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How do you come up with your design solutions? Please don’t say it’s just intuition.
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How do you come up with your design solutions? Please don’t say it’s just intuition.
In the absence of defined processes based on science (such as engineers have) people sometimes ask if designers just rely on intuition, as if it means your guess is as good as mine. I bristle at that term. I do arrive at solutions pretty instinctively, but this is based on many years of education and decades of experience.
Don Norman1 points to what we might call the science behind expert ‘intuition’:
On intuitive design, a term I deplore: Intuition means actions that are automatic, without conscious thought. To make something automatic requires many hours of practice, the specific number depending upon the complexity of the task. Yes, it is probably pattern recognition of a complex sort, perhaps collapsing into a nearest-neighbor approach to matching patterns, dynamical systems, attractor states. But this only works after the patterns have been acquired – that’s what all those years of practice are about.
...Follow those instincts if and only if you are an expert. If you have put in your thousands of hours of study and thought so you have mastered hundreds of thousands of patterns that might then subconsciously find a match, then sure, go with those immediate feelings. If you are a novice without that deep knowledge, you are a hazard if you follow your gut.
1. These quotes are taken from two posts on the PhD-Design list, on JISCMail, Mon, 30 Mar 2009. This is an academic bulletin board so may not be accessible by all readers.