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Against Creative Flow: Design as Structured Movement

The culmination of ten years of teaching practice, this paper is a theoretical reflection on the nature of architectural design. The term ‘design’ is often used to describe something like a general overall ‘flow’ of the creative process between investigation, development and resolution. Demystifying the manner in which ideas move through this threefold process, it categorises the different intentions, modes of thought, and representational media particular to each stage. It criticises the vague notion of ‘ creative flow’, replacing it with the notion of ‘middle ground movement’. What is often glossed over in the flowing definition of design is fine-grain creative practice, or particular interactions between modalities of thought that enables the progressive embodiment of abstract thought, and without which thought becomes discontinuous. In a data-led culture where increasing emphasis is placed upon preliminary research, it is no accident that mapping techniques have become so predominant. However this is at the expense of the middle ground, which as a result tends towards instrumental automation, literalisation of the diagram, and scripting of form.

Challenging the automation of creativity and the instrumental determination of computational design, this paper argues for the persistence of multi-media design practice. It promotes the following strategy– that the primary role of architectural education is to cultivate multi-disciplinary, dialogical practice, and for students of architecture to learn how this can be preserved in professional practice.

All of the material collected in this co-edited volume is the product of research-led teaching practice.