Design Practice for Lateral Thinking

Practice

The students are set a specific design task. Each student tackles the same task. Every design is a drawing. Brief notes may appear on the drawing to indicate how something works. In addition there may be a fuller explanation but this fuller explanation should only refer to what is already in the drawing — it is not to be a substitute for the drawing. Half an hour is enough time to allow for each design project since one is not so interested in the excellence of the design but in the process itself.

When the design task is set some of the students may ask for additional information. For instance if the task was to design a vehicle to go over rough ground then someone could well ask how rough the ground was to be. Though such questions are perfectly legitimate and in a real design situation one would specify the objective very closely, it is better to specify nothing. This means that each student is allowed to assume his own specifications. This gives a much wider variety of response. In discussing the results one can comment on the way the designs fulfil other objectives as well as the main one but one must not condemn a design for not fulfilling a condition which was never given.

The collected results may be discussed there and then or they may be examined and discussed at a subsequent session. Wherever possible it might be an advantage to display the results in some way before discussing them.

As suggested before, the discussion is centred on comparisons of the different ways of doing things and the picking out of cliché units. It is best to avoid making comparisons as to which is the best design for fear of restricting imagination. If one does want to pick out a design as being very good one can do so by commenting on something specific for instance the originality or economy of it rather than giving a blanket approval such as ‘good’. Otherwise one uses such comments as ‘Interesting’, ‘unusual’, ‘very different’ etc. Above all one wants to refrain from condemning any particular design. Such condemnation can only be restrictive. If one wants to encourage some particular feature one can do so by praising it where it is present rather than condemning its absence. For this reason it is best not to allow students to pass open judgement on the design efforts of others (i.e. not to call for such judgements in the class situation).

Suggestions for design projects have been given in the course of this section. In general the design project may ask for a design to do something that is not done at the moment (e.g. a machine to cut hair), or to do something in a better way (e.g. redesign a comb). The projects may be simple or more complicated. On the whole simple mechanical designs are more useful than abstract ideas. Students may be asked to redesign any everyday object whatsoever, for instance: telephone receiver, pencil, bicycle, stove, shoes, desks. Further suggestions are given in the previous section on design.

Will it work?

One does not want to restrict designs to the sane, workable ones by carefully analysing each one and rejecting those which would not work. Nevertheless one does want the students to aim for a workable design and not produce a fantasy for the sake of fantasy. The level of mechanical knowledge which one could expect of the students obviously varies with their age but in any case one is not testing this. It is sufficient if every now and again the teacher picks out a design which would obviously not work and gets the class as a whole to accept that it would not work but can still lead to useful ideas. The judgement is not as to whether the design is workable but as to whether the designer was genuinely trying to make a workable design (even if everyone else can see that it would not work). If there is any doubt it is better to say nothing and simply ignore the design.