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This paper argues that the widespread belief that ambiguity is beneficial in design communication stems from conceptual confusion. Communicating imprecise, uncertain and provisional ideas is a vital part of design teamwork, but what is uncertain and provisional needs to be expressed as clearly as possible. Understanding what uncertainty information designers can and should communicate, and how, is an urgent task for research. Viewing design communication as conveying permitted spaces for further designing is a useful rationalisation for understanding what designers need from their notations and computer tools, to achieve clear communication of uncertain ideas. The paper presents a typology of ways that designs can be uncertain. It discusses how sketches and other representations of designs can be both intrinsically ambiguous, and ambiguous or misleading by failing to convey information about uncertainty and provisionality, with reference to knitwear design, where communication using inadequate representations causes severe problems. It concludes that systematic use of meta-notations for conveying provisionality and uncertainty can reduce these problems.

Drawing ideas from previous designs and other sources of inspiration is a universal part of all human designing, but the forms that adaptation takes, and the ways it is conceptualised both differ between industries. This paper describes how sources of inspiration are used in commercial knitwear design. Knitwear designers actively search for sources of inspiration, which they use both to define the space of designs that will meet their purposes and tune their tacit perceptions of what is appropriate, and in the development of individual designs. They employ active strategies for guiding their idea generation actions to produce the ideas the situation requires. Knitwear designers routinely use a very broad range of sources of inspiration, and are explicitly aware and open about how they use them. Identifying a good source is often the key creative step in knitwear design, and being able to do this well is a vital skill for a designer. The paper makes some provisional generalisations about the structure of design processes driven by thinking with sources of inspiration, to provoke and facilitate comparisons with other industries.

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Abstract:The nature of novel idea creation in design depends on the nature of the design challenge: how requirements and constraints not only determine what is acceptable but shape thinking. This paper explores how overconstrained and underconstrained problems are tackled in fundamentally different ways, using engineering design, knitwear design and software development as exemplars. Problem framing as well as the iterative reformulation of the design problem is crucial in all fields but is done very differently. However, designers face a variety of types of problem, including problems resembling those typical in other industries; this paper argues that a wider awareness of the creative thinking methods used in other industries would aid designers in many fields to tackle unfamiliar problems.