Understanding Designing: Getting Too Close

There is a lot of research aimed at 'exploring', 'dissecting' and 'examining'  important human activities with the purpose to 'reveal' and 'unpack' its inner structure and mechanisms.  For instance, creativity, learning, and designing are all human activities that are constantly examined.

This ambition is easy to understand.  Humans want to improve their activities and to be able to improve they have to understand how things work. For instance, to improve designing, first, we need to have a good understanding of what it can do, how it is done, how it can be done, and maybe how it should be done, etc. So we need more research on the process of designing.

We can formulate abstract theories and philosophies about designing as a human activity. We can study what designers are actually doing when they design. We can produce infinite amounts of data on different design processes, in different areas, with different designers, with different purposes, knowledge, skills, experience, etc.

But, can we get too close? The knowledge about designing that can be created is infinite. We can go layer after layer, closer to the 'real' thing. But for each layer, we add combinatorial complexity that quickly becomes impossible to handle and manage. We end up with knowledge that is extraordinarily complex and as fast as it grows in detail and complexity, it loses its practical relevance and potential guidance for improvement.

This is a well-known effect in systems theory. Getting closer gives you a clear picture of a defined part of the whole but may lead to a completely wrong understanding of the whole. This is what I see a lot today when it comes to research about designing. We see an overwhelming stream of research results dealing with this or that aspect of designing. We learn a lot, but where is the broader picture. Where are the attempts to combine all the details, to develop a whole?

We might need the details...maybe, but we definitely need the understanding of the whole.