Interview with Nigel Cross, by Neeraj Sonalkar, 2008

Nigel Cross is the Professor of Design Studies at the Open University based in Milton Keynes, UK. He is a leading thinker in the design research and the design education communities. His latest book, Designerly Ways of Knowing showcases his ideas on what designers do when they do design and promotes Design as a discipline like Science or Arts.

SONALKAR: Can you tell us something about how your interest in design and studying design developed?

CROSS: Yes, certainly. It started when I was an undergraduate student. When I first went to University, I wanted to study engineering. I thought engineering would be something about designing things, but in the first year of my course, it certainly wasn’t. It was just physics and maths that I had studied before in high school and then I saw that some students from architecture seemed to be having a really good time. They were really spending a lot of time doing design activities and generally having a lot more fun than we engineers were. So I switched to studying architecture. And then I found it was a bit strange because the tutors and the lecturers didn’t tell you how to do it. They came in and they gave you a project, a problem or a design brief and you had to produce a solution to it and then they would come and criticize it. These tutors sometimes came around to the studio and talked to you a little bit about what you were doing. But I thought there’s just this big leap from setting the problem, giving you the design brief to criticizing your solution to it, that it didn’t seem to be an adequate kind of education to me. And at the same time, this was in the mid 1960s, there was a lot of new work coming in about systematic design methods and even using computers to design. These were new things, but they seemed to me to offer some sort of a promise on how to design. I thing what it helped me with was to realize that there could be a way of approaching the concept of design which wasn’t just magic.

SONALKAR: So, the new design methods that were coming up got you to thinking about how we can study design?

CROSS: That’s right, I studied in Bristol, in England and then I went to Manchester, where John Chris Jones who wrote one of the first books on design methods was running a post graduate course, a Master’s course in design methods and studying design and I went to study with him.

SONALKAR: In Stanford, we use the term design thinking a lot. But it is still not well defined. It is like the term design itself, where there’s no one particular definition that everyone agrees upon. What are your views on this subject? What is design thinking to you?

CROSS: Okay, yeah to me. I realize that there are quite different interpretations of design thinking. For some people who are coming at it from a business end, I think it is different from the people who are coming at it from the design end. I think to me, my interest in design thinking is related to this thing about trying to understand what is it that people do when they are designing? How you design things? How you think about the design process? So design thinking for me is about those cognitive skills that designers use. I think one of the key ones is this idea that designers practice a kind of constructive discontent in their thinking. I think designers are often discontented because they see things in the world and they say that could be better, there’s a kind of discontent about that. But it has to be a constructive discontent. Anybody could be a critic, but to be a critic who could say things could be better in this way and suggest how they could be better in a constructive sense is a key part of design. I think another key thing about it is imagination. And I think imagination is quite a good word. Imagination is a much more appropriate word than creativity. Because imagination has different words wrapped up in it. For example it has image or imaging wrapped in it and I think what design thinking includes is the ability to image, image in the minds eye, but also to produce images, to communicate through images, through drawings and models and images of possible new things. I think imagination also has some kind of enjoyment associated with it. If you think of something as very imaginative, it also suggests something that is enjoyable for people. I think that is a key part of design thinking. I just realized thinking about your questions that imagination could be a much better word than creativity or innovation which is also quite often used. And I think it is also this thing about being able to have self confidence about coming up with ideas, imagining possible solutions. And it’s the rapid satisficing that designers do instead of optimizing. You know this idea from Herbert Simon about satisficing instead of optimizing, I think that’s what designers are good at, fairly rapidly producing some appropriate satisfactory ideas. 

SONALKAR: From my own personal experience I do feel that it is the discontent that drives me to do design, but sometimes I have seen people who design because they are excited by the new ideas. They are driven by the excitement rather than the discontent. Have you observed something similar?

CROSS: I am trying to express what I see happens with good designers. Yes there can be an aspect of excitement in designing, but it’s more to dowith an attitude that says that isn’t good enough or that could be better. Strangely discontent is quite an important part of being a designer. It makes you kind of unhappy you know (laughs) because I am always saying - oh that’s such a bad piece of design! It doesn’t have to be like that.

SONALKAR: In your recent book, Designerly Ways of Knowing, you have mentioned promoting design as a discipline like science and arts. We always talk about design science because we come from science and engineering background in academia, but if we look at design as art, what has that to influence us as researchers? 

CROSS: Well, I think the art of design is in the practice of design whereas the science of design is in the study of design. So the science of design studies the art of design. Again for me, art, if you think of something like visual art like painting or sculpture, what they mean to me is that it’s a combination of pleasure and some sense of insight. You feel that you have learned something more in how to see something which otherwise you would not have seen. And I like to think that the practice of design produces the same kind of impact on the user or just the observer of a piece of design work. So art interpreted in that way is I think part of design activity. It is the way in which it influences the other person, the user or the beholder. The problem with design science which is some kind of an attempt to make design into a science is that it loses the art. It tends to ignore the art and develop a way of designing that doesn’t have any art in it. On the other hand I am trying to look for ways of talking about and explaining designing that doesn’t interpret it either as an art or a science but rather something in its own right.

SONALKAR: Since you have been involved in design research for a long time since the early developments in the field, can you tell us the story of how design research started as a discipline?

CROSS: Yep, I think it did grow out of attempts in engineering to develop a more scientific or systematic or rational approach to designing and that was the origin of it. I think after the Second World War, the designing of new complex things needed new design processes. Things were too complex to be designed, they were using new materials or involved combinations of different people and they were part of that shift from design as a craft to design as a quasi-scientific activity. But the emergence of trying to develop Design as a discipline in its own way, I think came from the late 70s or the early 80s and for me it was certainly prompted by an educational point of view. Rather than continuing with the sort of craft based or apprentice based type of education and to make it more explicit and more generalized sort of education. So that you can use it in education without assuming that the students are actually going to become designers. It is the same as they teach science subjects not assuming that the students are going to become scientists. There is something intrinsically valuable in learning about literature or science or mathematics, which we think every educated person should have. And I think every educated person should have something about design in their education. In that case you have to find out what is intrinsically valuable in the activities of designing, in design practice which everyone should have. And that’s what made me think about what it is that designers do which would be useful for everybody to have. That’s what forced me to think about what it means to have design as a discipline in its own right, to make it something stronger than just an imitation of some other field. It fitted in with design research which I have been involved in and it fitted in also with working in the Open University where a lot of our educational work was aimed at large number of lay person student audiences rather than specialist professional student audiences.  

SONALKAR: Can you tell what you perceive as the biggest challenges in the field of studying design or design as a discipline?

CROSS: I think it’s about maintaining and building the idea of Design an intellectual discipline. And I think it would be easy to go back to sloppy thinking, sort of hand waving ideas about design that there used to be and probably still are. It is a difficult intellectual challenge to develop the idea of design as a discipline and I am not up to being someone who can develop it in a very strong way. I do think it is important to develop it and that we need a sort of bootstrapping with our younger students or new researchers coming into the field. We cannot import research from other fields, but we have to develop our own ways of doing it. The big challenge is to construct the paradigm of research, research activities and examine what we mean by that in the design world. Those are still the challenges which we had to face for the last twenty odd years and they are not yet resolved. And it is still about understanding what it is that expert and good designers do when they are designing. That is not very clear. It’s still quite a mysterious thing.

SONALKAR: That’s true, especially when you talk about maintaining and building the idea of design as a discipline. It has been my experience while studying here that we borrow from a number of academic disciplines while we are studying what designers do when they are studying design – psychology, sociology or social psychology when we study teams and when we actually publish results, it is sometimes unclear where they lie, whether they lie in those disciplines or in design.

CROSS: Yes, I have always said to my PhD students, this is the problem. You have to go in to other fields. But your PhD is not going to be a PhD in that field. So it’s not going to be in psychology. Though actually one or two very good younger researchers studied design within the psychology discipline. Their PhD was in psychology, but we in the design, if you are doing it in the design department, it has to be a PhD in design, a Masters in design or whatever it is. But you have to be able to understand enough of the other professions, the other ways of thinking to be able to do it. So it’s a difficult balancing act for any student to undertake and the supervisor has to have that kind of skills in order to do that. So it’s difficult, but we are still doing it and a lot of PhD work is really pioneering work in that sense because we don’t necessarily have easy paradigms or small projects. And if you look at the kind of PhD work that the students are doing in other departments, you might think that it is actually a very small narrow piece of work that they are doing. It is also something their supervisors might be doing, you know, “I can take five PhD students because I have got five small little problems” or something and they carve specific pieces of work. So I think it still is difficult to do PhD work in design research. But we have to do it and it will get easier.

SONALKAR: You are known as a father figure in design research, sort of a rock star, how do you feel about it?

CROSS: (Laughs) I have to say to be honest I was very surprised to hear that I might be looked at as a rock star. Let me tell you it’s certainly not a rock star’s life as you might imagine. There is virtually almost no sex and no drugs! (Laughs) Don’t think it is gonna be like that. No, I was terribly surprised by that idea.

SONALKAR: Well, you do mention on your webpage that you played in a rock band, right?

CROSS: Yes, I do mention that, but that’s a bit of a joke. I always wanted to be, well, not exactly a rock star, but I always wanted to be able to play an instrument. And it wasn’t until I reached my thirties that I thought that this is ridiculous that I can’t actually play an instrument. So that’s when I took up playing the guitar. But I fairly soon realized that I am not by any means a natural musician. It was very very difficult and I was very very bad at it. But with a couple of colleagues in my University department, we kind of jammed together and played bits together and we pushed out our band at around this time of the year at a Christmas party, our departmental Christmas party. Our biggest gigs have only been when we played at our birthday parties! (laughs) It will be terribly difficult to pick up a guitar and demonstrate to you how good I am. I have to practice, practice, practice, practice, practice before any kind of small gigs that we do. But it’s a great pleasure. It’s a very nice thing to do with a couple of friends to actually be able to play some music together. It doesn’t have to be great music. So it’s a nice hobby for me.

SONALKAR: That’s cool! You mentioned your work at the Open University. Can you tell us something more about how it differs from traditional University settings?

CROSS: Yeah, Open University does education at a distance which means it doesn’t have undergraduate students on campus; we do have some full time post graduate students. The undergraduate students all tend to study at home. And so what we do is prepare course material for them. In old days it used to get sentto them through the postal service, but the University has increasingly become an internet university and a lot of our work is now web based. When the university was initially setup in the 1960s, it was seen as the University of the Air, I mean as a broadcasting university, using television and radio broadcasts. That kind of began to slip away and then we tended to send video cassettes and a lot of books were sent out, but now a lot of it is online. What I was going to say, is that anybody can see some of our teaching if you go to the website which is http://openlearn.open.ac.uk and that’s where some of our course material is uploaded for everyone to have a look at. It is one of these things where design teachers have said you can’t possibly teach design at a distance. You need to have the students face to face; you have to have studios and those kinds of things. And I think there is some truth in that but it is not the whole truth and in fact we teach something about design that is practical as I said in the context of what is useful for everybody. So it is about design thinking and what kinds of thinking do you try to develop in everybody.  We don’t have a degree in design and the Open University degree can be a mix and match of a number of credits that the students take from all kinds of subject areas. So they can include some design in their degree, but we don’t have something that is a full design degree. So we don’t have that kind of constraint of trying to produce professional designers which makes it somewhat easier of course. It is interesting because it made me think what it means to be a design teacher in this new context. Whereas if I had just gone in the school of architecture then I would have carried on teaching without facing those sort of challenges.

SONALKAR: Can you elaborate a bit more on that? What does it actually mean to be a design teacher in this new context of design education for everyone?

CROSS: Well, for one thing it makes you think about what you are doing as a teacher. I mean you really have to think why am I telling them this, why am I setting this task or project? I think you have to be more explicit about what you are teaching and why, try to tell the students what it’s all about. You have to try to be clear about the skills you are trying to teach, intellectual or cognitive skills as well as practical skills. Which of course has been made easier by design research, studying how designers design.

SONALKAR: What according to you has been the contribution of design research to the practice of design?

CROSS: Yeah, I think what it’s contributed are the graduates. The people who are entering design practice are better educated; more self aware about designing, the design process and how to be a designer. That is a kind of slightly different take than what might beexpected. It is how design schools that have the culture of research within them are producing graduates who are different from schools who don’t have that kind of background where they study. So I hope one of the things that we are contributing to practice is these better educated students, better educated graduates. But I think also that some of the things that are taken for granted in design practice are things that only thirty years ago were in design research, things like using computers and computer aided design are now part of the conventional practice. But thirty years ago they were things only design researchers were interested in and were trying to develop. So I think it takes a generation of people, takes at least twenty five years, maybe thirty years or more, before it becomes conventional in practice and people realize that its something that has come from the design research world. What appears to be good practice in the product design and industrial design area nowadays are the kind of things that we were talking about and thinking of developing in design research thirty odd years ago. So it has taken a very long time. Here I am thinking of things like user centered design, user participation in design – those were the things that were not normal in design practice thirty years ago and it is only in the world of design research that those kinds of things were being thought about and ways of doing those were being developed in the design research world. So I think there has been an effect on practice but it has been not so obvious or immediate enough to see it. You have to be around a long time like to see, oh yeah these kids today are using the stuff that we thought of but it was a long time ago. Now they don’t think of it as having come from research.

SONALKAR: Since you have studied a lot of professional designers, do you have any comments about what are some of the aspects of good design practice?

CROSS: I think when you see good design practice, you see design without compromise. What annoys me very much is that people say, and they say it quite often, that design is about making compromises. No, it’s not, it’s not! Where you see good design, you see solutions where you don’t see the compromise. People say, oh yeah, if we can spend all the money in the world, we can do perfect design. That’s not true. They say it’s compromise between cost and quality or compromise between speed and reliability. Yes, you do have to resolve these sometimes completely conflicting requirements in good design. But I think in good design it is seamless. You do not see the compromise. And I think to start off thinking it’s going to be a compromise usually ends up with poor design. So where I see good designers producing stuff, they are so committed to it, and they are so skillful at it, you don’t see them making these compromises. I certainly wouldn’t say that design is a compromise. So that’s one thing. I think the other thing has to be imagination again; imagination with responsibility. It’s rather easy to be creative, to think of things that would not be a great idea, but a designer has to be also aware of social responsibility, environmental responsibility, these kind of things at the same time. So imagination with responsibility and design without compromise would be my key phrases.

SONALKAR: I think one of the major issues we have when studying design is to come up with a metric for performance. There doesn’t seem to be a good metric for evaluating design. Do you have some metric in mind with respect to design without compromise or imagination with responsibility so that when you see a design you can say, yes this is a design without compromise?

CROSS: No I don’t, I’m sorry. That’s a nice thing to have but more research is needed for that kind of thing. There is still a bit of mystery about it, I’m afraid. When I say good design is design without compromise, I think you can recognize it when you see it, but you don’t necessarily have a way of articulating it so clearly that you can develop a metric for it. Maybe there will be, but that’s another forty-odd years of research for people to do.