Epistemological gaps in studying design, design ability and the phenomenology of architecture, Neuroanatomical basis -mind and body- of the design cognition and action

Abstract

This study finds it’s place in a much large research project, which aims to furnish some new, more empirical and scientific explanations to the problematic articulation and the relation between the deliberate –cognitive- control and the spontaneous generation of designs in creative designing process.1 These accounts concern the methods of the process of implicit and explicit space experiments and the “phenomenons” lived by the designers, which enter in the new designing experiments through sketching. Secondly, in the meta disciplinary level, this general research approach postulates and tends to demonstrate that the findings in the scientific disciplines can (and must) be applied to the design research. And doing this, it claims the necessity and the feasibility of the cross and interdisciplinary approach in the study of the design and the architectural design. Thirdly, it postulates in fine as an epistemological level hypothesis that the design activities such as architectural design, urban design activities involving space, because of their foundational epistemological difference (the phenomenological aspects in the involvement of space in the cognitive functions), must be separated from other types of so named “design” activities. Then briefly, we can say that this study has two main goals. First of all it outlines a framework of design process as space creativity based on a totally new perspective of functional cognitive neurosciences. And secondly it tries to place within this new theoretical framework a certain amount of those issues evoked in the established design research -in general and the architectural research in particular-, issues such as the phenomenology of architectural design (Pallasmaa,2009, 2005, 2006) in one hand, and the issues like "designerly ways of knowing”, "the nature and nurture of design ability", “design thinking and design sketching” (Cross, 1982,1984,1990,1995,1999,B.I.R.D. 2007, Dorst, 2006,) "how designers think, design in mind, what designers know" (Lawson 1979, 1980, 2004).