stage in the particular design journey that is being undertaken. These modes of thought can be iterative and the designer is usually quite comfortable with a great deal of ambiguity that would need to be faced all through this kind of exploration and articulation. Starting with clarifying intentions through some pretty focused and also fuzzy explorations using intentional thinking the design journey would progress to the establishment of categories and a degree of order in the understanding of the design space. This would be done by repeated bouts of brainstorming and categorization till a suitable framework for the structure of the design space is developed and modeled. This process is not straight forward but could be like a meandering stream that flows through the terrain of the design landscape exploring the context and the trends are gleaned to inform further action in the form of tentative and later more definite insights that would feed into the designers convictions about the nature of the design opportunity. A variety of approaches are explored and these would be tested periodically at both the macro as well as the micro level of detail. The macro would inform the designer of the viability of the approach while the micro details would provide approaches to the numerous possibilities that would be available in the choice of materials, structure, form and performance attributes that could be taken up for further refinement at the stage of taking firm decisions.

A number of analytical tools could be adopted by the designer and these would be typically drawn for a host of disciplines and fields of human knowledge and depending on the nature of the task the knowledge could be from any domain that is found relevant and usually there us no hard and fast boundary for what would be considered a valid field to be included in such a journey. Access is important and the constraints of cost, access, ability of the designer and his team would usually determine what is included and what is excluded in the scope of the design journey. These explorations and inplorations would continue till the designer feels comfortable with the quality of the concepts or when the deadline for decision draws near when in a creative leap of motivated imagination a number of concepts are offered for examination and subsequent testing and evaluation. This is done through a unique set of thought patterns that move from explorative and generative in which many alternatives are thrown up and this is followed by rapid and deliberate combinatorial explorations which tend to produce a situation for the incubation of new and interesting patters in a creative leap of imagination and expression. All through these explorations numerous external representations are produced and set aside, rarely documented, but all of these produce traces in the mind that are rich with insights and these move quite explicitly form being abstract to being increasingly tangible in their form and treatment. For instance early expressions may take the form of deedless and later ones in the form of more explicit diagrams and even three dimensional expressions which too would move from soft models to a more hard models with defined contours and attributes. Cascading decisions are taken all along this journey and the early decisions are usually strategic in nature while the later decisions are of a more tactical nature and would deal with numerous details that would need to be resolved to make the concept fit the context which will be in constant review. However once the design action is taken in a reflexive space the act is done and it is usually out of the hands of the designer and only the consequences would be attributable to the designer and the final outcome could be either success or even disaster if the context were to change dramatically with the designer having little control on these outcomes.

While all these explorations are in progress the designers emotions too would go through a roller-coaster ride with all its associated ups and downs, and at some stage even an extreme low in confidence and conviction which could lead to the project itself being dropped or delayed by being set aside till the circumstance or opportunity were to change for the better. This can be a very lonely journey even when one works in a team unless there is a good deal of external representation the various team members would have no access to the designers imagination and therefore would not be able to share in the associated convictions that the design thinker would have generated at any particular stage of the design journey. The impact of the design outcome is compared to the effect of a well managed fire, being beneficial, however if the factors are out of control the results could be a disaster, but the designer would still be responsible for the consequences and this can be quite painful indeed. In the review of the numerous decisions the design journey would involve evaluative thoughts that are reflective in nature and decision making is by judgment and not just by the accumulation of facts and evidence that would be used to justify a particular decision. The compositions that are offered in design are one in many options and there are no correct answers and it is the judgment call of the designer that is valued in most cases although many clients would insist on the use of many systematic decision tools even if they have a limited relevance.

Demystifying the act of design thinking and visualisation.

Image: A preliminary sketch by architect Louis I. Kahn for the IIMA Building project in Ahmedabad. "Plan Sketches early revision Nov. 14 1962", IIMA campus & buildings, Ahmedabad, India

Demystifying the act of design thinking and visualisation in the DCC course.
In 2003, exactly four years ago, I made the following submission to the PhD-Design discussion list to explain my understanding of design thinking at that stage in the context of the discussions that were taking place on a list populated by as many as 1200 professors and scholars of design research and theory. When I look back at this submission I do not find much that I would change today since my views have not changed much but my understanding of design has undergone a massive change in the same time.

Today when we were discussion with our post graduate batch of students working on the articulation and expression of design opportunities dealing with “Sustainability” in their core areas of – Learning, Food, Health, Mobility and Play – I found that the students required a thread of ideas about design imagination and visualisation to hang on to, when they went about their task of trying to figure out how designers thought and how they would then share these thoughts with their colleagues and to other stake-holders who may play a major role in the implementation of that design concept that was on offer. Their imagination that was triggered by their perception of the possibilities and limitations needed to be shown in some way for a transfer of the concept to be effected. It is only when the core of the concept is made visible or in some way tangible would their peers and partners carry the same degree of conviction that they themselves may have as a result of their internal-to-themselves-thoughts, a result of “inploration” (a new design word – see link) that is a product of sustained thought and cumulative insights.

Image: "Partial site plan and elevation sketches, early version", IIMA campus & buildings, Ahmedabad, India

The drawings and sketches made by architect Louis I. Kahn while working with NID on the design of the Indian Institute of Management’s campus in Ahmedabad in the early 60’s is used as an example of progressive visualisations that were made in the design process – from vague and tentative expressions (doodles) to definite and decisive form and proportions (measured drawings) – all done as new information and feedback would have come in from the client (Vikram Sarabhai is mentioned in one sketch) and from his own imagination and conviction as revised from time to time. A description of all images is given in the notes below.

The students were required to explore some selected concepts and meet experts and users and develop insights which would inform their further moves and build their own layers of conviction as they moved towards a solution, all with a number of variations and alternatives that unfold as the development work progresses. These positions based on conviction would be used to take decisions and to evaluate and choose the one alternative that eventually would represent the final synthesis that would be chosen individually or collectively with other stake-holders. I am quoting below the post that was made on the PhD-Design list to explain the process of design visualisation and its role in design synthesis and decision making.

Image: Plan Sketch sixth version with library in diagonal square, IIMA campus & buildings, Ahmedabad, India

Image: First floor plan - twelfth version 1969., IIMA campus & buildings, Ahmedabad, India

I quote (note there is a nested quote below which is part of the PhD-Design submission):

Creativity vs Design Visualisation: Looking Inside vs. Looking Outside

Prof. M P Ranjan - 20 September 2003 (A very long post: Not for the light-hearted))

Creativity for me has been a very ambiguous target and much of the published references having raised more questions than helped provide answers to many pressing questions that come to ones mind. However there is such a large body of literature on the subject and it is interesting to see that there are as many sceptics as there are the believers in search of the final truth in this matter.

I have all but stopped using the term “creativity” because of the numerous myths that surround the term in the domains of art, music and literature and nowadays in a large section of management writings and in science break-through as well. However I am as yet unable to find a simple, compelling and fitting explanation of the phenomenon of creativity that is not prescriptive or aimed at the uninitiated others in search of that “elusive leap of imagination” or “flight of fantasy” that I can use with my students effectively.

From a design education perspective I have found it to be far more fruitful to focus on the external models created by a profession, particularly in those tangible traces of external manifestations that are used by designers when grappling with a solution for a complex design problem, at the macro level of the total system or at the micro level of part detailing, that are being attempted in the process of design synthesis. For me It has been more interesting to try and watch the process of design synthesis through these external manifestations and to try and discover the very fuzzy initial processes through the evidence provided by the external traces of early models (external) that led to the comprehension of some major new pattern or breakthrough in the course of the design exploration and iteration. This may be a more fruitful course of investigation in the understanding of the phenomenon of innovation and creativity and perhaps the field of Cognitive Psychology will provide some of the answers that we seek in the years ahead.

Several years ago I therefore abandoned the search for a description of creativity processes while dealing with my students in the design methodology class (now called “Design Concepts and Concerns”) and I shifted my attention to the series of external models that are generated by various professionals from a number of fields of art and design. To make my views on the subject available to my students I offered a set of class notes and created a lecture with supporting visuals from the works of great architects and artists. We had with us a remarkable set of original drawings and pre-visualisation sketches created by the architect Louis I. Kahn who worked with my Institute (NID) as the local architects to design and execute the campus for the Indian Institute of Management. These are now published in the book “Complete Works of Louis I. Kahn” (* see reference below). I used these and other available pre-visualisation images of progressive external models to argue against the single great moment of break-through and in favour of this progressive external manifestation that facilitated the right and left-brain interaction in the process of design synthesis. My paper that was created as class notes in 1997 to support a visual lecture is quoted below. (Since it has not been published outside NID so far, reproduce it here to facilitate this discussion).


QUOTE:
Class Notes and Lecture on Drawing for Visualisation
AEP Bridge Semester
National Institute of Design
Paldi, Ahmedabad - 380 007.

16 October 1997
Design Visualisation

M P Ranjan

Design is a responsible and creative activity that aims to understand human needs and aspirations in order to generate effective alternate solutions that can resolve these needs. By its very nature the process of design deals with extremely complex interrelationships of issues and concerns of the user, the environment and the well being of society in social, technological and economic realms. The designer is therefore in the arena of generating scenarios and specifications and offering these for selection and decision within the framework of professional contributions offered to a wide variety of clients. The nature and complexity of different design tasks may vary to a great extent. Some tasks are technologically complex but most design tasks deal with other realms of complexity in the social, economic or psychological dimensions of users and the community that supports the conduct and performance of the task.

Design has therefore moved from being an individual enterprise to that of being a team effort with a variety of members being drawn from a large number of diverse disciplines, the selection depending on the nature of the task and our current understanding of the same.

Professional design has the further complexity of being conducted in an extremely competitive business and economic landscape where the demands of time and quality are stringent and is accompanied by a very high degree of risk. These pressures have mandated a number of critical changes in the processes that designers and their collaborators employ in the conduct of the design programme. Design has borrowed work strategies from all formal disciplines where effective approaches and methodologies have been innovated and developed through experience and research. The morphology of the design task has therefore become a complex set of iterations that revisit the stages of defining and redefining the task leading to improved understanding of the task itself. In this process several alternate scenarios are developed and examined critically and this may lead to restatement of the very problem itself.

Design thinking is distinctly different from scientific and management thinking styles in that the designer and the design team are willing to cope with a great deal of ambiguity while the boundaries of the design opportunity are gradually brought into sharp focus. The process of refining the understanding of the design task and that of generating alternate solutions or scenarios follow one another in fairly quick cycles and are mediated by interactions with real users in many cases. The user centered ideology adopted by designers in recent years has necessitated the creation of several new stages in the design process. Early concepts and prototypes are shared with users with the use of preliminary visualisations that are specially conceived to permit user participation or facilitate user observation to develop insights into potential problems that are not perceptible in the normal course of concept development. It is the attitude of the designer that is put to critical test in such cases where it is very easy to slip into the mode that the "designer knows best" which is in the final analysis counter productive. The designers visualisation skills and cognitive capabilities are needed to create new and unique solutions, but the evaluation of each of these is done through user mediated processes that have proved to be most effective.

The designer is then called upon to innovate appropriate representations of the design concept in whole or in part so that individual or groups of users can interact with these representations and provide fresh insights into both the nature of the problem and the suitability of the solution. Here the challenge is to discover and use appropriate tools and media that are best suited to the process of visualisation and the process of evaluation. The tools and media need to be selected with care so as to afford fluent representation of complex relationships or geometries, form and content, structure and context that is required by the particular design task.

Traditionally the use of a variety of types of drawings were the preferred modes of visualisation used by sculptors, artists, architects and designers. However in recent times many examples of direct modelling in soft materials have been explored where drawing would limit or inhibit the perception of new and unique possibilities. Preferred styles of visualisation of individual designers may also emerge from their professional habits, degree of skill with the tools of their trade and the cognitive modelling capabilities of the individual. Each design discipline or design school may advocate certain standards for the design students or practitioners from their group. Trade practices in particular industries may also set demands for certain standard specifications to be followed by the designer in the manner in which the design concepts are delivered to the client for further action and decision. Many of these standardised methods of representation reflect the communication and documentation norms of the industry or trade in question. Notwithstanding these trade practices and norms the individual designer is always at liberty to explore their personal repertory of media and skills in the early stages of design visualisation when the emerging images of the external models are primarily intended to capture the fleeting cognitive maps and scenarios that are being iteratively explored by the designer.

Such early external visualisations are barely recognisable as coherent images to a casual observer, however for the designer they are of great significance since this is perhaps the first stage of the dialogue between the left and right hemispheres of their brain that is facilitated by the external model, however rudimentary. These early visualisations take many forms and these depend on the media that the designer may choose to employ at various stages of their work and these may be deliberately varied as a result of experience or in an effort to open up new and unusual possibilities in response to the challenges of the design task. These external manifestations may be barely discernible doodles or smudges that for the designer represent a rapidly executed trace of the cognitive model that is being continuously refined, modified and developed in the designers mind. While sketching and doodling are used extensively by the designer for this early stage of visualisation there are a number of other media that are used.

One characteristic of the media that is in common is that it is very fluid and has soft features as if to reflect the fuzzy nature of the cognitive model at this early stage of design exploration and development. These external traces and markings on paper or soft materials provide the designer with the multilevel and intermodal dialogue between the two brain hemispheres that is critical for creative reinterpretations of possibilities and for pattern recognition of complex new relationships that may have been studied in isolated instances but that needs to fall together in the process of design synthesis. Design decisions are made as a sequence of choices exercised by the designer at the time of articulation of the external model.

The design visualisation progresses by the designer creating a series of images or models, each an embodiment of a particular set of characteristics as determined by the data available, the analysis of the task and the user or as perceived by the designer at that particular point of time in the design process. This very act of articulation brings new insights and may shift the direction of exploration or launch the designer into a search for a particular detail that may be critical in making the overall concept to be either viable or interesting. Thus the designer moves from the general to the particular, from the macro to the micro level of observation of the cognitive model that is constantly being refined and elaborated without freezing on any one specific alternative. Usually the designer defers decision on specific attributes and leaves some difficult details in an ambiguous state in a deliberate effort to obtain clarity of the larger patterns and relationships of the solution before solving particular structural, formal or production problems.

In the user centered design ideology adopted by many designers and by several design led companies, the early prototypes and external models are prepared expressly with the intention that they be shared by groups of users in a variety if real use settings so that they can provide critical insights into the strengths and weaknesses of a particular design solution. Numerous iterations are made, each exploring one or more dimensions of the design opportunity and these are documented so that the design team can develop a conviction about the particular directions to be taken in each case.

These external models begin as very abstract and fuzzy representations and these are gradually refined and elaborated till more concrete models replace earlier representations. These models, when drawing and sketching are used as a route for visualisation, grow out of thumbnail sketches, doodles, scale drawings, orthographic drawings, breadboard models for details of construction or performance of mechanisms, scale models and renderings for form review, full scale mock-ups and fabricated prototypes where ever possible.

It may be useful to look at a few examples of such visualisation in action. Let us look at a potter as a metaphor for the process of early visualisation. An artist, designer or studio potter, working at the wheel and making the model of the clay pot works with clay in a series of iterations to produce one particular pot. A lump of prepared clay is centered on the potters wheel and the material is turned at a suitable speed. The potter applies her hands to the rotating clay and observes the transformation of the form with each application of pressure. The form of the pot emerges as a result of her subtle manipulations. The feedback to the potter is not merely a visual appreciation of its form, but with the eyes closed, she can feel the shape and size of the emerging pot, at one point too tall and at another too wide, leading to a corrective pressure on the tips of her fingers or at the base of her palm.

Each application of pressure and the result thereof is a result of years of fine training and experience and each pot is a unique expression of a design intention that is revealed to the designer in the progressive iteration of its making. The designer would have had the chance to see, feel and evaluate numerous intermediate stages before a design and aesthetic decision is frozen in the shape of the finished pot. If the making of a pot is taken as a metaphor for the early stage of design visualisation, then we see that a very flexible medium is manipulated through numerous iterations before the designer moves on to another approach or attempt to resolve the various conflicting variables of the task at hand. The cognitive model held by the designer too gets enriched through each iteration.

Each new "pot" adds to the designers experience of the various scenarios that were explored and it helps form some deep bonds with preferred directions especially if these are confirmed by the interactions with users who are able to see for the first time the "products" of the designers cognitive explorations. In this process the cognitive model gets progressively detailed and is far more complex and detailed than any representation. The designers’ cognitive model is rich in detail and is instantly recalled under varying circumstances of the user and environmental conditions. The designer sees the solution by day and by night, feels the air flow around its contours and can sense the soft feel of the flexible material of a handle even if it is only in the mind at this stage.
The designer lives with the changing model through numerous refinements and critiques from users and colleagues. In team mediated processes it becomes critical that all members of the team are clued in to the current state of the model and their individual contributions are then directed at solving particular aspects of the design task that their special skill or expertise enable. It is important to generate these external models in a suitable media. Sketching has been used by many architects as a means of capturing complex concepts that need to be clarified and developed through numerous iterations before communicative drawings or scale models can be made. The works of architects Reima Pietila and Louis I Kahn are well documented examples of great design vision being captured through a series of fuzzy sketches leading to the articulation of some of their finest works of architecture in India and elsewhere. Kahn designed the Indian Institute of Management campus at Ahmedabad and his early sketches speak volumes of the highly refined cognitive model that he carried about in his head long before a single brick was laid at the campus in Ahmedabad. Similarly the Finish Embassy at New Delhi emerged from some very fuzzy markings and doodles in pen and ink and dry pastels from the experienced hands of Pietila. The key decisions are made in the mind's eye and the external markings at this stage are but a trace of the rich cognitive model where some critical details or proportions are expressed as a slight stress in the quality of a line of the thumbnail sketch if you can call it a sketch.

Like foot prints in the sand on a crowded beach these fleeting impressions are captured on paper (or clay) by the designer in an attempt to clarify and elaborate the form, structure, performance, content and context of the design solution, all in a single moment of design synthesis, only to be reviewed and revised as the design task progresses to its formal conclusion. For the designer these markings are very personal and memorable just as for the person strolling on the beach his very own footprints are clearly distinguished from those of all the others, which for him is mere noise. Very few design tasks are documented to retain some of these moments of breakthroughs that are achieved on the back of an envelope or through a little doodle on the corner of a large drawing that just lets all the complex variables fall neatly in place for the designer to know that the solution is near at hand. The excitement of the moment is sharp and intense particularly after many attempts were frustrated by the critical needs of the problem at hand. Sometimes the designer too is unprepared to see the radical proposal that has emerged from the subconscious just as Leonardo Da Vinci and his colleagues ignored the perfect sketch of a bicycle drawn on one of his sheets. Mankind invented or should we say reinvented the bicycle four hundred years later as a result of this oversight.

There are many dimensions to design visualisation and it is this special capacity of the designer to generate visible and tangible scenarios to complex needs that makes the profession different from the managers who also develop strategies and scenarios for action in their own way. However these are rarely expressed in visual form but in the form of feasibility reports and verbal specifications. It is then the designers task to give form and expression to these strategies and the particular embodiment of the design strategy is captured and the image produced carries with it messages of a complex nature be it fashion, reliability or meaning to a set of users or the community.
~
UNQUOTE

I would certainly like to hear from those who believe that the term “creativity” is useful, critical and has a clear definition that can be studied and used in the context of education. I would also like to hear from the list on the ultimate short list of books that must be added to any design library on the subject of creativity and perhaps we need to open a new thread on models and cognition in design to explore some of these issues and processes to arrive at a better understanding of this very complex and elusive phenomena.

* Reference: Heinz Ronner, Sharad Jhaveri & Alessandro Vasella, “Louis I. Kahn, Complete Works, 1935 – 1974, Institute for the History & Theory of Architecture, The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, 1980. (Pages 265 to 305 - Drawings and illustrations on the process of conceiving & building The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India.)

With warm regards

M P Ranjan
from my office at NID
20 September 2003 at 4.55 pm IST

end of main quote.

Notes about the drawings:
Drawings of Louis I. Kahn were originally held in the NID archive and later loaned to the Louis Kahn Foundation for the use in the publication listed above.