Design Studies Award to Professor Rivka Oxman.

I am highly honoured to accept this recognition of my work. I want to thank all involved in selecting my work as worthy of distinction. This is a great encouragement for me to continue working on design research, and I am sure that I accept it not only for myself, but for all the many excellent researchers that are together trying to understand, formulate knowledge, and eventually to improve the many processes of design.

The research described in this paper deals with visual reasoning in design. The particular subject of this research is the role of visual reasoning in the emergence of the form in design, or what is scientifically called, “emergence”. We have attempted to establish a theoretical foundation for the cognitive basis of visual reasoning in emergence. What is unique, and perhaps important in our findings, is the role of prior knowledge, or higher level knowledge, in the reasoning process. We claim that it is the re-cognition (recognition) of visual shapes and images in design that enables emergence. This kind of guidance function in emergence is termed `anticipated emergence'. We demonstrated how high-level domain knowledge of visual forms can be accommodated as cognitive content, and how this can contribute to establishing a cognitive basis for emergence.

This particular piece of work is one part of an on-going, long-term involvement with the exploration of design thinking, the role of representation in design reasoning and the formulation of knowledge in design. I have been involved with these subjects for many years both in a pure empirical research format and also - in relation to systems development – in experimental and developmental formats.

This long-term project has always been carried on in an academic framework. And other academic activities have been the counter-form and the supporting infrastructure for much of this work. I think that to all of us, the pragmatic motivation for much of this research is the improvement of the design process. In my case a strong motivation has also been to apply knowledge gained in research in the improvement of design education. This is for me also a constant and on-going relationship. So I must also thank my many generations of design students and research students.

Finally, I want to express my continuing gratitude to Nigel Cross and to Design Studies for providing this important and unique forum for design discourse.

To Award Address By Professor Nigel Cross.

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