The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design by Mads Nygaard Folkmann

Author:Mads Nygaard Folkmann [Folkmann, Mads Nygaard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780262313773
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2013-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 7.8

Cheetah, 2003. Design: 3PART. Manufacturer: R82.

Searching for the Possible

After having proposed the dichotomies of known versus unknown, whole versus detail, and focusing versus defocusing as parts of an overall conceptual framework of schematization, the next step is to ask for practical application.

The big question is how to combine the three dichotomies in design practice. The general and easy, but valid, answer would be that they all help to inform a design-relevant and design-specific discourse about the formative powers behind creative processes in design. In this way, the proposed theoretical framework can contribute to our knowledge about design processes that normally have the character of tacit knowledge. Exploring imagination also means exploring productive factors of creativity. A greater awareness of the mechanisms of imagination helps us understand how imagination contributes to our ways of constructing meaning and lets us create and use design as a medium for this process.25 In addition to this kind of methodological reflection that considers the general benefits of conceptualizing means and procedures of practice and tacit knowledge, the three dichotomies can be used to offer theoretically informed insights into the underlying structures and structural codes in the design process.

A concrete proposal for employing the structural coding of imagination in relation to the design process may be to connect it to the search for possibilities and see this as a conscious approach to the work with concepts through the prism of schematization. This can be visualized in a model (figure 7.9) that can contribute to both understanding and describing the dynamic workings of an imaginative creation of new possibilities. The aim of the model is not only to state the opening of new possibilities in design but also to indicate a succession of stages of mental settings in the creative act of “possibilizing,” that is, the act of actively searching for new possibilities. The model is not meant as a prescriptive tool for all processes of imaginative designing and searching for new possibilities, but it may serve as inspiration for ways in which imagination can be employed and engaged in the search for the possible in design. In the same way, it may be productive to state all design problems as “wicked problems” as that may produce new insights, a reflective grasp of possibilities, and a conscious venture into the unknown that may also set the design process in a new light. The model describes a process in the polarity of actualizing and possibilizing, with phases involving the enabling of meaning and realization of design.

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