The brand designer Michael Johnson describes in his book “Branding in Five and a Half Steps” the role of the half step as “bridging the gap between strategic branding and the design process” (Johnson, 2016). He calls this “leap of faith moment” as the most challenging yet rewarding part of the creative process. In that very moment the designer must let go intellectual strategies and logical insights and embrace intuition, emotion, and creativity to develop visual concepts. The leap from research to design requires a shift from logical reasoning to embodied knowing, where tacit knowledge plays a crucial role (Grey & Malins, 2004).
This stage in the creative process seems to fill students with the most amount of anxiety. There have been many times in my ten years in teaching where students turn up with metaphorically blank sheets of paper and “talk me” in my tutorial through their ideas up to two/three weeks before the hand-in date. The reason why they haven’t gone put their ideas to paper yet is often because they are too afraid of making the jump of their beautiful and perfect idea in their head to giving it a physical shape.
In order to distill a sense of of excitement instead of fear to make this “leap of faith” from an conceptual idea to an initial visual expression, I try make the studens realise that communicating ideas verbally (as suppose to being shown it on paper / on the screen) has limitations. Each solely verbally described idea – by the very nature of our minds – will evoke a completely different imagine in each person’s mind. I talk them through how it currently looks in my mind. With this exercise I often manage students from turn their fearful staring at the gap into joyful laughter and the following week they eventually jumped to the making and trying stage within design.
I want them to learn to trust their intuition (tacit knowledge) as it naturally will guide them in finding the right expression and help them understand that the design process is a messy one and full of little uncertainties. Gray and Malins highlight that the jump from strategy to design is not a straight path—it involves iteration, uncertainty but ultimately result in a beautiful outcome and add embodied knowledge to the tacit one. The studio and tutorial settings are where ideas can truly take shape, bridging the gap between research and tangible design outcomes. Design research does not follow a linear path; it is iterative, where insights from making and testing continuously refine the process(Grey & Malins, 2004).
References
Johnson, M. (2016) Branding: In Five and a Half Steps. London: Thames & Hudson.
Gray, C. and Malins, J. (2004) Visualizing Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design. Farnham: Ashgate.