4. Seeing the Forest for the Trees
How Senses and Reason Frame Our World
Senses, worldview, and probability are necessary for reason. This makes reason a tricky thing. The most common definition of reason is your ability to make sense of things, even when something is new.
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher in the 18th century. He is often pointed to as the figure that moved philosophy forward. Before Kant, philosophers were divided into two main camps. The first believed that all knowledge was learned through the senses. The second believed that humans are reason their way into knowledge.
Variations of these beliefs are still found in philosophy today. Most people actually believe both, but apply them differently. The field of Design is no exception.
Making Sense of Senses
There are five human senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing. These senses give us the tools we need to interpret the world. Our brains collect the data being received through our senses, analyze it, and use that information to make decisions. Sometimes this information is also stored in our brains, creating memories.
I’ve written about our understanding of sense perception here. In essence, our senses determine how we know how to see the world. Knowing how to see the world is how we create our own personal worldview. This worldview is a filter that we use to reason.
Senses, worldview, and reason give meaning to our actions. For Designers, this meaning becomes our process and aesthetic. Through the practice of empathy, Designers can know the boundaries of their worldview and ego in order to set them aside. This process creates space for clients to share their worldview for the design process.
The difference in individual experiences as mediated by our senses is called embodied cognition. It is a body-memory that is unique for everyone, and it is two-fold for Designers. All Designers bring their own embodied cognition to their projects, and they must also design for the embodied cognition of others.
Reason in Design
Designers empathize with their clients and stakeholders. Designers can listen and observe what the users might be feeling, but they cannot know. Its impossible to walk around in the bodies and memories of other people. This is where Reason and Design meet.
The relationship between Design and Reason go back to ancient Greek arguments about “craft” versus “art.” Though this discourse is still relevant today, the field of Design has carved out a niche for itself in this debate.
Inductive Reason
Q: What do you see in a forest?
A: Trees.
This generalized answer is the result of inductive reason. Inductive reasoning is the process of making observations about the world and making a generalized conclusion. Simply saying “Tress” doesn’t account for the specific species of trees, but it gets the point across.
Deductive Reason
Q: Who lives in a forest?
A: Deer? Yes. Squirrels? Yes. Aliens? No. Only Deer and Squirrels live in the forest.
This Deductive reasoning uses the process of elimination to get to a conclusion. This conclusions, however, can may not encompass all the details. Do rabbits also live in the forest?
Abductive Reason
Q: What is a forest?
A: A forest has trees, squirrels, deer, and sometimes rabbits. Other animals and plants also live in the forest.
This statement uses abductive reason to make an educated guess about what a forest might be.
Design researchers and philosophers describe the process of Design Thinking as Abductive Reasoning. It is the unique combination of generalizing existing ideas while also narrowing down existing choices in order to generate new ideas. These new ideas are the best guess for a design that will meet the needs of stakeholders.
Kees Dorst summarized the history of reason and design a paper presented that the “DTRS8 Interpreting Design Thinking: Design Thinking Research Symposium” conference in 2010. He described Abductive Reason in Design as the result (Value) of what you are designing (What) plus your method and constraints (How). This idea is based on Charles Sansers Peirce’s work on formal logic as interpreted by Dutch Industrial Designer Norbert Roozenburg.
Dorst breaks Abduction into two forms. The first form is most similar to how we think of problem solving. What we will make is unknown. We only know how we’re going to problem solve and the goal value.
The second form of Abduction is more complicated. In this version we only know the goal value. The “What” and “How” are both missing.
To make sense of this second form, Dorst recommends we invent a flexible scenario by using induction.
Then, we can use Abduction-1 to make up what the “What” might be.
This mental math is one of the unique tools of Design. Designers can use empathy, personal knowledge, reason, and Design Thinking to make educated guesses toward solutions.
Frame, Frame, and Frame Again
Designers use their empathy, senses, and worldview to shape their work. They also take into account the user’s point of view and preferred state. Both the Designer and user exist within a world of infinite possibility. In order to find a potential path forward, Designers use abduction to guide their process. This happens rapidly and can radically influence the outcome of a project.
This process of creating potential paths forward can only happen after a few assumptions have been solved for, like the What, How, and Value. In order to solve for these three things, Designers might have to go through several iterations of abduction. This is called “framing.” Dorst describes framing as the “reasoning in design situations”.
Frames are made from the bits of stuff gathered from the Designers, Users, project demands, and external world.
Frames are lenses created in order to look more closely at a problem. Each lens provides a slightly different way of looking at what the problem might be. Frames might be created for defining users needs, critiquing a prototype, or ideating new solutions.
Throughout a single project, Designers create many frames. Each frame is unique and creates different potential solutions. No design can meet every single need in Frames 1, 2, and 3.
Even if a design can’t meed every need in every frame, it is the responsibility of Designers to accurately frame user needs. As designers begin to better understand the users needs, this is new information for a more nuanced frame.
Users will also begin to understand their own needs differently as the project progresses. This might sound terrifying because you will need to create more frames to meet these new needs, but this is a sign of learning and progress.
As users learn how to articulate their needs better, they become more valuable resources. These users also serve as a model for how to teach new users to understand the thing you’ve designed. Think about how you learned to use a complex piece of software. Did you take a class? Look up tutorials? These are all examples of how you used reason to solve a problem and increase your personal autonomy.
Autonomy is a Design principle with the goal of empowering beginners and emboldening experts. Have you ever created a plan to coach a user to learn something new so they could do it by themselves? That design challenge creates user autonomy through the perfect balance of empathy, reason, and framing.
This article is part of a series: How Do We Get There From Here? Each essay explores a component of Design and how it shapes our practices. You can find the full series and related content at How Might We…, ongoing thoughts from my Graduate work at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design.
