Design Studies Award to Professor Rivka Oxman.Address by Professor Nigel Cross, Editor: Design Studies Journal.The Design Studies Award is made annually, jointly by the journal publishers, Elsevier Science, and the Design Research Society, for the best paper published in each year. The award comprises a certificate and a prize of £500. The criteria for the Award, in order of priority, are: contribution to the development of the field of design research, originality of research or scholarship, breadth of relevance, and clarity and style of presentation. Votes for the Award are cast by the journal Editors and a group of Officers of the DRS. The winner of the 2002 Design Studies Award is Professor Rivka Oxman, of the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion - Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, for her paper The Thinking Eye: Visual re-cognition in design emergence, published in the issue of March 2002. Rivka Oxman has been a frequent contributor to Design Studies, in a series of papers addressing issues in design cognition and computational modelling. She has been especially interested in visual reasoning in design – how designers think and reason through the medium of sketches and drawings and representations of shapes. Her award-winning paper concerns a significant perceptual phenomenon in this context of visual reasoning, that of emergence, or the recognition of implicit shapes. In her paper she proposes that emergence is not accidental, but is guided, for example by memory and precedent, and is a dual act of perception and cognition. She uses an example from architectural design, and empirical experiment, to identify the phenomenon of what she terms 'anticipated emergence'.
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