Affording Design, Affording Redesign

Abstract

Thinking quickly overwhelms the mind, and the mind expands into the world. The mind creates a range of cognitive tools to represent thought. Sketches are among the most prevalent and productive ways to make thought visible to self and others and to promote creative thought. Sketches, like diagrams, map the elements and relations of ideas to elements and relations on the page. They entail abstraction and allow ambiguity. Their ambiguity creates possibilities, it allows exploration, inference, and discovery of ideas, some of the reasons they are so useful in design as well as other domains. Objects and the surroundings that provide contexts for objects can also serve as tools for thought. Like sketches, objects and surroundings provide visual feedback, but unlike sketches, objects and environments provide tangible feedback, feedback from interactions with the body as well as the eyes of the user. Whereas design begins with ideas and goals that need embodiment, redesign begins with a specific problem embodied in a person in a place at a time. Solutions often come from reuses of old objects. Problems and reuses of designed products inspire implicit conversations between designers and redesigners.