Description

Describing what designers know is not an easy task. At a recent forum on architectural education one speaker challenged the conference to say what architects did. An easy question to answer you may think but not one of the experienced practitioners and educationalists present was brave enough to take up the challenge. No one felt able to offer a succinct description that they were
confident would be widely agreed upon and yet describe the work of all architects.
It is quite possible to find two people who call themselves architects and yet hardly share any of their daily tasks. The more generic question about what designers do is even more difficult to answer simply and successfully. This book is not about architecture or specifically about architects, nor is it a book that will tell you how to design. Rather it will attempt to develop part of what has to be a rather long answer to some very short questions. What is it that designers know? Does design knowledge involve a special way of knowing?
How do designers acquire and make use of their knowledge? In this book then we will explore the common features we can detect in the kinds of knowledge designers rely upon and try to explain why they are indeed rather special and
in some ways rather unconventional.