Limitations in the decision strategies of design students

What I read

In this text, the author reflects on his observations of architecture students working on a project. He focuses on their strategies and approaches to problem solving, and identifies that the most successful students worked from different decision-making strategies into content and tactics, rather than the other way around, and were willing to change their approaches based on the circumstances of the experience. Playfulness was a key part of this approach—treating the decision-making itself as malleable, rather than something conservative and fixed was a successful approach.

First, the author sets the context for his exploration. He wants to “discover how to teach” the subjects of operational knowledge and substantive knowledge, and the mechanism he selects is to observe 12 students as they work through a problem. The author decides to focus on the different definition and problem solving approaches used by students, which along with implementation, he calls decision-making.

He summarizes the themes that emerged. First, it is a poor idea of separating decision-making discussions from content and context discussions. Strong students altered their decision-making based on context, and could “decide how to decide and learn how to learn.” Less strong students were able to change content, but not the form of their decisions. Additionally, strategies for decision-making are hierarchical, where higher-level strategies emerge in response to context, and are then used in the lower-level activities.

Some students were unwilling to develop those higher-level strategies, often due to issues with soft-skills. One was fear, where students “tended to identify their own sense of uniqueness in a fixed operational style. To ask these people to change their mode of operation in response to context, even for a moment, was like asking them to commit suicide.” Another was that students begin to develop ideologies and were unwilling to reconsider them, and their decision-making strategies were informed by these as well as their values about the substantive material of the problem and the role of an architect, both in society as well as in the organizational context of working on a problem. Only one of the biggest themes was related to the actual use of strategies, but was focused on the primary issue described: the idea of a strategic (and therefore skill-based) weakness or strength limited or unlocked a more fluid or flexible approach.

Next, the author describes the strategies in more detail; these are separated into three levels. The first is the theme of decision-making (defining, solving, and considering implementation); the second is the way a student moves between the elements of the first; and the third is about the “basic operational building blocks” or hard-skills.

At the first level, students used both linear and holistic strategies. Linear approaches started with planning processes, deductive thinking, or a pragmatist approach. Some students did not follow these rigidly, and one observation was that the flexibility came from the “rare ability to let go of early decisions if it transpired that subsequent phases could not be accomplished.” Students who selected and committed to a linear approach did so in order to have a starting point, and did not realize that the actual problem itself could be changed to provide that start.

Students who used more holistic strategies were able to avoid commitment early in the process, but after selecting a strategy, it was very difficult to let it go. Students using an approach like this often “began with the activities they most valued and/or were most skilled at.”

At the second level—the way students moved from the different phases in the first level, students again leveraged linear and holistic ways of thinking, and again, students who were not willing to “hold the initial idea lightly enough for it to be changed” were unwilling to go back to the first level of decision-making. Some students used a “separate entity mechanism,” where solutions are generated without considering fit (temporarily suspending the judgement of “correctness.”) Others used more bottom-up approaches, which “required framing up on nothing.” Most students selected a strategy here and stuck with it, even in the face of evidence that it wasn’t working effectively. One reason was because they didn’t have other strategies; another was the “great difficult which students had in carrying out the rather limited operational advice they tended to get.”

The third level is the place where actual content moves are made, and the author describes that “it is likely, then, that the limited strategies of the other students is partly explained by their deficiencies in performing one or more of the basic elements.” One of the challenges observed was the lack of intuitive knowledge, or a lack of appreciation for intuition over rationalism. Another was the lack of ability to push back on new ideas later in the process, or more commonly, the opposite – the inability to integrate new information. The author describes that “it is the major conclusion of this paper that while students showed some ability to accommodate or adjust their substantive knowledge to new evidence, only two were willing to accommodate their operational knowledge.” Another issue for some students was their comfort with ambiguity, and ability to either integrate or avoid forcing a abstract to concrete move.

Next, the author describes something he calls the “art of performance.” When students were not in the studio (for example, “in the bar,”) they were more capable of showing a range of thinking about their work. He relates this to de Bono’s ideas of being playful. This is intertwined with discussions of culture, and for some, being playful was in direct opposition to the idea of doing work.

Last, the author noted that students held large views on the role of architecture in society, and when these were fixed, they then impacted the way work was done. The “degree of dogmatism was proportional to the students’ needs to protect a particular weakness or promote a particular strength in one of their basic operational skills.”

The author concludes that “it is possible to teach students to be operationally flexible by helping them address the problems they have in performing elementary skills. The key to this help is not to describe the essence of a particular activity to them… but to help them get into the right frame of mind for it.”

What I learned and what I think

I’m really taken by the idea of strategies for selecting decision-making approaches in design problems. It seems like I’ve maybe forgotten a lot of Simon’s focus on that, focusing instead on the type of problem being addressed. I’m thinking about how I taught this (or didn’t) in undergrad studios. Coaching the move itself would be a “What would it look like if the candleholder had more curvature here, to better reflect the light?” Coaching the strategic would be, “What are ways you can explore curvature?” Coaching the decision-making approach would be, “What are some of the things to explore?” Coaching the strategy selecting a decision-making approach would be, “What are the pros and cons of selecting different things to explore?” …..?

I’m not sure about that; it gets sort of meta-wrapped around itself. But there really is a skill of answering the question “What is the right thing to be doing right now?” at any level of fidelity.

It’s almost like the bootcamp students have never learned any strategic way to select decision-making strategies, or even any tactical way to select decision-making strategies, or any decision-making strategies, or any strategies at all. Assuming the methods and process are good and sound, there’s still the application of these things in the context of a problem. Rote application implies no strategic consideration of how to approach the problem; it isn’t strategic because it was claimed to be the right and only way to do things (or wasn’t claimed, as much as was never provided an amount of time for consideration and presentation of alternatives.) There was really no discussion of “approaching a problem” at all. But to then select from decision-making strategies, one needs to know more than one of them; and then to strategically select from them, one needs to know more than one of them and have an informed view of when one is better than the others.

Decision-making is different than problem solving, too, and the nuance feels important. In the context of working through a design problem, I’m making decisions about the problem itself as self-contained “moves,” and I’m also making decisions about which content to focus on in order to make moves, and I’m making decisions at a broader level about approaches. Should I make a lot of iterations? Should I abandon the whole thing, or put it aside? Should I question the premise of what we’re doing? Should I go back to the business problem, the perceived need for the thing at all, or the model in which the solution or problem appears? And even at a method level, there’s a “would it be helpful to tell a little story here?” or “I think I need to diagram this out because the complexity is overwhelming.” Is good creative direction actually making a non-content decision for a more junior designer, but avoiding the content decision itself (“I think it would be valuable here to look at the problem from this other perspective; to do that, we should try writing down nouns and big verbs”).

I found this paper by searching for the author by name; as I understand it, he worked directly on the architectural studies upon which Schon’s work is based (the Quist work.) This was written in 1980, and Schon’s Reflective Practitioner was published in 1984; I think this entire body of work is probably intertwined into most of the way we have reflection in action.