Episode 7 - Design Expertise

In this penultimate DTM podcast Peter talks to one of his colleagues at Delft, Professor Matthijs van Dyke. Matthijs is a Professor of Practice and co-author of the well-known Vision in Product Development (ViP) method. Matthijs is not only an educator though. His main job is working at the design business he co-founded: Reframing Studio in Amsterdam, where he has built up considerable expertise in design working with major clients and organisations. In the podcast Matthijs reflects on his changing role in the business, what his core expertise is, and why he doesn’t think that trying to categorise people into different levels of expertise is useful. Following the interview Peter and Mieke discuss what they think about design expertise, pulling out some key themes from the interview with Matthijs. Total running time is 35 minutes.

Peter introduces a book by Bryan Lawson and Kees Dorst called Design Expertise (also mentioned in the Assignment 2 description) which gives an overview of how designers develop across many different disciplines. There are some excellent case studies of how top designers work – a recommended read. The different ‘levels of design expertise’ that the book quotes is from a paper by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus called Expertise in Realworld Contexts which is an insightful look at why it is difficult (or impossible) to encode human expertise into computer code. Bryan Lawson has written much about the design process and the expertise of designers, and Mieke mentions one of his papers about how designers make sense of new situations through their experience: Schemata, Gambits and Precedent: Some Factors in Design Expertise.

Peter mentions a bestselling book by Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers: The Story of Success, which amongst other things discusses the idea that becoming an expert ‘simply’ takes 10,000 hours. Finally if you want to follow up on the cooking documentary that Peter mentions, ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’, it is currently playing on Netflix.