Form Follows Feeling: The Acquisition of Design Expertise and the Function of Aesthesis in the Design Process

This PhD thesis is an attempt to understand what is involved in learning to design and to propose a theoretical framework that explains how design expertise is acquired and why a highly developed sense of design is necessary to acquire design expertise.

It’s a multi-disciplinary work that looks at the topic from theoretical, philosophical, psychological, historical, evolutionary and cognitive science points of view. There is no doubt that some will take issue with how I describe design, what I claim is the proper end to design, how I define expertise, what I identify as normative performance expectations, my argument in favor of tacit knowledge and embodied cognition over technical rationality, whether one really can experience qualia in mental representations, the developmental model of the acquisition of expertise, my use of the word aesthesis, and the importance of aesthetic resonance in the design process.

Even so, there are many valuable concepts and ideas presented here that are worth considering and that offer insight into how students learn to design.