How Designers Think - Softcover

Lawson, Bryan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0408500727 ISBN 13: 9780408500722

Publisher: Architectural Press, 1990

Synopsis

How Designers Think is based on Bryan Lawson's many observations of designers at work, interviews with designers and their clients and collaborators. This extended work is the culmination of forty years' research and shows the belief that we all can, and do, design, and that we can learn to design better. The creative mind continues to have the power to surprise and this book aims to nurture and extend this creativity. Neither the earlier editions, nor this book, are intended as authoritative prescriptions of how designers should think but provide helpful advice on how to develop an understanding of design.In this fourth edition, Bryan Lawson continues to try and understand how designers think, to explore how they might be better educated and to develop techniques to assist them in their task. Some chapters have been revised and three completely new chapters added. The book is now intended to be read in conjunction with What Designers Know which is a companion volume. Some of the ideas previously discussed in the third edition of How Designers Think are now explored more thoroughly in What Designers Know. For the first time this fourth edition works towards a model of designing and the skills that collectively constitute the design process.

About this title

Review

Reviews of previous editions:
'It has a great virtue of being thorough and readable ... excellent bibliography.'
Built Environment.
'This book makes a valuable, if individualistic contribution to the literature of design theory.'
Science and Technology Press.
'I like the book because it is the sort of book I would not enjoy writing.'
Edward de Bono
'The author succeeds in demystifying his subject for the lay reader.'
New Scientist.

'The chapters are well written in a readable form and packed full of data undeniably valuable to students.'
ASI Journal

Reviews of this edition

"Its success is well deserved, because it is clearly written, the arguments are logically presented, and the design process is indeed demystified."
Architectural Science Review

Synopsis

This is about design problems and the design process. Design skills (or "creativity") are involved in a great many human activities, but exactly how the design process occurs has obstinately resisted explanation both by those involved in practice and by psychologists. Bryan Lawson has the unusual qualification of being both a designer and a psychologist, and this book draws on his own teaching experience, designers' own accounts of their work, and the writing of design methodologists and theoreticians. The author shows that the design process involves a variety of different types of thinking and that design skills can be acquired, practised and improved, like playing an instrument, rather than being imparted as if by some mysterious process. His book will be of great interest not only to designers seeking a greater insight into their own thought processes, but also to students of design in general.

Edition details

• Publisher: Architectural Press
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0408500727
• ISBN 13: 9780408500722
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 243