Abstract

Key to design ability is said to be a characteristic form of cognition, generally described as ‘visual thinking’: designers are particularly visually aware and sensitive, and use models and codes that heavily rely on graphic images. In designing architecture, for instance, the visual seems so important that architecture students are characterised as “the vis kids of architecture” (Goldschmidt 1994: 158). Even authors who argue that this visual mode of thinking in design is a philosophical construct that can be dispensed with acknowledge that this does not undermine the significance of the visual dimension (Moore 2003).