Nigel Cross: How designers think.

Professor Nigel Cross is the podcasts' 120th guest, Emeritus Professor of Design Studies at the Open University, design researcher who played a pivotal role in establishing design as an academic discipline, Editor in Chief of the journal Design Studies between 1984-2017, developing the concept of design thinking along the way. We speak about the second edition of his book, Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work, published with Bloomsbury in 2023.

On design, Nigel says: ‘the key thing for me is to see it as a […] form of skilled behaviour, not as a talent or a gift, you know, something which you just magically have or you don't have. It's a form of skill. It's a set of cognitive and practical procedures that designers do in the process of designing. So that, I think is the most important thing for me to come out of what I've been researching - is to see it as a skill. And if it's a skill, then it can be enhanced, it can be trained, it can be educated.’

This is a refreshing and for some I suspect, rather challenging suggestion. If it can be trained, perhaps we might ask, why isn’t it more? 

Nigel is so big he has a Wikipedia page. I mentioned Nigel’s paper Design thinking: What just happened? published in Design Studies 86 (2023), and his earlier book, Design Participation (1972), which was the Proceedings of the Design Research Society International Conference, 1971: Design Participation.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick