Intuition in Design

A perspective on designers' creativity

David Durling
Advanced Research Institute,
School of Art & Design, Staffordshire University, UK

This paper may be cited as: Durling, D. (1999) Intuition in Design. In Bulletin of 4th Asian Design Conference
International Symposium on Design Science 1999, Nagaoka, Japan, October. ISBN 4-9980776-0-0 C3072.

Keywords: design thinking, intuition, creativity, personality

Abstract
Creativity is manifest in different ways in individual creative people. Designers are shown
generally to prefer an intuition led approach to seeking design opportunities. It is thought that
this intuitive approach arises from the particular personality characteristics of designers.

The paper seeks to set out findings about characteristics relevant to designer personality
which have been reported in the wider psychology and design literature, including a study of
eminent designers and the ways in which they work. A special study was undertaken of UK
design students to assess their personality characteristics and any possible bearing on
intuitive preferences towards designing. Over three quarters of these designers were shown
to prefer an intuition approach coupled with flexible open ended attitudes.

Some relations are drawn between these findings and explanations arising from theoretical
models which may help to explain intuitive processes and which form the basis for ongoing
research in this area.

Intuition is considered to be a distinct and transferable skill which is a precious asset as yet
undervalued in the design domain.

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1. Introduction

Simple observation of design students in departments of Art & Design1 shows us that they
exhibit certain characteristics in creative thinking, and seem to have particular attributes of
personality. For example, in designing it can be seen that there is a motivation for difference,
often for its own sake; there is a desire for style, sometimes at the expense of practicality; or
there is a drive for some particular aesthetic or tactile quality that must receive expression.
They seem to like solving new problems — as opposed to incremental change — or seeking
new opportunities, and occasionally have great fun so doing. Cognitively, they are given to
generating unusual associations and relations, and they sometimes break the rules set by their
tutors. Occasionally, they are rebellious and difficult. They rarely work from first principles and
seem happy to work with uncertain or incomplete knowledge, and to feel their way intuitively
through the problem. Intuition seems often to take precedence over either formal design
processes or fact-based approaches. By comparison with, for example, engineering
designers formal methodologies to aid the design process have met with little success in
departments of Art & Design.

This paper suggests that designers' creativity is inextricably bound up with their personality
characteristics, and that their particular form of creativity is intuition led. Furthermore, intuition is
not simply guesswork, but may be seen as rooted in designers' particular ways of thinking as
fostered by their training, and is a skill common to many creative persons. However, design
educators, researchers and practitioners are often uncomfortable with expressing design
thinking in terms of intuition, and it is a phenomenon which has not been adequately studied in
our field. A better understanding of intuition is an important contribution to building a credible
domain of design knowledge, and will be of practical use to academics in teaching creativity, as
well as to design practitioners in gaining a better understanding of their own creativity and its
enhancement.

2. Creativity

It has been suggested that there are 'designerly ways of knowing', particular cognitive styles
typical of designers and the ways in which their world is sensed, and which underpin their
creativity 2. There are many working definitions of creativity arising from various psychological
studies. For example, creativity has been suggested to be: thinking which results in the
production of ideas that are both novel and worthwhile 3 ; may be expressed in the
production of artefacts having a notable degree of originality 4 ; and creative enterprise as
simply an act that produces effective surprise 5 ; and an important and persistent feature of
creativity — the ability to set aside established conventions and procedures 6. There are
clearly many outcomes of creativity, some of them differ widely. For example a criterion of
creativity in engineering may be predicated on there being progress ie. a product may be
made cheaper or stronger, or perform better or have additional functions. In fashion design, on
the other hand, criteria for originality may include being different for its own sake. It is not

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always possible to separate functional improvement from simple change, the eccentric and,
occasionally, from the merely frivolous. One reported case from psychology illustrates this
point well. A research subject tested with cards of the Rorschach psychodiagnostic (a set of
ink blots of ambiguous form, from which patterns may be perceived) was asked to tell what
he saw in each blot. Instead of looking directly at the test cards as expected, he inspected
them edgewise and even bent cards in the middle and looked at them from various angles.
He gave responses unique to the examining psychologist — a veteran of several thousand
such tests — who was certain that the subject's responses were original because the test
manual defines an original response as one that occurs less than than once in 100
examinations 7 . But is this creative or merely eccentric behaviour? The eccentric may not be
creative although in a statistical sense it is uncommon. A general and practical criterion of
creativity is therefore difficult to establish.

A number of areas of significant difference between designers and others have been
postulated, including engineers and other cognate professionals 8 and that these differences
have implications for education in the subject 9 . Among these differences are thought to be
the extent of, or preference for: divergent/convergent thinking; brain lateralisation; spatial
modelling qualities; holism/serialism; and subjective/objective thinking. In problem solving,
the cognitive style of convergence is, for instance, characteristic of many engineers 10 . There
are several secondary pointers to the particular cognitive qualities of certain designers. For
example, in the area of brain lateralisation, as motor co-ordination of the left hand is under right
brain control, it has been thought that in designers this might lead to a higher incidence of left-
handedness and dyslexia, together with more ability in right brain activities such as visuo-
spatial processing (anecdotally, Art & Design student populations n the UK do seem high in
left-handedness and dyslexia, thought there are few corroborating data).

As an example, in one (USA) empirical study 11 students and their tutors in a department of
architecture were found to be more left-handed than would be expected. The norm for
preferred left-handedness in the population was defined as 8-10 per cent. Of the staff, 29
per cent were left-handed. Of the students, left-handers represented 23.9 per cent in one
year group and averaged 16.3 per cent across all student groups. In a related spatial
awareness task, left-handers exhibited 100 per cent accuracy, whilst on the other hand (so to
speak) right-handers achieved accuracy of less than 50 per cent.

However, left-handedness is strongly acculturated and may not generalise globally. Left-
handedness has traditionally been repressed in children, and continues to be discouraged
strongly in certain cultures. For example, oriental designers may therefore show less left-
handedness, but this will not equate to higher levels of creativity among western designers!
What is required are measurable and stable indicators of preferences which traverse cultural
boundaries.

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3. Creative personality

There has long been the suggestion of a particular personality which fosters creativity. Some
observers have demonstrated creative personality as a pattern of cognitive traits which are
characteristic of creative persons. This pattern is manifest in creative behaviour, including
inventing, designing, and planning. Though creativity is manifest in quite different ways in the
arts and in the sciences, in various psychological assessments of highly creative persons
distinguished by contributions to their field, it was noted that there was a high degree of
similarity across disciplines. In this respect it was observed that:

"it would almost seem as if the differences between science, art and literature are
differences of particular skills and interests only, and that the fundamental
characteristic of the creative, original person is a type of personality".12

4. Study of UK design students

In order to ascertain whether designers differed from a normal population in respect of

personality, a study was made of design students in typical courses in UK university design
departments13 . This study used a form of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
questionnaire14 in order to assess psychological types of design students. Two universities
were selected which offered typical art-based undergraduate design courses in both 2D and
3D studies. Samples were restricted to whole subject-specialist cohorts in their first year of
undergraduate study. First year students were chosen because they are relatively unchanged
by their studies. The subject areas were industrial design (product), interior design, graphic
design, furniture design, and design/marketing. The MBTI is based on Jungian theory, and
classifies individuals into one of sixteen types resulting from four scales. One of these bipolar
scales measures preferences for sensing or intuition.

Firstly, the sensing-intuition scale:

sensing sensing is perceiving reality directly through the senses, dealing with the practical
elements of reality and facts. It is focused on what is actual, in the present or past.

intuition intuition is internal sensing using imagination, seeking possibilities, preferring

relationships and problems to facts. It is focused on what might be, in the future.

Figure 1: sensing-intuition scale

Therefore, at one end of the sensing-intuition scale, sensing deals with preferences for fact
based information rooted either in history or in the present, whereas intuition is much more
future oriented and imaginative. In this study it was found that a large majority of design
students (79 per cent) had intuition as a preference. In a normal population intuition is reported
as 24 per cent.

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Secondly, another scale, judgment-perception, defines the following:

judgment judgment emphasises thinking in a decisive, planned and orderly manner, aims to
control events, and is associated with closure and the settling of things.

perception perception is more about keeping options open, and is associated with living a more
flexible, spontaneous existence, aiming to understand life and adapt to it.

Figure 2: judgment-perception scale

Therefore, at one end of the judgment-perception scale, judgment deals with preferences for
working with order, whereas perception relates more to being open to experience. This may
be described as the difference between going shopping and feeling good about making a
decision to purchase (judgment) or enjoying the possibilities for purchase offered by the shop
(perception). In this study it was found that a majority of design students (69 per cent) had
perception as a preference. In a normal population perception is reported as 34 per cent.
This kind of thinking has been reported 15 as follows:

"Associated with openness and lack of rigidity is the ability to play spontaneously
with ideas, colours, shapes, relationships, to juggle elements into impossible
juxtapositions, to shape wild hypotheses, to make the given problematic, to
express the ridiculous, to translate from one form to another, to transform into
improbable equivalents. It is from this spontaneous toying and exploration that
there arises the hunch, the creative seeing of life in a new and significant way"

Individuals in this sample clustered in a small number of types. Over a quarter (26 per cent) of
design students were assessed as one type (ENTP). It is instructive to reflect on Myers' own
description 16 of this type:

"Their intuition acquires an unquestioned personal validity that no other process can
approach. They will enjoy, use, and trust it most. Their lives will be so shaped as
to give maximum freedom for the pursuit of intuitive goals. Because intuition is a
perceptive process, these [types] will deal with the world in the perceptive attitude
[...] They will consult their judgment [...] only when it does not conflict with their
intuition"

5. Intuition

Though intuition is widely preferred by designers, the intuitive, future oriented, seeking of
possibilities is a shared characteristic among creative groups such as designers, architects and
artists. In MacKinnon's celebrated 1960s study of American architects17 the conclusion was
inescapable that the more creative the architect, the stronger that intuition was represented.
The most creative group in his study showed 100 per cent preferring intuition as measured by
the MBTI.

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More recently, further light has been thrown on this phenomenon by a study of members of
the Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry (RDI). This comprises a group of eminent
designers administered by the Royal Society of Arts, UK. Membership is by invitation only,
and is based upon excellence in practice of the subject. The Faculty numbers no more than
100 RDIs at any one time. Thirty five RDIs were interviewed at length about the ways in
which they design, in order to elicit how they experience moments of insight significant to
themselves 18. How is it that, from the many ideas generated in a problem solving task, the
designer knows that a particular proposal is the idea that should be taken forward? Several
points emerged from this study which are typical of designers' descriptions of their experience
of having the idea and knowing it is right. A typical response was

"I always know when an idea is right [but] I can't always put facts and figures against
it".

It is significant from this study that the gaining of the idea is strongly held. It may appear
intuitively, but is then felt to be absolutely right as a solution to the problem space under
consideration. This realisation may also be attended by strong emotions such as feelings of
wholeness and completeness. Designers also recognised the difficulties that intuitions present
for providing rational explanations that are acceptable to others. While there was acceptance
that the "intuitive bit comes first" it was argued that often

"you do rationalise every step of the way. But I think the actual way in which you
got them [ideas] might even be called irrational."

These deeply held responses may be summarised as follows:

a sense of wholeness and unity about the solution

experience of paradox

difficult or impossible to analyse, or to express process adequately in words

openness to all kinds of experience

deeply felt positive, pleasant ecstatic feelings and lack of anguish

originality, unique syntheses and harmony

Figure 4: RDIs' responses

One of the characteristics of these designers is that they are open to all kinds of experiences,
with high awareness to influences relevant to their design problem. In particular, they seem
ready to notice particular coincidences or juxtapositions of events which others — less
sensitised — fail to notice. The researchers state that these designers:

"are able to recognise opportunities in the way coincidences offer prospects and
risks for attaining some desirable goal or grand scheme of things."

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This is a model more of opportunity-seeking than problem-solving. Though intuition seems
central to designerly thinking, these designers felt that their intuitive consciousness was
impossible to articulate or to translate adequately into language. This must raise some doubts
about the extent to which intuitive design can be taught explicitly, as opposed to the general
studio-based manner of inculcating design values and thinking through opportunities which
present themselves in the course of project-based teaching. This is learning design creativity
by discovery, by osmosis.

Designers rely on intuition, some exclusively so. But alongside their more 'rational' colleagues
from business, engineering and the like, many designers seem uncomfortable with the
generally held perception of intuition being something vague, unquantifiable, and indeed
unscientific. However, intuition is not guesswork. It is not random, haphazard, or hit & miss. It
is the apprenticeship in learning how to think in designerly ways that produces the deep
insights which designers characteristically manifest. What to the outside world may seem like a
guess is in fact the result of experience coupled with a certain facility in thinking. It is the basis
of our creativity, and yet we seem uncomfortable in claiming it for our own.

6. Mental models

One way of understanding the workings of intuition may be by reference to theories of mental
models. For example, schemata19 and scripts20 underpin a range of cognitive theories. In
this context, schemata are reported to be well supported empirically 21 and form the
foundations of many cognitive theories. They are mental representations which consist of
general knowledge about events, objects and actions. These 'chunks' of information or
schema are formed from an individual's personal experiences, and are a representation of their
unique view of those experiences. Schemata take the form of networks of schema which
facilitate mental frameworks for understanding, remembering and acting upon information.
These schemata are built up over time by designers in learning through designing. Memory is
organised around personal experiences. Arising from these theories it is thought that all
conceptualisations can be represented in terms of a small number of primitive acts. Scripts
allow individuals to make the assumptions needed to understand events by filling in the
missing pieces from the existing network. For often repeated events the response action for
that event is embedded in memory as scripts. These become automatic responses for that
specific situation. When presented with a new event, individuals will make assumptions
based upon their previous experience. However, once a schema has been established, the
existing understanding can be enhanced as additional related information is encountered. For
example, in learning to drive a motor vehicle, the process of starting from standstill requires a
considerable balance of judgment in throttle, clutch pedal, and movement of the gear lever in
moving up through the gears. As learners, we have to concentrate hard on getting these
actions in balance. After a time, these actions become internalised and we do not think about
them openly — they become automatic in the context of that particular situation. Both
schemata and scripts can take care of that particular task. If conditions change — for example a

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steep hill start not previously encountered — we can still apply the knowledge previously
gained and modify our script to cope with the new situation. This too becomes embedded
and so on.

Intuition may play a part in dealing with novel situations in two ways. Firstly, the preference for
intuition carries with it comfort in making propositions that are not necessarily based upon
evidence. This is not guesswork, but more an idea however preliminary or vague, that can be
tested later. Designers are happy to work with uncertain knowledge and to form preliminary
conjectures and assumptions. This is similar to Lawson's observation of the differences
between architects and technologists in tackling a problem22 in that, whereas the technologists
approached the solution of a problem by trying to understand the underlying rules and
constraints and only then making conjectures, the architects took an altogether more playful
approach by proposing solutions for consideration in the expectation that understanding
would be gained later. This playful conjecture seems a natural cognitive style for designers
and is well supported in project-based learning in the studio. Secondly, another designers'
cognitive style is the facility and preference for divergency in thinking. It may therefore be that
unusual associations and relationships may be formed between the more generalised
schemata and their associated and more specific scripts. Intuition is clearly not simple
guesswork. It is founded upon layers of the designer's existing knowledge structures and the
rich complexity of associations between schema, schemata and related scripts. Nor is intuition
a random activity. It is situated in the particular design task, and is tightly focused on seeking
opportunities which are apparent perhaps only to the trained designer's creative mind.

7. Conclusion

Particular aspects of personality which bear upon designers' creativity have been highlighted.
Many kinds of professional are creative, but the designer's particular brand of originality seems
more connected with divergent thinking (coupled as it is with ideation and unusual associations)
than it does with convergent thinking. There is also flexibility of thinking and openness to
experience and ideas. An important aspect of design thinking is intuition. This is more than
guesswork — it centres on a synthetical process, poorly understood and difficult to verbalise,
yet which is utilised naturally by designers with confidence. Eminent designers have reported
that they know intuitively when an idea is the right one.

A survey of design students shows them to be high on intuition. Their psychological type
leads them to be imaginative, future focused, open-ended and curious about their world. Their
profile is quite different to a normal population, particularly in respect of intuition. They also
score high on perception attitude which facilitates flexible thinking. Designers share similar
characteristics of intuition with cognate professionals such as architects and artists.

A number of issues are raised which require investigation through further research and the
provision of empirical data. In order to clarify some of these issues, at Staffordshire University
School of Art & Design, we are part way through two further studies of design students. One

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study seeks to understand the social processes involved in design learning in the studio.
Another project, conducted by a psychologist, is examining the relationship between
creativity and cognitive styles in designers. Among the expected outcomes of this research
is an attempt to relate a cognitive style measure to brain asymmetry. It is expected that some
preliminary findings will be reported over the next few months.

Many design educators recognise that often, the skills we can give our students today will be
out of date within a few years. The intuitive approach to design seems so fundamental to the
designer's particular brand of creativity, and yet is so often regarded implicitly at best, or
disregarded completely at worst. It is no wonder that designers show discomfort with
attempting to rationalise their 'irrational' processes, but through a better understanding of these
special ways of thinking, intuition may be seen as our most precious and transferable asset.

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