Affording Design, Affording Redesign - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 85

Chapter 7
Affording Design, Affording Redesign
Barbara Tversky
Abstract Thinking quickly overwhelms the mind, and the mind expands into the
world. The mind creates a range of cognitive tools to represent thought. Sketches
are among the most prevalent and productive ways to make thought visible to self
and others and to promote creative thought. Sketches, like diagrams, map the
elements and relations of ideas to elements and relations on the page. They entail
abstraction and allow ambiguity. Their ambiguity creates possibilities, it allows
exploration, inference, and discovery of ideas, some of the reasons they are so
useful in design as well as other domains. Objects and the surroundings that provide
contexts for objects can also serve as tools for thought. Like sketches, objects and
surroundings provide visual feedback, but unlike sketches, objects and environ-
ments provide tangible feedback, feedback from interactions with the body as well
as the eyes of the user. Whereas design begins with ideas and goals that need
embodiment, redesign begins with a specific problem embodied in a person in
a place at a time. Solutions often come from reuses of old objects. Problems
and reuses of designed products inspire implicit conversations between designers
and redesigners.
Keywords Ambiguity • Constructive perception • Creativity • Design • Diagram
• Map • Redesign • Sketch
7.1 Thinking with Things
Creativity seems impossible to study. First, we don't know what it means. And
second, whatever it means, it goes on in the mind, invisibly. Whatever it is,
creativity is not just wild ideas, unusual associations, weird combinations. Any
dumb machine can do that, probably more wildly than people. Although it may
sound paradoxical, creativity is constrained. Creative solutions may indeed appear