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A Case for Intuition-Driven Design Expertise

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Design for Tomorrow—Volume 3

Part of the book series: Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies ((SIST,volume 223))

Abstract

The role of intuition in decision making is widely recognized in many fields, which saw a strong network of an intuition-based research community in this early turn of the century. However, it is poorly studied in the design field and notably little has been published on its role in design decision making, especially on the early concept stages of the design process. Reviews of previous studies reveal that task uncertainty and creativity have a positive and significant impact on expert intuition. This makes it a more convincing case for studying the highly unstructured mode of problems that are typically found in design. The case study on intuition-driven design expertise was done as a triangulation of data source from the in-depth interview of ten expert and six senior-level designers, followed by four sessions of focus group involving thirty-two participants made out of novice-level designers. Working around the common theme of “Future Workplace for Designers in the Year 2050,” the result produced a rich comparative and descriptive attributions of intuition-driven decision making between experienced and novice designers at three different types of intuition. These findings later inform the three decision-making models for training design expertise based on (1) affective intuition which draws on emotion, heart and feelings; (2) heuristic intuition which draws on logic, theories, facts and hunches; (3) holistic intuition which draws on abstract thinking, big ideas and big picture.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial Design, Faculty of Art & Design, Universiti Teknologi MARA, 40450, Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia

    Natrina Toyong, Shahriman Zainal Abidin & S’harin Mokhtar

Authors
  1. Natrina Toyong
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  2. Shahriman Zainal Abidin
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  3. S’harin Mokhtar
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Natrina Toyong .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Product Design and Manufacturing, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

    Amaresh Chakrabarti

  2. IDC School of Design, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India

    Ravi Poovaiah

  3. IDC School of Design, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India

    Prasad Bokil

  4. IDC School of Design, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India

    Vivek Kant

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© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

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Toyong, N., Abidin, S.Z., Mokhtar, S. (2021). A Case for Intuition-Driven Design Expertise. In: Chakrabarti, A., Poovaiah, R., Bokil, P., Kant, V. (eds) Design for Tomorrow—Volume 3. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol 223. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0084-5_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0084-5_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-16-0083-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-16-0084-5

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