Liminal States in Designing

Abstract

Designers today face the daunting challenge of having to create more powerful, more innovative, and higher quality products through better, faster, and less costly processes. Can present approaches meet these challenges? Probably not. How might, we develop approaches that can? One path that seems reasonable is to try to gain a bettor understanding of the conditions and practices that lead to our best designs. If we can identify and describe these conditions in sufficient detail, then perhaps we can reproduce them and increase our chances of meeting today's challenges. This essay offers a preliminary sketch of a concept called the “liminal state” that we feel may represent a central element of designing and a condition that when embraced leads to the very best design products and processes. We will define the “liminal state,” describe a variety of contexts in which it may occur, and speculate on some particular areas where liminal states might improve performance.