Attribution of intuition-driven decision-making in strategic designerly practice / Natrina Mariane P. Toyong

There is a general recognition of the evolutionary nature of a designer's role, which mimics the pattern of a persistently changing industry, locally, glocally, and globally. With a focus on the Malaysian design industry, consistent with what is happening everywhere, the definition of a trained designer is constantly being pushed to meet this demand for change, and designers are finding themselves moving from working with complicated problems to increasingly complex design problems. Thus, a reconsideration on the current designerly way of thinking towards discovering a strategic decision-making practice is needed to fit this new condition. Not coincidentally, the present study establishes that intuition is an often-quoted cause for many unexplained brilliant works by designers. Among all the excellent decisionmaking strategies, it is least understood in the design field and often reduced to being an ambiguous designer's instinct, which is divine in nature. The study, therefore, investigated intuitive attribution as it explains the causes of decision making at the early concept stage of a design process. Although Intuitive Expertise and Intuitive Creation has been heavily studied, current research on intuition has neglected to account for the outcome attributes of Intuitive Foresighting. The present study addressed questions on types of decision making in design, how intuition-driven decision making is applied at the early concept stage and how it may be practised strategically as a form of designerly thinking. Therefore, this form of thinking, specifically Designerly Concepting, is presented as a form of intuitive foresighting and a hallmark of design practice expertise. The inquiry's subjectivity comes from the complexity problem’s nature that stems from unknown and ambiguous underpinning theory in intuition research. Thus, the present study adopted a philosophical assumption with a relativism ontology that is interpretive and constructive by employing a qualitative inquiry. It looks at the symbolic interaction of multiple reality in the attribution of intuitive decision making specific to the design and designers changing culture. Using multiple case studies through in-depth interviews of ten expert-level designers and five senior-level designers triangulated with four focus group session with thirty two novice-level designers. The findings demonstrated a distinct combination of heuristic, holistic and affective-intuition attributes in design and the internal and external condition that leads to it. The result is a rich constructed meaning that defines an intuitive decision-making pattern of experienced designers consisting of an expert and senior-level designers. The study also presents five welldefined intuition decision-making patterns found in novice designers, which sets the training toolkit for practical decision-making ability at the early concept stage. The finding offers a starting point for the formulation of future training module of Designerly Concepting aptitude that can be trained as practical skills in design education. The significance of the study is that it informs the domain knowledge of design studies and design education by introducing a focus on the internal and external intuition attribution, leading to value and skill in the form of Designerly Concepting. Finally, the availability of the suggested training module further strengthens Designerly Concepting as a proponent for future-proofing design in a climate of an unpredictable, complex environment.