Seeing and learning from familiar shapes of a Seljuk pattern

The designer develops personal sensibilites in the course of the design process. Personel sensibilities through appreciations and emotinal responses lead the designer to follow a non-linear trajectory. The trajectories, consist of a process that the information is retrieved in-toto rather than a step by step generation of images, depend on the idea of distinctive design worlds constructed by the designer. Highly personal design worlds entail how we perceive our surroundings. The diversity in perceiving the outside world give rise to every single designer do things in a particular way. Design processes and design thinking have been extensively investigated by several studies (Akın, 1986; Goldschmidt, 1991; Newell & Simon, 1972; Schön, 1992; Suwa & Tversky, 1997). However, neither the conclusions they have arrived at nor the processes they have been through coincide with the nature of design processes they have described. The methods for analyzing design processes and design thinking that these studies employ lack personal sensibilities. Therefore, they do not reveal anything novel. This study proposes a new kind of method for investigating and learning from design processes and design thinking with a distinct personal voice. This method is an attemp to develop a model of designerly way of conducting a research and approaches design processes as a process of defining, redefining and changing the problems-as-given. It consists of four steps and each step sets a ground to freely explore ideas without necessarily coming up with a solution or an answer. The study begins with a visual deconstruction of a Seljuk pattern. The deconstruction aims to find a congruency between how a composition is made and how it is perceived. Then, we set out an explication of all the questions as appeared as successive thoughts in writer's mind in the first place which all together started the curiosity to initiate this study. Following the path formed out of successive thoughts allowed us to obtain unanticipated relations and features. After that, the author narrates her encounter experience with a photographic representation of a Seljuk pattern. In order to reveal the structure of repeating phases, a dissection method was applied on the narration. The narration of the plastic experience aroused interest in how others experience this encounter experience. We explored this in a study consists in seeing and drawing; each participant drew what he/she had seen while looking at a photographic representation of a Seljuk pattern on computer screen. And finally the outcomes of the study was dissected based on the findings of the dissected narration. This part aims at finding correspondances between the outcomes of the dissection of the narration and the study.