{"id":536,"date":"2026-07-13T16:10:41","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T15:10:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/?page_id=536"},"modified":"2026-07-14T13:36:05","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T12:36:05","slug":"creativity-and-confusion-in-design","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/schools.stem.open.ac.uk\/knowledge-media-institute\/creativity-and-confusion-in-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Creativity and Confusion in Design"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\"Dr<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Dr Ben Sweeting – University of Brighton<\/p>\n\n\n\n


This event took place on Wednesday 08 July 2026 at 11:30<\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n


Design activity involves various paradoxical structures. Some are familiar within the discipline, such as the way that responding to a design challenge can tend to change the structure of the challenge, a dynamic that can be both beneficial and frustrating. Other examples are more difficult to navigate. Consider tendencies to put faith in technological innovation to respond to ecological crises that are caused by other (past and present) acts of technological innovation, or how the paternalism of many well-intentioned approaches to designing suggests that \u201cdoing good\u201d is not always the right thing to do. In this presentation, I draw on the work of Gregory Bateson concerning logical types of communication and double bind theory, to offer an interpretation of design\u2019s paradoxes not as problems to be solved but as structural to design processes in various ways.   Bateson discussed how communication that moves across contexts involves a kind of \u201cdouble take\u201d that can lead to both confusion and creativity, giving examples that included play, fantasy, humour, metaphor, ritual, empathy, and poetry, as well as his experiences of the speech patterns of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia. Similar kinds of double structure are evident in design contexts in numerous ways, underpinning both design\u2019s capacity and some of its muddles. Consider the metaphorical structures of drawings and models, the playful aspects of design studio processes, and the imagining of worlds not only as they are but also as they could be. Consider also how design is vulnerable to confusions that can be understood as mismatches of logical type. Buildings that \u201clook good on plan\u201d are equivalents of eating the menu card rather than the meal.   A theme running through these examples is the way that modern design conventionally rests on divisions of labour between planning and acting, a relation across logical type that opens many possibilities but also leads to various distortions. Related to this is the recursive structure in which design processes are embedded. Any instance of design activity is subject to constraints resulting from the outcomes of previous design processes\u2014and its outcomes in turn become constraints on future acts of designing. This recursive structure takes in both intentional and unintentional processes and formal and informal acts of design. Consider the design of design processes, such as in the development of new methods; the constraints that artefacts of all kinds place on their use; the way that design operates within contexts, settings, constraints, problems, and possibilities that result from previous design outcomes; and how design normalizes its premises by embodying these in artefacts.   In trying to think through design in this way, my intention is to point to a pattern at large in design contexts and to develop a way of thinking about creativity and confusion in design in relation to each other. An underlying question (and one I do not yet know how to answer) is in what ways adaptation to the context of the double structures in design processes has consequences (for good or ill) when it comes to the more tangled paradoxes in which design is implicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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