“Diaphanous” (2024) (Author, AI-generated via Freepik.com)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Two Suggestions about the Diaphanous
4. Cognitivism and Creativity: A Concise Overview
5. From Cognitivism to Propensity
6. The Work at Work, or, the Effective Present
7. The Diaphanous as Generative Stimulus
8. Conclusion
This essay was previously published in a slightly different form as (Paans, 2024a), except for the Introduction, which was written specifically for APP.
It will be published here in eight installments; this is the fourth.
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4. Cognitivism and Creativity: A Concise Overview
To understand why modern design theory has not paid much attention to the diaphanous, we introduce a sharp distinction between two scientific paradigms. During the decades following the Second World War, Western design theory adopted a broadly cognitivist approach to creativity. Following the cultural influence of both positivism and the rise of the mechanistic worldview, designing was framed as a kind of rational problem-solving or heuristic search (Newell, 1980; Simon, 1996; see also Paans 2022). Correspondingly, the designer was viewed in terms of decision theory, as a rational optimizer.[i] Again, corresponding to that idea, creativity was viewed as a kind of heuristic selection of the best possible solution for a relatively well-defined problem. Particularly the first generation of design theorists during the 1960s and 1970s presupposed rather than argued for this notion, although many of their core concepts remain firmly entrenched in the design literature. During the 1980s, the thematic focus shifted towards the sociological aspects of designing, but the core of the approach always retained—in some form or the other—its cognitivist inheritance.
Cognitivism in design theory champions the idea that designing is a specialized form of deliberative reasoning. Admittedly, this form of reasoning may be less structured and more open-ended than philosophical reasoning, legal reasoning, or bounded rationality, but it is nevertheless concerned fundamentally with the development of theories or micro-theories about a given design idea. There is certainly a deep kinship here with the idea of logos, construed as our human logical reasoning capacity. The operation of the creative mind was often quickly subordinated to our capacity for logical reasoning, either in the inductive or deductive sense (Eastman, 1968, 1969). The cognitivist orientation had its roots in post-war work on cybernetics. This can be seen in how visual representations were viewed: they were regarded as carriers of informational contents. Following Norbert Wiener’s and Marshall McLuhan’s cybernetics theories, such representations were deemed successful if their contents could be unambiguously interpreted. Consequently, the designer was viewed as a rational agent who made sketches to aid effective decision-making, recording options, or communicating ideas to others. The design drawing was regarded as strictly a decision-theoretic, heuristic, or communicative tool. It became the physical transcript of reasoning processes, giving rise to the so-called “protocol studies,” in which participants sketched and verbalized their thinking processes. It should be emphasized that such studies were useful in understanding the “reasoning of designers” (Rittel, 1988). That does not mean, however, that the entire design process is understood; it entails merely that its reasoning is clarified. However—and this has been a recurring question—the cognitivist paradigm had always problems in locating the site of creativity or the properly generative potential within a design process. If designing is just logical reasoning, where does the creativity reside? Why then are designers not just engineers?
Certainly, there have been attempts to address these questions. For instance, the work of Teresa Amabile on creative processes can be read as an attempt to address that gap in the cognitivist paradigm (Amabile, 1988). Amabile closely followed the procedure-like models of the first generation but added that “creativity-relevant skills” are required to advance from mere problem-solving to reaching truly creative solutions. Amabile concluded that creativity and personal traits are closely linked. An open, experimental, flexible, and explorative mindset seems conducive to creativity. Moreover, the creative mind experiments with new cognitive pathways in order to broaden the range of strategies to break through cemented habits, patterns that shape thoughts, and ways of approaching problems (Hanna and Paans, 2021). Amabile builds on an earlier conception of the creative personality developed by Donald McKinnon, who held that creative persons tended to more expressive, thereby affording themselves easier access to the richness of the subjective experience (McKinnon 1966).
This coincides with the finding by McCrae that a defining characteristic of creative personalities is openness to new experiences (McCrae, 1987). In addition to dealing with new experiences, the creative process is also distributed in time. McKinnon held that often, there are phases of engagement, disengagement, withdrawal, insight, and evaluation (McKinnon, 1967). While it is tempting to frame these phases as neatly delineated, in reality they seamlessly merge into one another. In an additional refinement of this picture, Harvey and Berry have argued that we might distinguish between various forms of creativity, some of which are concerned with novelty in the narrow sense, while others are focused on integration (Harvey and Berry, 2023). This insight was already present in the early, pattern-based design theory developed by Christopher Alexander to the so-called Systematic Design Models, which distinguished between phases of divergence and integration (Asimov, 1962; Broadbent, 1966; Jones, 1970; Lawson, 2005).
The layered and variegated nature of the creative process was also recognized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his seminal study of “flow states” (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008). On the one hand, flow states are “autotelic”—that is, they become ends-in-themselves. They invite involvement, play and enjoyment. And on the other hand, they also provide a cognitive advantage, since they fuse action and awareness, joining both capacities to reach high levels of achievement (Csikszentmihalyi, 2013: pp. 101–102). One of the advantages of this fusion is that it becomes easier to focus one’s energy towards the external world, thereby aiding a deep involvement with the surrounding environment and highlighting the capacity to “see” new possibilities. Indeed, as David Bohm has argued in his work on creativity, the capacity to perceive the new into the existing order of things is what underlies creativity as such: the novelty that is produced lies not only in making new objects or plans, but in conceptualizing relationships that were “hidden in plain sight”(Bohm, 2004). All these insights apply straightforwardly to hand drawing and sketching: if there is a single group of practices that could lay claim to the label “autotelic,” this is it. In drawing, the hand and the head fuse in the material domain. An idea acquires a form, while the form that appears transforms the idea. Already, we deal with a certain translucency here: an opacity through which the idea appears on the world—but not in its final form, but as an allusive imprint of what it will become. The acquisition of form takes place through a lived, engaged, embodied experience. It cannot be reduced to an intellectual exercise or the practice of decision-theory. To think so would be reductive, discounting the lived experience that is absolutely crucial to the act of human creation.
In architectural theory, this line of thinking has been developed in the “phenomenological approach” (Mallgrave and Goodman, 2011: pp. 201–214). Concisely put, this approach focuses on first-person, lived experience and engaged forms of knowing in order to account for design creativity. In particular, the work of Peter Zumthor is relevant here (Zumthor, 2014: p. 13). Zumthor held that drawings require a degree of openness, so that they can be “inhabited” by the imagination (see also Paans and Pasel, 2018). Some sixty years earlier, Michael Polanyi formulated a similar idea by advancing a notion which he termed “indwelling” (Polanyi, 2009). The idea is that only intimate knowledge leads to insights that are truly creative. Without denying the use of heuristic reasoning, both Zumthor and Polanyi supplement it with an aspect of deep familiarization and immersion. Instead of focusing only on the logical reasoning of designers, the phenomenological approach stresses the subjective and embodied experiences of designers while working out their ideas. Zumthor emphasizes this point and states that the perception must “take the drawing in possession.” That is, only an engaging attitude and willingness to be influenced by what is present allows one to drive the design process onward.
Recently, the work of Juhani Pallasmaa applied the insights of personal experience, hand drawing and embodiment theory to architectural design. For Pallasmaa, working out an idea consists in keeping all loose ends close by as a way to “dwell in the plasticity and multiplicity of an idea” (Pallasmaa, 2009: pp. 109–110). Indeed, the architectural image is seen as an “organizing image.” We use this organizing image as representation of our most fundamental categories of thinking and experiencing (Pallasmaa, 2011: pp. 121–122). By analogy, the architectural drawing becomes a microcosm in which one can experience what the space-to-be will become. In emphasizing this lived aspect, Pallasmaa builds on McKinnon’s insight that creation thrives on the willingness to experience new impressions. The architectural image becomes not just the site of reasoning, but the site of experimentation with a range of (spatial) experiences. It follows that the designer must therefore grow accustomed to a degree of uncertainty or indefiniteness. One must, as it were, “learn to love” the process of exploring, deferring decisions, and lacking direction (Jonas, 2014: pp. 72–103).
In the phenomenological approach, the image itself is imbued with a kind of agency. As Albena Yaneva has shown, this insight easily extends to the thought that the designer, the design tools, and the image are all joined in a network (Yaneva, 2009).
Drawing on Bruno Latour’s version of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the designer is seen as one of the many actors in a meshwork of (social and instrumental) interactions and relations. The designer is no longer the sole process agent, and design cognition becomes one among many factors that shape thoughts and ideas. Many of these factors are located in the material realm – ranging from the sketching paper to the marker or felt pen with which the lines are drawing, or the gypsum that leaves drops and splashes on a surface. But equally, we can conceive of the perceptual realm of the allusive or translucent as an agent in its own right. Why should we deny causal influence to such notions, even if they are distributed throughout the creative process? Not every agent in the meshwork of design is a clearly demarcated entity.
Extending this thought, over against the cognitivist paradigm, we can therefore formulate an alternative, which I’ll call the agentive paradigm. Extending the insights of ANT, the core idea is that images or visual media more generally possess an inherent propensity to effectuate, drive, direct, illuminate, and actualize thinking processes that include deliberative reasoning, but also include other forms of thought. These thought-forms can be emotive or affective, but at any rate, they are non-conceptual and non-propositional. That is, they cannot be framed as neat, determinate statements about a design concept or idea. There have been moves towards a so-called “aesthetic epistemology” (Haarmann, 2019), or architectural image theoriesto emphasize the agency that images exert (Goldschmidt, 2017). Building on this foundation, I’ll turn to the work of François Jullien, who provides an alternative way of conceptualizing this agency, and whose insights allow us to understand why diaphaneity is a generative stimulus in design.
NOTE
[i] Horst Rittel explicitly made the point that spatial planning is a process of variety creation and reduction in his 1970 article Der Planungsprozess als interativer Vorgang von Varietätserzeugung und Varietätseinschränkung, “The Planning Process as Iterative Progression of Variety Generation and Variety Reduction,”highlighting the core idea that heuristic reasoning forms the basis of design activity. In turn, Rittel took this idea up from his colleagues using the same Positivist/decision-theoretic approach.
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