projects
Matters of trannsformation: Complexity and sketching
DESCRIPTION
" I believe Complex thinking should be more embraced by designers throughout the design process in order to tackle wicked societal problems. When tackling societal challenges, it can be tempting to take a more reductionist approach: breaking all the parts down until they seem more cognitively manageable. However, in this approach parts of the challenge will get lost and reductionist representations of the problem often are inaccurate and overlook the complexity. Contractionary to reductionism; taking a holistic approach to societal challenges can lead to representations which are non-operational.
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When sketching, a skill intertwined with my design process, I either visualize a specific part of an idea or a thought, or I use sketching to clarify more holistic relations and structures. Therefore I could say that I tend to take a reductionist or holistic approach and overlook the relations between the part and the whole. I trust that designers are capable of involving complex thinking more in their design process, yet in the hustle of the design process it easy to fall back on the ‘human instinct’ to break everything down into small manageable pieces,which is something I have experienced as a designer myself. For this reason I explored the possibilities of sketching on context, providing designers with a tool that allows them to see the relation between their sketch (the part) and the context (the whole).
I trust that designers have the capability to involve complex thinking more in their design process as they are already trained in dealing with uncertainty and seeing uncertainty as an opportunity for creativity and new perspectives.
Therefore I believe the design community should act as a ‘reminder’ and spread awareness about the downside of reductionism and offer tools to embrace complex thinking in the design process. Also, the design process in itself has to transform as one cannot define upfront where the process will lead to. Which can be an obstacle, and therefore a new challenge, in collaborating with institutions that are based on reductionist thinking.
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Date: Nov 2020- Jan 2021
Course: Matters of Transformation
Lecturer: Pierre Levy
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