tonkinwise 2011 taste for practices unrepressing style in design thinking

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A taste for practices: Unrepressing style in design thinking Cameron Tonkinwise, Parsons The New School for Design, 66 5th Ave, New York 10011, United States The current vogue for design in management discourses results in abstractions of the design process that repress the role of aesthetic judgments. This paper offers an explanation as to why design-as-styling is being neglected or concealed, and then explains what is at stake. It theorizes that a key aspect of the agency of designing, as the creation of artifacts to facilitate activities, lies in this taste literacy of designers. The framework for the argument of this paper is Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’ and the notion of ‘style’ as proposed by Fernando Flores and his coauthors. The paper argues that designers are hermeneutists of proximal taste regimes, for the possibilities of new styles of action. Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: taste, styling, design activity, aesthetics, user behavior I t is strange that in all the current talk about “design thinking,” almost no reference is ever made to the work of the Design Thinking Research Sym- posium, which has been collating and initiating innovative yet careful and extensive research into the nature of the design process for two decades; nor indeed has much reference been made to any of the research published explic- itly in relation to the cognition of expert designers - for example, Lawson (1980, 2004), Rowe (1987), and more recently Lawson and Dorst (2009) (though this series of omissions from the literature has been addressed in Nigel Cross’s recently published Design Thinking (2011)). What is being promoted as “design thinking” seems content to extrapolate from the internal reflective practice of a design firm (IDEO, in the case of Brown, 2009) or from a selection of interviews with design principals by management educators (in the case of Martin, 2009). What is lost in this exporting of design thinking from designing? 1 Refashioning design thinking It might seem that “design thinking” [double quotation marks from now on will signal the current popular discourse of design-based innovation and man- agement, as opposed to research into the cognitive processes of designers designing] is design minus the material practice (Burdick, 2009; Kimbell, 2009). However, “design thinking” is foremostly defined as the sort of action research that comes from failure-friendly, iterative prototyping in contexts of Corresponding author: Cameron Tonkinwise tonkinwc@newschool. edu www.elsevier.com/locate/destud 0142-694X $ - see front matter Design Studies 32 (2011) 533e545 doi:10.1016/j.destud.2011.07.001 533 Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Page 1: Tonkinwise 2011 Taste for Practices Unrepressing Style in Design Thinking

Corresponding author:Cameron Tonkinwisetonkinwc@newschool.

edu

actices: Unrepressing style

A taste for prin design thinking

Cameron Tonkinwise, Parsons The New School for Design, 66 5th Ave,

New York 10011, United States

The current vogue for design in management discourses results in abstractions of

the design process that repress the role of aesthetic judgments. This paper offers

an explanation as to why design-as-styling is being neglected or concealed, and

then explains what is at stake. It theorizes that a key aspect of the agency of

designing, as the creation of artifacts to facilitate activities, lies in this taste

literacy of designers. The framework for the argument of this paper is Pierre

Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’ and the notion of ‘style’ as proposed by Fernando

Flores and his coauthors. The paper argues that designers are hermeneutists of

proximal taste regimes, for the possibilities of new styles of action.

� 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: taste, styling, design activity, aesthetics, user behavior

It is strange that in all the current talk about “design thinking,” almost no

reference is ever made to the work of the Design Thinking Research Sym-

posium, which has been collating and initiating innovative yet careful and

extensive research into the nature of the design process for two decades; nor

indeed has much reference been made to any of the research published explic-

itly in relation to the cognition of expert designers - for example, Lawson

(1980, 2004), Rowe (1987), and more recently Lawson and Dorst (2009)

(though this series of omissions from the literature has been addressed in Nigel

Cross’s recently publishedDesign Thinking (2011)). What is being promoted as

“design thinking” seems content to extrapolate from the internal reflective

practice of a design firm (IDEO, in the case of Brown, 2009) or from a selection

of interviews with design principals by management educators (in the case of

Martin, 2009). What is lost in this exporting of design thinking from

designing?

1 Refashioning design thinkingIt might seem that “design thinking” [double quotation marks from now on

will signal the current popular discourse of design-based innovation and man-

agement, as opposed to research into the cognitive processes of designers

designing] is design minus the material practice (Burdick, 2009; Kimbell,

2009). However, “design thinking” is foremostly defined as the sort of action

research that comes from failure-friendly, iterative prototyping in contexts of

www.elsevier.com/locate/destud

0142-694X $ - see front matter Design Studies 32 (2011) 533e545

doi:10.1016/j.destud.2011.07.001 533� 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Page 2: Tonkinwise 2011 Taste for Practices Unrepressing Style in Design Thinking

534

immersive social research. Without referencing any of the research of design-

ing, “design thinking” does acknowledge that this experimentalism involves

a kind of problem-definition/solution-proposition co-evolution e see for

instance Jennifer Riel’s box-insert in Martin (2009: pp. 94e5) on design as

wicked problem-setting. So there is a practice to design thinking.

What must be removed from designing to make it appropriable by managers is

rather, it seems: aesthetics, by which I mean, anything to do with form-giving,

the pleasing appearance and feel of a design. Roger Martin’s The Design of

Business makes no reference at all to aesthetics. It quotes with approval

Hugh de Pree discussing the authority granted to designers over the develop-

ment of the Aeron Chair, now an iconic form, that “Designing. comes to

grips with the very essence of a problem, from the inside out, as opposed to

‘styling,’ which concerns itself largely with the distinctive mode of presentation

or with the externals of a given solution.” (2009, 113) Tim Brown’s Change by

Design opens with a first chapter that is explicit about the need for strategic

design to displace design’s aestheticism: “Getting under your skin, or How

Design Thinking is about more than Style.”

At one level this is understandable. If “design thinking” is primarily ‘design for

non-designers,’ then “design thinking” must be able to be done without

becoming a designer, without having to adopt the lifestyle, working environ-

ment and habits of designers; for instance, their penchant for being concerned

about fashionable appearances, their own and that of everything around them.

But in another way it is strange that almost none of the 4e7 dot point lists cir-

culating about what is involved in being a design thinker e see for example the

compilations of Wroblewski (2006, 2007, 2008), which at least include pattern

recognition and visual story telling e mention any of the habits of designers;

forever browsing different media for a sense of different formal trends in dif-

ferent areas of design; making large collections of liked and inspiring examples

(on this see Keller, Visser, van der Lugt, & Stappers, 2009); constantly critiqu-

ing with a distinctive lexicon the aesthetic quality of the designed output of

partners, peers and students (on this see Strickfaden & Heylighen, 2010).

1.1 Constraining stylesEven if current promoters of “design thinking” as strategic management had

consulted the findings of groups such as the Design Thinking Research Sym-

posium, they would not have been clearly redirected toward the aesthetic side

of designing. Style is a primary concern of Rowe’s, but as a morphological

constraint of particular design disciplines and the cultures within which

they are practiced, rather than as a variable that is distinctive to the

problem-responding done by designers (see also for example, Chan, 2001).

Lawson has long argued that style is an imposition retrospectively read onto

completed designs by critics rather than a concern manifest in grounded the-

orizing of the design process. For Lawson, aesthetic styles may be sources

Design Studies Vol 32 No. 6 November 2011

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Unrepressing style in des

of primary generators, abductive ways of finding appropriate design gambits,

but these must then be reformed and validated by more functional require-

ments. Dorst mentions in Understanding Design that the (Design Thinking

Research) knowledge-base around form-giving is weak (2003, 36) but has an

entry for “Good Taste” (181). There are however no index entries for aes-

thetics or style in Design Expertise (Lawson & Dorst, 2009), though there is

a discussion of form-describing language used by designers (following Tovey

in relation to automobile design and Eckert and Stacy in relation to fashion

and helicopter design) and also a rather critical discussion of form-driven

design in relation to the iconic work of Stark and Utzon. Journals such as

Design Studies contain studies of consumer perception of product form (for

example Crilly, Moultrie, & Clarkson, 2004), but the theoretical framework

tends to consider form as only one outer layer of a design, and consumer

attitudes as fixed constraints e though the exception is Janlert & Stolterman’s

rich proposal to consider product design in terms of character or personality

(1997; see more recently Desmet, Nicola�cs, & Schoormans, 2008), a metaphor

that is less layered and more integrated, and one that suggests that styling is

a rhetorically variable aspect of interaction design and not just an environmen-

tal constraint into which the design must fit. It could also be noted that com-

munication design, and even more so, fashion e areas of design practice that

are especially concerned with styling e are rare foci for research of design

(though in Design Studies on textile and knitwear design, see Petre, Sharp,

& Johnson, 2007, and Eckert & Stacey, 2000).

Yet surely, if design is about changing situations into preferable ones, one of

the main criteria, or at least a necessary if not sufficient criterion, as to what

counts as preferable that is particular to designers, is: increased aesthetic plea-

sure? Are we in a situation where all the attention being paid to design,

whether researched or promotional, is nevertheless missing one of the primary

aspects of designing? And does it matter if design is cast, by “design thinking”

promotions or Design Thinking Research, as not primarily an aesthetic

practice?

What follows is motivated by these rough observations. It takes the conspicu-

ous absence of styling from “design thinking” as a prompt to sketch out a real-

igned theoretical framework for future research of design; one that attempts to

outline how it might be hypothesized that designers think ‘through style’; how

they solve problems or find problems and improve situations by having a sty-

listic predilection.

1.2 Restyling designWhy might “design thinking” be repressing design as styling? Current promo-

tions of “design thinking” are clearly aimed at enhancing the power, and so the

earning capacity, of designers. To move designers up the consultancy hierar-

chy also means moving them earlier in the process, extracting them from their

ign thinking 535

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536

position as last phase surface treatments of already prescribed product types.

This back-ending of design appears to be a legacy of design’s original promo-

tion, especially in the USA, by the Streamliners: Dreyfuss, Geddes, Loewy,

Teague (see Meikle, 1971 e though this is a misunderstanding; Streamliners

birthed design in the US as market-creating brand innovation, with rich mod-

ernist ideologies [Andrews, 2009]). To insist on design’s inclusion in front-end

business strategy development, styling is belittled. In an era concerned about

sustainability, repressing design as styling also frees design from implied

responsibility for gratuitous consumption.

Aesthetics are also thought to be subjective. Themanagerialism that is interested

in “design thinking” claims to be shifting to less algorithmic modes of operation,

but it could be that the stylistic aspects of design remain too incalculable. It could

also be that in a related way, aesthetics is too political. Sam Ladner has conjec-

tured that design thinking is a way of concealing the politics of management

(2009). Aesthetics, as inherently subjective and/or cultural, foreground interper-

sonal politics. Despite its commitment to failure-friendly iterations, perhaps the

risks involved in styling are too much for “design thinking”.

These suggestions might go some way to explaining why aesthetics are down-

played by “design thinking,” but what is at stake in these tactical evasions of

what intuitively seems central to design, as a thinking or a practice? How does

‘style’ help designers design?

2 Taste practicesIt is Pierre Bourdieu (1984) who has done the most to make clear that aesthetic

judgments are inherently and forcefully political. Precisely because questions of

beauty and taste appear natural, or universal, they are powerful ways of rein-

forcing hierarchical distinctions between people. They make visceral e in the

disgust or desire one feels for what others wear, or like, or use e levels of cul-

tural capital, in other words, which non-necessary values one has been able

to afford to use, learn about or discuss. Everyday semi-conscious decisions

about the components of the built environment that we choose to dwell with

comprise a competitive game with tacit but evolving rules.

Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984) is an entertaining and convincing read because

of the empirical way in which it demonstrates homologies between different

fields of taste. The numerous portraits provided throughout the book build

up overlaid maps of people’s tastes, so that the reader can begin to see parallels

between someone’s literal taste, what they like and do not like to eat, and their

taste in household furnishings, or the size and nature of their household book

and music libraries, etc.

Bourdieu’s sociology in Distinction then appears as reflexive version of an

expertise that we all more or less have as we attempt to read the financial,

Design Studies Vol 32 No. 6 November 2011

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Unrepressing style in des

social and cultural capital of people we meet. Film art directors are exemplary

Bourdieusians, finding ways of giving us rapidly comprehensive portraits of

a character via the artifacts visible in a 5 s camera pan about that character’s

room. Glimpsing that poster, those objet d’art, and these kinds of clothes,

allows me as a viewer to make quick hypotheses about the person whose

room this is, about their class, their level of education and financial standing,

for instance - but also, especially if you are a (interaction oriented) designer, of

what they are capable, their facilities with various kinds of activities.

In most uses of Bourdieu’s work, and indeed, inDistinction itself, the emphasis

in these cross-field parallels tends to remain at the level of selections of signi-

fiers. However, importantly, there are practical aspects too. Distinction sug-

gests that people who select the same television shows from all that is on

offer will tend to not only wear similar kinds of clothes, but will also have sim-

ilar levels of knowledge about fashion. They will tend to share ways of talking

about fashion, and they will share how they go about buying and wearing

clothes. In other words, taste regimes also manifest as practices, in this case

the practice of being more or less fashionable.

Bourdieu makes this point when indicating that people from differing levels of

social and cultural capital may ‘like’ the same image, but for very different rea-

sons, or rather, because that image is part of very different practices of image

appreciation. A black and white image of an old woman’s hands can be liked

for its formal compositional properties by someone practicing a kind a high

bourgeois art historical appreciation, whereas it can be appreciated as a sym-

pathetic portrait of suffering by someone practicing a kind of petit bourgeois

empathetic humanism (1984, pages 44e5).

Bourdieusian readings of aesthetics as political have reached design studies,

understood as material cultural studies of designed objects as they circulate

in society (for example, Lloyd, 1991; Julier, 2007; Boradkar, 2010). But they

have not sufficiently reached the research of designing version of design stud-

ies, that is, interrogations of the design process as a practice of, what could be

called, applied taste hermeneutics (though Harvey Molotch’s study of

designers (2005) has an outsider’s recognition of the centrality of aesthetic

judgement to the nevertheless function-oriented aims of designing e Molotch

cites Bourdieu, but does not discuss practices).

Bourdieu is acknowledged as having initiated the current ‘practice turn’ in

sociology (Schatzki et al., 2001). However, as AlanWarde, in the context of so-

ciologies of consumption (2005), has pointed out, the link between taste regimes,

as mapped by Bourdieu in Distinction, and practices, as I have just explained

them, was not made clear by Bourdieu. Warde (2004) is forced to do some

extrapolating to make sense of the formula in Distinction, “([habitus]

[capital]) þ field ¼ practice,” and finds it necessary to use Theodore Schatzki’s

ign thinking 537

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538

characterizations of practices as more discrete ‘teleoaffective structures.’ (2002)

The work of practice-based sociologists such as Schatzki and Andreas Reckwitz

is now being introduced into accounts of design (Shove, Watson, Hand, &

Ingram, 2007; see also the activity-theory work of, for e.g., Gay &

Hembrooke, 2004). From these emergent perspectives, the connection between

Bourdieu’s work on taste regimes and designing becomes clearer. Being adept

at discerning taste regimes also affords you access to what could be practice re-

gimese fields of know-how. Understanding the aesthetic judgments of someone

provides insight into what he or she can do, or could be helped or persuaded

to do.

I am therefore suggesting that there is an expertise to designing that involves

reading people’s taste regimes for their ‘practice styles.’ A crucial part of

designing is being sensitive to overlapping tastes, the habitus that enables those

overlaps, and so the practice dispositions of people with such a habitus.

Designers are concerned with style, because style is a translator of people’s

structured choices into action propensities.

2.1 Innovative styles of practiceTo explain, let me broaden the notion of ‘style.’ Style most immediately refers

to a more or less rule-bound look. However, the term equally applies to

actions, to the modes or moods with which activities are undertaken. Any

practice is able to be performed in various ways; not just in distinct sequences,

but with distinct paces and pressures and mindfulness. For Fernando Flores1

and his Heideggerian colleagues, Charles Spinosa and Hubert Dreyfus (1999),

style is more like the ground of a practice, that which coordinates actions and

makes them meaningfully part of a practice:

There is more to the organization of practices, however, than interrelated

equipment, purposes and identities. All our pragmatic activity is organized

by a style. Style is our name for the way all the practices ultimately fit

together. A common misunderstanding is to see style as one aspect among

many of either a human being or human activity, just as we may see the

style as one aspect of many of a jacket. Our claim is precisely that a style

is not an aspect of things, people or activity, but rather, constitutes them as

what they are. (page 19)

The importance of this more ontological way of characterizing style becomes

apparent exactly when Flores et al. describe encounters with new situations:

Sometimes finding a situation familiar means simply having an appropri-

ate set of dispositions and having them respond on cue. No doubt people

do form habits and find situations familiar, but there is another feature of

familiarity that is different from, indeed, opposed to, this sort of habitua-

tion. One can find a situation familiar even when one has never

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Unrepressing style in des

experienced its like before. In such a case what makes a set of practices feel

familiar is that they share a style. (19)

Now this is an important point worth dwelling over. Flores et al. are writing

in a book about entrepreneurship. They are attempting to articulate the dif-

ference between a politics or managing that either:

a) conserves present setups, perhaps with incremental innovation (or

evolution)

b) proposes unfeasible disruptions to present conditions

c) generates significant innovations around which present situations can

nevertheless realign

The difference b) and c) is like the difference between art and design. The latter

is concerned with use; the new that it creates must be practicable. Getting at

the essence of design then, as opposed to some more radical or abstract

creativity, means explaining not just how the practice of designing

manages to generate the new, but also how designing manages to generate

the not-so-new-as-to-be-unimplementable, Loewy’s famous MAYA e Most

Advanced Yet Acceptable (see also Nelson & Stolterman, 2003). For Flores

et al., the key to understanding the designing of the usefully new concerns

style; innovating, but still within a style:

When people change their practices in meaningful ways, they do so on the

basis of the style they already have. Style acts as the basis on which prac-

tices are conserved and also the basis on which new practices are devel-

oped. (20)

People who are very sensitive to the style of some domain are particularly

good at making such adjustments. In fact, it is this characteristic that

allows us to see a mastery in what they do. [Expert sportspeople] show

their mastery of the game when they win by doing something that we

would not have expected could be the reasonable thing for them to do

given what we have seen before; but when it works out, we see, in hind-

sight, that what they did was to respond to the new situation by staying

within their style and doing something new that the style called for. (22)

The hypothesis that emerges then is that designers, as expert innovators,

operate within discernments of style and their variability. This is what risks

being ignored when design thinking avoids the primacy of the aesthetic in

design.

3 Designing functionality through formThere is a sense in which what I am arguing sounds very pedestrian. The mod-

ern profession of design had its birth in the slogan that form follows function.

On the one hand, this meant that the aesthetic manifestation of a design was

(to be) determined by its function. Design aesthetics has therefore always been

ign thinking 539

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540

read to some extent practically. On the other hand, this slogan was also a kind

of minimalist anti-aesthetic, requiring the form of a designed artifact to be

constrained by the assumed universal and necessitous function of the design.

Being against ornamentation, this modernist form of designing represents

the opposite of what is being argued here; that the forms that comprise the

functional aesthetics of a designed artifact (what Lars Hallnas (2011) has

recently called the “interaction design expression”) reflect the variable taste

regimes of its targeted users. The slogan for what is being argued here is

more like ‘functionality follows the form of the taste practices of the target

market.’ To explain, I will elaborate by outlining 3 under-researched areas

of design practice.

3.1 Brand afforded designingThere has been some engagement, within design literature, with

consumer-oriented research on how the design of a product can attract a pur-

chaser. But the end-point of such design aesthetics has been ownership, with

use being a secondary quality, something purchasers have to learn how to

do more or less on their own. This is evident in much of the work on extending

product use life by enhancing product-owner attachment (e.g., Mugge,

Schoormans, & Schifferstein, 2005). The latter risks leading to products that

are kept museum-like in display cases, rather than products in everyday use

(on this distinction between symbolic value as opposed to use value in relation

to product use life, see Verbeek & Kockelkoren, 1998, and Ilmonen, 2004).

Embarrassingly, ‘user-centered design’ is a relatively recent innovation

(Redstr€om, 2006).

The shift from a marketing-focused designing to user-centered designing was

paralleled by the shift in branding from integrated visual identity to experience

design. The project of the former was merely integrating marketing channels

throughout the customer’s experience of discovering and purchasing the

designed artifact. The latter, with its project of ‘end-to-end’ branding, pays

equal if not greater attention to the nature of the user’s experience of the

designed artifact. A brand’s value derives (or is co-created, according to

Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004) from the usability of its products and services

or, more significantly, from their usefulness.

Now, branding is very clearly a proactive version of Bourdieusian analysis.

Conventional branding attempts to use the homologies of taste regimes to

associate products and environments with the same levels of cultural and

social capital. Experience design, as the convergence of interaction design, ser-

vice design and branding, reintroduces the practice dimension to this Bour-

dieusian process. Branding becomes an exercise explicitly in styling, in the

full practice-oriented sense of Flores et al.

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There has been very little analytical research, of the type done by the Design

Thinking Research group, on branding-based design (though see

McCormack, Cagan, & Vogel, 2004 for an example of style-as-constraint/

branding-as-marketing). More work is needed following the lead being taken

by Megan Strickfaden in relation to analyses of the role of cultural capital in

designing (for example, 2004, 2010). That work should include an interroga-

tion of the role of branding in what Alan Costall identifies as “Socializing

Affordances” (1995). To what extent are affordances stylistic, or of the same

field as certain taste regimes? What is called for is a move similar to that

made in Krippendorf’s Semantic Turn (2006), where the term ‘meaning’ is

used to refer to the nexus of taste signifiers and use affordances. Krippendorf

uses the model of language, suggesting the articulate-ability of these integra-

tive meanings, whereas the more culturally-situated, embodied-action perspec-

tive of Bourdieu is deliberately designed to foreground the tacitness of many of

these actions, the extent to which they are habitual or structured rather than

interpreted or even negotiated. (On the debate about how ‘deep’ or ‘articulat-

able’ are Bourdieu’s habitus, see the discussion in Flyvbjerg, 2001, which

draws heavily on Hubert Dreyfus’ work.)

Validating these claims would entail introducing Bourdieusian profiles into

usability testing. One would be seeking to correlate sets of users with similar

symbolic capital with the immediacy of features on designs intended to

work as affordances. One could hypothesize finding, as Lucy Suchman

famously did (1987), that what usability engineers presume is a universally

rational communication, is in fact highly situated within a particular ensemble

of cultural capital and even taste regimes. Suchman insisted upon a more

Schatzkian version of the bounded ecosystem that comprises a practice, but

research should now be done on the impact of more Bourdieusian

socio-economic variables.

3.2 Performing personasA particular design tool that represents the convergence of branding and (user-

centered) designing is the persona (Pruitt & Adlin, 2006). This fictitious individ-

ual, somewhat accreted frommarket research, is designed to represent the typical

user, quite literally speaking for the user during the design process. The aimof the

method is to extrapolate from this individual to scenarios of use. Yet a persona is

precisely a Bourdieusian profile; it is an inspiration board of tastes and activities.

Alan Cooper who originated the practice of using personas in user-centered

design research (2004) claimed that personas allowed designers to access

user goals in design-motivating ways. Phil and Susan Turner have usefully

drawn critical attention to personas recently (2011), arguing that their agency

derives, often with politically constrictive results, from their function as ‘ste-

reotypes.’ On this reading, personas are tools for ‘chunking,’ productively

reductive types of shorthand.

ign thinking 541

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542

But I would rather claim that personas are tools for pattern recognition. They

disclose styles, understanding style precisely as the pivot between taste regimes

and practices. Unless style plays this role, it is impossible to explain the effec-

tivity of personas, how they enable designers to move from an ‘is’ (a descrip-

tion of a target market situation) to an ‘ought’ (a design proposal for an

improved situation). From a Bourdieusian perspective, personas do for

designs what art direction does in relation to film characters; personas are

demonstrations of an adept reading of practical traits from stylistic built envi-

ronment decisions.

3.3 Reproducing modernist practicesOne of the important reasons for reconsidering style in relation to design

thinking is because of the extent to which style remains central and pervasive

in design education, in both the exoteric and hidden curriculum. Design edu-

cation is exemplarily Bourdieusian:

The studio system is essential for socializing students with a cultivated

habitus. By saturating students with the objects of architectural culture;

by presenting them with role models, living examples of embodied cultural

capital (hence the insistence on the importance of having practicing archi-

tects as teachers); by displaying in all the slight ways of manner, dress and

taste that one is becoming what one wishes to be, the student absorbs that

cultural capital in the only possible way, by presenting to the studio mas-

ter’s gaze their whole social being. (Stevens, 1995, page 117).

This suggests that design education is not just about learning to play the game

within the design field, but, since it is so explicit a form of reproduction,

becoming adept at discerning the games of other fields. Though this is exactly

what needs to be evaluated: to what extent are designers capable of empathiz-

ing across taste regimes and classes of cultural capital (see for instance,

Aspers’ work (2010) on global fashion supply chains)?

When Neumeier, as the exception in promotions of “design thinking”, devotes

Part 2 of The Designful Company (2009) to “The Rebirth of Aesthetics,” it is

a celebration of elegance. Neumeier usefully demonstrates that a concern for

aesthetics manifests not just in designers pursuing pleasing artifacts, but also

pleasing solutions; artifact-enabled practices that have unexpected simple

styles. Neumeier recalls the oftquoted Buckminster Fuller: “If the solution is

not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” (73) However, parsimony, far from being

a universal truth, is a very particular modernist aesthetic, whether in organiza-

tional design as Neumeier mentions (see also Guillen, 1997) or computer pro-

gramming as David Gelernter discusses in Machine Beauty (1998). By way of

perhaps extreme contrast, consider Francois Jullien’s work on Ancient Chi-

nese aesthetics of Detour (2004) and Blandness (2007). When Donald Norman

claims in the first chapter of Emotional Design (2005) that “Attractive Things

work Better,” what design education taste regime is being reproduced? Is this

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Unrepressing style in des

part of what JanMichl has recently called “the modernist apartheid” of design

education (2007)?

There are complex issues here concerning the extent to which globalization has

involved the homogenization of the taste regimes of the consumer classes. But

the implication is that “design thinking” has been blind to the functional role

of aesthetic tastes in design because a form of modernism has been taken for

granted as a near universal, at least in the institutions of design education

around the world.

4 Concluding remarksI have been arguing that the promotion of “design thinking” has been replicat-

ing a tendency in Design Thinking Research to downplay the primacy of aes-

thetics in designing. This risks concealing the way in which designing is the

designing in, with and of styles; styles that make possible existing and new

forms of social practices. Designing is a current economic force when it is

most explicitly designing via practical styles, as evidenced by brand-driven

and persona-based design. Concealing the practice-oriented nature of styles

in design in turn risks restricting design to only those styles to which design

education unreflectively seeks to naturalize us.

AcknowledgementsMany thanks to Lucy Kimbell for looking over this paper and providing cru-

cial references and Susan Stewart’s ongoing patience and editorial support.

Note1. Disclosing New Worlds lists the authors with Spinosa first, Flores second, and Dreyfus

third. I call out Flores in relation to the following pr�ecis of their argument, as the first

section of the book which discusses entrepreneurship is based on Flores’ biography,

and Flores has gone on to be more explicit about the role of style in business innovation

(Flores, 2000).

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