DESIS-Africa: design thinking for social innovation and development

Abstract

Transdisciplinary design practice requires different approaches and different subject to the teaching of traditional discipline-orientated design. It is the authors’ contention that the field of Information Architecture Design contains many of the cognitive decision making tools required for a transdisciplinary design practice and that the effectiveness of IA’s cognitive tools in the teaching of broader design practice is a rich and relevant focus for design research. In this paper, Nathan Shedroff’s Continuum of Understanding is used as a conceptual model to firstly identify and then discuss aspects of transdisciplinary design practice such as problem locating, synthetic solutioning and the role of subjectivity in design. Aspects and dispositions that tend to hinder the development of transdisciplinary practice in design education are briefly introduced. The outcome of the discussion is an amended model representing the synthetic development of design solutioning and a set of heuristics to guide practice. The presented heuristics are further unpacked in an analysis that explains to what extent and in which forms they exist in the practice of Information architecture.