Designing in Skills Nurturing Personal Engagement in Design

Potentialities of skills in design are intriguing. Skills open up new perceptions of the world, transform human understanding and engagement with the world itself. Our explorations suggest that leveraging existing designer's skills and training for new skills might remarkably contribute in designing for richness of meaning. We developed several skills-based techniques and validated them through a number of workshops. These techniques encourage participants to make before thinking, to reflect on the outcomes of making, and proceed by iterations of reflection-on-action. Also developed are techniques to increase the frequency of such iterations to minimize loss of meaning by abstraction, and techniques to foster depth of reflection. We organised these techniques into a framework, Designing in Skills (DiS). DiS nurtures personal engagement of designers, compelling a sense of responsibility; it supports designers toward what we call the "first-person perspective", enabling application of individual sensitivities. This paper presents firstly the motivation of our work and the surrounding theory. Subsequently, it introduces the framework and its development, using design cases that have led to its consolidation. It illustrates how DiS prepares for design practice and reflects on the theme of experiential richness.