Understanding the nature of design ability can better enable design educators to nurture its development in their students. Such understanding has been promoted by a wide variety of studies of design activity and designer behaviour. From a review of these studies, design ability is summarised as comprising resolving ill-defined problems, adopting solution-focussed cognitive strategies, employing abductive or appositional thinking and using non-verbal modelling media. These abilities are highly developed in skilled designers, but are also possessed in some degree by everyone. A case is therefore made for design ability as a fundamental form of human intelligence. The nurture of this ability through design education is discussed, with particular reference to the problem of providing design education through the distance-learning media of the Open University.
CITATION STYLE
The Nature and Nurture of Design Ability. (2006). In Designerly Ways of Knowing (pp. 15–27). Springer-Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-84628-301-9_2
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