Design-based studies: an action-based ‘form of knowledge’ for thinking,reasoning and operating

Some points of significance in the Royal College of Art report Design in general education have, to a certain extent, been insufficiently exploited by ‘doers and makers’. This paper re-acknowledges the contribution made by the identification of ‘modelling’ and ‘design awareness’ to the acceptability of action-based problem-solving. Simultaneously, the paper relates the RCA report to longer-term trends in thinking about traditional conceptions of knowledge divisions and boundaries. The RCA report is seen as an inevitable point on a continuum, but unfortunately it stopped short of suggesting action-based modes of knowing and thought as constituents of a ‘new’ discrete form of knowledge. This concept, outlined by Hirst, functions alongside the structures associated with verbal/mathematical and other language ‘tools’ used generally to organize aspects of reality in distinctive and characteristic ways and to generate new thought within the language mode and associated knowledge domain of ‘doing and making’.The paper goes on to propose a model which relates the imagery and structure of action-based knowledge with the principle theories on the thought-verbal language relationship and some other prominent observations on the nature of thought and language. As a follow-up to this it is necessary to outline the crucial importance of internalization of action-based experience so that both action-based imagery and structure are assimilated into the thinking, awareness and character of the individual.Finally the paper examines some of the implications this might have for the way design-based studies are to be viewed in the future.