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Sources of Inspiration: A Language of Design

Article  in  Design Studies · September 2000

DOI: 10.1016/S0142-694X(00)00022-3 · Source: OAI

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Sources of inspiration:
a language of design
Claudia Eckert, Engineering Design Centre, Engineering Department,
University of Cambridge, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 1PZ,
UK
Martin Stacey, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, De
Montfort University, Milton Keynes, UK

Sources of inspiration play an important role in the design process, both

in defining the context for new designs and in informing the creation of
individual designs. Previous designs and other sources of ideas furnish
a vocabulary both for thinking about new designs and for describing
designs to others. In a study of knitwear design, a process in which the
use of sources of inspiration is explicitly acknowledged, we have
observed that designers communicate with each other about new
designs, styles and moods, largely by reference to the sources of their
ideas. In this paper we discuss why this style of communication is so
important, and what information it is used to convey. We view it as the
use of a language to describe regions in the space of possible designs.
 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

Keywords: sources of inspiration, design precedents, communication,

collaborative design, knitwear

T
he Enterprise–D encounters a starship crewed by an alien race with
whom Captain Picard and company cannot communicate despite
the omnipotence of their universal translator1. Eventually they dis-
cover that this race communicates entirely by reference to historical anec-
dotes or shared myths. The Tamarians can express in a few words a com-
plex concept like ‘two strangers overcome their differences in the face of
great peril and are friends ever after’, while conjuring up a rich picture of
the emotions involved in the adventure. However it takes them equally
long to convey a simple concept such as ‘give me a knife’, by referring
to a story of a man who opened his arms in front of a town wall and was
given something.
1 Star Trek: The Next Gener-
ation Series 5 Episode 2 ‘Dar-
In an ethnographic study of the knitwear design process we have observed
mok’, first broadcast in the week
of 30 September 1991 an almost equal reliance on shared cultural references to express design
www.elsevier.com/locate/destud
0142-694X/00 $ - see front matter Design Studies 21 (2000) 523–538
PII: S0142-694X(00)00022-3 523
 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain
 ideas2,3. Knitwear designers talking among themselves describe designs
almost exclusively in terms of combinations and modifications of design
elements that they refer to either by category labels or by their origins—
in other designs, or in other objects or images. Their words can only be
understood correctly by people who know what the sources of their design
ideas are. Often the referents of the designers’ descriptions are nowhere
to be seen, but are simply part of the designers’ shared cultural experience.
While the sketches they create to communicate designs are intended to be
context–independent, the recipients’ interpretations depend on their under-
standing of categories of design elements4. Knitwear designers’ communi-
cation of their designs shares many characteristics of the Tamarian langu-
age: complex concepts can be expressed concisely by reference to sources
of inspiration, but many simple things cannot be made explicit. We have
also observed very similar communication by reference in a study of heli-
copter design, a branch of engineering with interesting similarities to knit-
ting5.

This paper seeks to describe and explain this phenomenon. Why is com-
munication by reference to examples so pervasive in knitwear design?
2 Eckert, C M Intelligent sup- What can and cannot be said in a language of examples? When is it an
port for knitwear design PhD the- effective means of communicating designs? What happens when people
sis, Department of Design and
Innovation, The Open University, don’t share the same stock of reference points?
Milton Keynes, UK (1997)
3 Eckert, C M ‘Managing effec-
tive communication in knitwear
design’ Design Journal Vol 2 No
1 Sources of inspiration
3 (1999) pp 29–41 Almost all design proceeds by transforming, combining and adapting
4 Stacey, M K, Eckert, C M elements of previous designs, as well as elements and aspects of other
and McFadzean, J ‘Sketch
Interpretation in design com- objects, images and phenomena. Everything can be a source of inspiration
munication’ Proceedings, 12th
International Conference on to a designer. ‘A good designer is inspired by everything’ is a frequent
Engineering Design Vol 1 Tech- quote one hears from knitwear designers as an answer to the question what
nical University of Munich, Mun-
ich, Germany (1999) pp 923–928 makes a creative designer. Designers use a variety of types of source:
5 Eckert C M and Clarkson P comparable designs (for knitwear designers, other knitted garments); other
J ‘Customisation and change
processes in complex engineer- types of design (for knitwear designers, typically textiles and other decorat-
ing’ Cambridge University Engin-
eering Department technical ive products); images and works of art; and objects and phenomena from
report CUED/C–EDC/TR88
nature and everyday life (such as the rhubarb leaves that lead Ove Arup
(2000)
6 Walker, D J with Cross, N G to the design for the Kingsgate footbridge in Durham, England6). Real
An introduction to design (Open
University Course T263 Design:
physically present objects reveal more details and carry information about
Processes and Products, Unit 1) manufacturing processes; while images of objects already have some
The Open University Press, Mil-
ton Keynes (1983) interpretation attached to them in the way they have been created, for
7 Eckert, C M, Stacey, M K example in the light in which objects are depicted, or the context created
and Clarkson, P J ‘Algorithms
and inspirations: creative reuse by the objects or people with whom they are displayed.
of design experience’ in Pro-
ceedings, Greenwich 2000 Inter-
national Symposium: Digital Cre- We use the term source of inspiration for all conscious uses of previous
ativity, University of Greenwich,
London (2000) pp 1–10 designs and other objects and images in a design process7. It subsumes

524 Design Studies Vol 21 No 5 September 2000

 narrower terms for specific uses of idea sources in design: starting
design—the design that is modified to generate a new design; precedent—
in architecture a culturally approved building that lends authority to new
designs based on it8; reuse—the deployment of an existing component in
a new context; pattern—the manifestation of a solution principle9; and
primary generator—a salient and explicit feature of the problem which
shapes the design10. Sources of inspiration play a number of important
roles in design thinking, as definitions of context, triggers for idea gener-
ation, and as anchors for structuring designers’ mental representations of
designs.

2 Knitwear design: a case study

Our empirical study of the knitwear industry, carried out over seven years
in more than 25 companies in Britain, Germany and Italy, has focused on
(1) communication in design teams2,3 and how this can be facilitated by
computer support2,11; and (2) the use of sources of inspiration throughout
the knitwear design process12,13. While it is simple enough to be under-
stood, knitwear design shares many characteristics of complex engineering
projects; many ubiquitous phenomena are especially salient and clearcut
in knitwear design. Complexity arises from the interactions between the
inherent limitations of knitted structures, material properties, manufactur-
8 Goldschmidt, G ‘Creative
architectural design: reference ing constraints, market pressures and aesthetic considerations. Knitwear is
versus precedence’ Journal of
Architecture and Planning
created by multidisciplinary teams, and problems arise from failures of
Research Vol 15 (1998) communication between team members. The product is highly dependent
pp 258–270
9 Alexander, C, Ishikawa, S, on the context created by other designs and cultural and technological
Silverstein M, with Jacobson, developments.
M, Fiksdahl-King, I and Angel,
S A Pattern Language Oxford
University Press, New York, NY
(1977)
The role of sources of inspiration is recognized and openly acknowledged
10 Darke, J ‘The primary gen- in the knitwear industry, where they have two fundamentally different but
erator and the design process’
Design Studies Vol 1 (1979) connected functions. (1) They define the context in which new designs are
pp 36–44
11 Eckert, C M, Cross, N G created. By looking at garments and other sources of inspiration, and learn-
and Johnson J H ‘Overcoming ing what their competitors are doing, designers define the regions of design
communication difficulties in the
design process by intelligent space into which their own designs should fit. The challenge is to select
support for conceptual design’
fashions, and locations within the envelope of each fashion, that fit their
Design Studies Vol 21 (2000) pp
99–112 customers’ self-images, or to create distinctive products by stretching the
12 Eckert, C M ‘Design inspi-
ration and design performance’
envelope without breaking out of it (and thus appearing odd or tasteless)—
in Proceedings, 78th World Con- see Figure 1. Fashion as we see it in shops emerges through many designers
ference of the Textile Institute
Vol 1, Textile Institute, Thessa- using the same objects as inspirations according to forecast trends and the
loniki, Greece (1997) pp 369–
387
lead given by catwalk designers. (2) Sources of inspiration inform the cre-
13 Eckert, C M and Stacey, M ation of individual new designs, which are adapted from one or more
K ‘Adaptation of sources of inspi-
ration in knitwear design’ Cam- sources of inspiration. Designers employ a number of adaptation strategies,
bridge University Engineering in which the synthesis of a new design is either triggered by the source,
Department technical report
CUED/C–EDC/TR80 (1999) or the designers select a source based on a plan for their design13.

Sources of inspiration: a language of design 525

Figure 1 The envelope of acceptable designs within a fashion

3 The roles of sources of inspiration in design

cognition
Perception of external sources of inspiration prompts new imaginings.
Research on the role of externalisations in design thinking has concentrated
on the role of sketching14. Schön15 has shown that for many architects,
sketching is an essential part of creative design, and creation is driven by
making and perceiving sketches; Schön characterises design as an inter-
active conversation between mind and sketch. Designers directly appreci-
ate different types of information in their own sketches16, alternating
between seeing that and seeing as17. Ambiguity in sketches facilitates rein-
terpretation triggered by dissatisfaction with the current design18. For
designers who make active use of sources of inspiration in designing, they
play a similar role to designers’ own sketches. The sources most typically
used by knitwear designers are images of other designs, which seldom
have the vagueness and ambiguity important for triggering reinterpret-
14 Purcell, A T and Gero, J S ations. However adaptations are triggered by mismatches between visible
‘Drawings and the design pro-
cess’ Design Studies Vol 19
or imagined design elements, and between designs and goals. Previous
(1998) pp 389–430 designs are not the only source of reusable chunks. Knitwear designers
15 Schön, D A The reflective
practitioner: how professionals actively search for sources of shapes, patterns, motifs and colour combi-
think in action Basic Books, New
York (1983)
nations that can be translated into aspects of designs.
16 Schön, D A and Wiggins,
G ‘Kinds of seeing and their func-
tions in designing’ Design Stud- Skilled designers in visuospatial fields, notably knitwear, are usually very
ies Vol 13 (1992) pp 135–156
17 Goldschmidt, G ‘The dia- good at generating rich and detailed mental images of designs, and have
lectics of sketching’ Creativity
very strong visual memories. They typically have the subjective experience
Research Journal Vol 4 (1991)
pp 123–143 of perceiving complete pictures, though aspects or details may change or
18 McFadzean, J, Cross, N G
and Johnson, J H ‘Notation and
only appear when people concentrate on them. Research on mental ima-
Cognition in Conceptual Sketch- gery19,20 shows that mental images and spatial representations are not
ing’ in Proceedings, VR’99 Vis-
ual and Spatial Reasoning in bitmaps: they comprise organised structures of meaningful information:
Design MIT Press, Cambridge
MA (1999)
chunks. How well they are remembered depends on how meaningful the
19 Kosslyn, S M Image and information is and on how richly it is structured. Strong visualisers create
Mind Harvard University Press,
Cambridge MA (1980) and recall very complex visuospatial chunks. Recognising similarities is
20 Kosslyn, S M Image and an inherent part of visual perception, and people group similar objects into
Brain MIT Press, Cambridge
MA (1994) categories. The visuospatial structures of individual items are encoded not

526 Design Studies Vol 21 No 5 September 2000

 just geometrically but in terms of category memberships and deviations
from typical forms. Knitwear designers look at very large numbers of gar-
ments and images of garments in the course of design research, and can
remember them. Designers develop both a stock of categories of designs
and design elements with typical forms and ranges of variations, and a
stock of instances they can remember and refer to by where they came
from. These provide a vocabulary for their mental representations of new
designs. Individual designs provide a large and open-ended range of subtly
differentiated concepts, accessible in memory but with no names other than
references to their origins. Strong visualisers, including many architects
and engineers, often imagine new designs in considerable concrete detail,
often much more detail than they need for some conceptual design activi-
ties. Knitwear designers report thinking about quite concrete designs during
range planning, which they know are placeholders for categories of gar-
ments to be designed later. Our observational evidence indicates that they
frequently draw design elements from their rich and open-ended stock of
instances rather than design element categories, so that what they imagine
are variations of concrete designs rather than elaborations of abstractions.

Previous designs comprise coherent combinations of design decisions:

design elements and their interrelationships. Complex designs comprise far
more information than any designer can think about at once, but designers’
stocks of remembered previous designs and other sources of inspiration
enable them to use these combinations to imagine and reason about com-
plex structures, by treating pre-existing chunks of information as units.
Complex designs can be represented concisely in consciousness and mem-
ory as combinations and modifications of existing chunks. Such designs
inherit the structure and details of their sources, so that small and simple
sets of sources and modifications generate complexly structured designs,
whose details are imported into consciousness as part of larger chunks, or
can be generated at need. Some aspects and implications of these complex
forms do not need to be explicitly created or remembered; instead they
can be reconstructed from the original chunks. Thus designs comprising
simple modifications and combinations of pre-existing elements that can
be remembered are easier to imagine than more complex or radical trans-
formations.

4 Communicating through sources of inspiration

Designers communicate by reference to previous instances of design
elements in a variety of different situations, to achieve different objectives.
The extent to which they rely on verbal references rather than showing
actual images or objects is influenced both by how much of their cultural
context is shared by their conversation partners, and by how much effort
they want to invest in the communication.

Sources of inspiration: a language of design 527

 Most communication by reference to example by knitwear designers is
about the emergent visuospatial form of their designs. Different visuospa-
tial aspects of designs can be indicated separately by referring to different
sources each quite different from the intended design; for instance a
knitwear designer might indicate a colour scheme with a photograph of
waves lapping on a sandy beach. A very important part of design communi-
cation about consumer products, not just in advertising but within the
design process, is cultural connotations of the design. In knitwear design
images unconnected to the garments themselves are used to convey
‘mood’, the desired self-image of the intended wearer, and the positive
values, experiences and feelings the product should be associated with. In
knitwear design the communication of visuospatial and cultural aspects of
designs is often not clearly separated. Of course, functional and structural
aspects of designs dominate design thinking in many industries. But they
were seldom referred to by the knitwear designers we studied, who leave
structural complexities to their technicians, while function is implicit in
the overall category of garment. Structural aspects of designs are implied
consequences of the selection of design elements on aesthetic criteria.

4.1 Classes of concepts communicated through sources

of inspiration
In aesthetic design domains we can differentiate between three different
types of information that is communicated primarily through images or
references to images.

4.1.1 Individual designs

New designs are often expressed by showing or referring to sources of
inspiration and indicating how they should be combined and modified. In
the knitwear industry ranges of designs to be sold together are often dis-
played by grouping sketches and pictures of source material on boards.
Individual worked out designs are normally communicated in sketches.
Design discussions customarily describe modifications to existing designs
or other sources of inspirations; and are usually supplemented by sketches.
Knitwear designers hardly ever sketch during design discussions.

4.1.2 Styles
Categories of designs are often described by showing groups of images
that illustrate the range of designs that belong within the category (see
Figure 2). Such image clusters are an important feature of fashion trend
magazines such as Zoom on fashion trends and Book Moda (better known
to designers simply as Collezioni). What makes the images similar may
not be obvious and may not be explained. Often one or two images are
highlighted, for example by making them bigger, because they either show
extremes within the space or provide typical examples.

528 Design Studies Vol 21 No 5 September 2000

Figure 2 A style display
(Zoom on Fashion Trends,
year 5 number 8, 1998, p 50)

4.1.3 Moods
Images are used to set an overall ‘mood’. Mood boards play an important
role in design communication in the knitwear and fashion industries. These
constitute descriptions of the overall aesthetic impression the items in a
category should create. This can include colours, proportions, cultural con-
notations and so on (see Figure 3). Mood boards are often arranged around
one central image which encapsulates the essence of that mood, with others
that indicate the scope for interpretations. Some images are included purely
for their visual properties, others for their cultural properties. Some have

Sources of inspiration: a language of design 529

Figure 3 An illustration of a
mood (Zoom on Fashion
Trends, year 5 number 8,
1998, p 31)

both. The mood is an emergent consequence of the combination of dis-

played images and inherits much of its connotation from them. The text
accompanying Figure 3 is ‘The bright colours by Lyocell [fibres] look back
to the atmosphere of far away places, back to exotic smells and oriental
beauty as they appear in the ‘Sensuous’ theme with flower, arabesque and
enjoyable striped patterns’. The tiles are medieval European and Turkish,
the fruit painting European, the intended overall effect Indian or southeast
Asian. Mood boards serve to indicate a range of possibilities; their power
is perhaps best understood by seeing what they exclude; for instance blues
and greens and pictures of waves do not go with chunky russet red sweat-
ers. Moods can also be communicated verbally by reference to a sequence
of objects.

In communication within the knitwear design process, moods and styles

are normally expressed on boards. All the information is shown concur-
rently, in contrast to the sequential nature of verbal descriptions. Individual
designs can either be presented on boards or by showing a sequence of

530 Design Studies Vol 21 No 5 September 2000

 images. The distinction between individual designs, styles and moods can
be blurred in industrial practice.

4.2 Shared cultural context

During the research and conceptual design of garments for a new season,
designers often talk to each other about their design ideas. To an outsider
these conversations appear entirely cryptic, for example: ‘I want to do a
cardigan like the one in Vogue, but in pink mohair’ or ‘let’s do a jumper
like the blue one last year, but a bit longer and with a V-neck’. This has
very little meaning unless the listener has seen the relevant design, can
interpret the changes, and can visualise the product (Which pink? Which
mohair yarn? How much longer? How deep is the V-neck?). Even if all
parties can have the physical objects or pictures of them in front of them,
they still have to imagine the changes.

Knitwear designers understand each other, because they have seen the same
garments in shops and read the same magazines. Designers in the same
company share a knowledge of the company’s house style and have looked
at the same research material. They share the same body of sources of
inspiration defining the context of the fashion. Even if the individual
instances that they generalise from are different, the emergent picture is
the same. Each season in fashion or style or domain creates its own
interpretation of words in everyday language. For example ‘blue’ or ‘a bit
longer’ has a different meaning for 1999 than for 1996. Understanding
such cryptic remarks also requires specific knowledge about the speaker.
Designers know what their colleagues like and what they have been work-
ing on, as well as the house style of the company. So they can guess which
cardigan the speaker might have picked up on. The listener includes all
this information when visualising the design the speaker describes.

4.3 The relationship between visual and verbal

description
Early conceptual designs are communicated through pointers to existing
sources of inspiration and modifications to them. The modifications are
expressed verbally. The descriptions are often vague and require interpret-
ation. For example when geometrical dimensions are modified, the changes
are often explained qualitatively, like ‘a bit longer’ or ‘much deeper’.
Sometimes numerical values are guessed, giving the appearance of accu-
racy when they are just placeholders for rough magnitudes.

Many design domains, such as knitwear design, do not have a universal

standard vocabulary for variations of design elements, such as cables or
lace patterns. New structures are invented all the time, without a corre-

Sources of inspiration: a language of design 531

 sponding increase in the range of meaningful names for them. Therefore
only a direct reference to an example can communicate the design element
unambiguously. The same problem applies to colours: a huge number of
colours are perceptually distinguishable, but human languages have only
a small range of accepted colour names. (There are standard naming and
numbering conventions used by colour scientists and other professionals,
but the names used for marketing purposes by paint and yarn manufacturers
are contradictory). Some knitwear and fashion companies benefit greatly
from developing an internal vocabulary for design elements and colours.
In other domains, such as mechanical or electrical engineering, components
are given precise identifiers, either referring to exactly defined categories
or to the catalogue numbers of parts. It is inherent in the structural proper-
ties of knitted fabric that no complete and accurate description of a knitted
garment is possible, and formal descriptions in absolute terms are difficult
to use effectively: this has profound effects on the communication of
designs between knitwear designers and technicians. So designers make
do with informal vocabulary that is open to misinterpretation2,3. Reference
to examples is more concise and precise than alternative descriptions.

Words can be used like images to evoke the connotations of designs and
styles rather than describe them. Clusters of images in fashion trend maga-
zines are frequently accompanied by prose descriptions that can seem rid-
iculous or preposterously pretentious, but which are primarily intended to
be suggestive. For instance, the text in Figure 2 begins ‘The triumph of
essential styles under the profile of understatement and influenced by New
Age philosophy. Clear geometric, minimalist lines are emphasised by
straight skirts, monochrome suits in neutral or grey colours.’

5 The structure of the language

Sources of inspiration provide designers with a vocabulary for thinking
about designs and communicating their ideas to others. In this section we
push the linguistic analogy a little further, to explore the structure and
expressive power of source-based communication.

5.1 The syntax

Descriptions of designs in source-language typically comprise references
to objects and images, sometimes to abstractions such as moods like ‘play-
ful’ or cultures like ‘Arabic’, plus phrases describing how they are modified
and combined in the new design. The sources themselves have the charac-
ter of nouns, while the modifications have the character of adjectives.
These modifications can change any describable characteristic of the
source. In knitwear design they might include shapes, sizes, proportions,
arrangements, colour schemes and materials. Modifications might add,

532 Design Studies Vol 21 No 5 September 2000

 remove or substitute components of designs, perhaps drawn from other
sources. For instance, a designer might say (with reference to the large
image in Figure 2) ‘produce a trouser suit like that but make the top a bit
longer to cover the hips and use the blue fabric we used for last year’s
trouser suit.’ The range of available nouns is large and open-ended, while
the range of adjectives is comparatively small.

If source-language has nouns and adjectives, does it have verbs? The anal-
ogy to a verb would be a description of an action, to create a design or
do something with it. In our observations of knitwear designers, they used
source-language to describe intended designs rather than procedures for
generating them, which are unspecified or implicit. In other words, they
describe static locations in design space, rather than trajectories through
it. Their use of source-language contained no verbs. However this is a
consequence of the fact that although knitwear designers use active stra-
tegies for creating designs13, they do not use any wide range of consciously
articulated techniques.

5.2 The semantics

Verbal and visual communication in source-language defines locations
within the space of all the possible designs of a type of artefact. The
locations of individual designs are defined through a single set of comp-
lementary source-features. The hearer or reader recreates the design from
the description, so communication depends on the hearer sharing the speak-
er’s mapping of terms to meanings. Communicating styles through pictorial
displays of a range of instances is an important feature of fashion trend
publications such as Book Moda, and is a frequent strategy within the
design process. In the terminology of machine learning, the viewer learns
the region in design space by generalising from positive instances. Nega-
tive instances are only implicit in the viewer’s prior experience. The region
is expressed by examples that may be typical examples, or encapsulations
of the essential characteristics of the region, or extreme examples (which
are not explicitly distinguished).

Figure 4 illustrates how an instance of a class of designs influences the

viewer’s perception of both the boundaries of the class and its centre of
typicality—what the viewer thinks of as central or ordinary. This percep-
tion of category membership and the learning of category boundaries and
centres is a tacit perceptual process. Moreover, people are ordinarily unable
to describe such a region of design space even if they can point to where
it begins and ends. This is because the defining characteristics of regions
of design space in aesthetic visuospatial design and the dimensions on
which they change are complex and subtle emergent properties: they can

Sources of inspiration: a language of design 533

Figure 4 Mapping out of design spaces

often not be recognised, and if recognised, not described. Thus designers

often have no way to describe or even think about designs in terms of
compositions of fundamental terms and parameters. If such descriptions
are possible they are likely to be too unwieldy to use. So designers can
only refer to variations of instances or classes of designs embodying the
complex and ill-defined characteristics they can recognise but not define.

By referring to sources of inspiration designers can convey concepts very

concisely: a key image or a mood board can express an elaborate set of
cultural references; and a brief description can express a complex design.
But it is not the design itself that is communicated, but information about
a range of alternative designs. The listener mentally redesigns the design,
influenced by a different set of preferences and procedures.

6 Discourse in source-language
Conceiving and communicating designs by reference to sources of inspi-
ration arises in situations with particular characteristics shared by design
activities in a variety of industries. It influences the forms of explanation
and argumentation used by designers, and the ways in which the members
of design teams alter each others’ design ideas.

6.1 Communication scenarios

Designers’ communication in source-language works differently for differ-
ent types of recipient who have different amounts of knowledge of the
designers’ sources.

6.1.1 Oneself
Sources of inspiration function similarly to sketches, as (1) facilitators of
reinterpretation when the context has changed, and (2) as memory aids.

534 Design Studies Vol 21 No 5 September 2000

 6.1.2 Fellow specialists
Designers exchange ideas with people who share similar knowledge,
expertise and frames of reference. References to sources of inspiration pro-
vide powerful, effective and efficient means of communication when exact-
ness is not required.

6.1.3 Complementary colleagues

The work of design teams depends on communicating designs to colleagues
who have different concerns, expertise, mental representations of the
designs, and frames of reference, but who share the same objectives. Unless
accurate and unambiguous communication methods are available, such as
precise technical specifications, design ideas are interpreted using contex-
tual knowledge. Therefore it is important to share the sources, which act
as referents. In knitwear design, designers’ verbal category labels are often
interpreted by technicians in terms of their companies’ designs of previous
seasons, rather than the designers’ sources within the design space of the
current fashion, which leads to manufactured garments being more con-
servative than their designers intended3,4.

6.1.4 Superiors
In fields like knitwear design, where managers don’t share the designers’
training or understanding of design, they have great difficulty following
explanations based on sources of inspiration, and designers are often forced
to produce rationalisations of their design choices that have little to do
with how or why they have produced particular designs.

6.1.5 Customers
Designers need to present their designs and often also their ideas in pro-
gress to their customers, who differ enormously in knowledge and sophisti-
cation between and within industries. In the case of the British knitwear
industry the customers are primarily the buyers for large retail chains. They
usually understand fashion and the role of sources of inspiration, but know
little about how garments are designed and manufactured. They obtain a
coordinated collection from different suppliers by enforcing a common
context through shared sources of inspiration. They cannot visualise new
designs from sources as well as can practicing designers, and therefore
insist on swatches and samples.

6.1.6 Unknown
Sometimes designers have to communicate their ideas when they can make
no assumptions about what their audience knows or understands. A lay
person has little chance to understand a discourse based on sources of
inspiration, because they are familiar neither with the sources nor the modi-

Sources of inspiration: a language of design 535

 fication rules. However they might be able to understand what would not
be included in a region of design space indicated by examples or a
mood board.

6.2 Argumentation in source-language

Because source-language refers only to locations in the space of possible
designs, it provides designers with little ability to create or express argu-
ments or explanations or justifications. Of course humans can argue with
the full power of natural language, while Tamarians can resort to other
stories to contradict, differentiate, or justify. But in knitwear design,
reasons for selecting some sources rather than others are unstated, and
procedures for mapping sources to designs are implicit, for the viewer or
hearer to reconstruct from a shared understanding of the context. In both
knitwear design and helicopter design, source-language is used when the
concepts are too distant from objectively grounded terms to allow arguing
with reference to an objective description of the design. What is possible
are assertions about the characteristics that are imported from the sources,
and where the modifications place the new design in design space relative
to the sources. When the recipients are unable to reconstruct the new design
from a shared context, or understand its implications, the only way to judge
it is by the originators’ authority and confidence. In the fashion industry
designers often have problems because they cannot justify their designs to
non-designers such as managers or sometimes buyers, in rational terms
that somebody who does not share the same design context can understand.
But the justification for a garment design is its relationship to the space
of garments admissible within the envelope of future fashion. As this is
typically impossible to express in base terms grounded in everyday experi-
ence, it can only be understood by absorbing instances of designs and their
surrounding mood indicators. To paraphrase Duke Ellington, if you have
to be told, you’re never going to know. In industry, knitwear designers
substitute assertions of the strength of their subjective belief in a design
for rational argumentation; they are criticised for not asserting strong
enough belief rather than for not presenting a coherent enough justification.

6.3 Aesthetics and complexity: sweaters and helicopters

We have observed very similar communication by reference to sources of
ideas in a field study of customisation processes in helicopter design at
GKN Westland, consisting of interviews with 23 senior designers5. Heli-
copters are among the most complex engineering products and have excep-
tionally complex networks of interdependencies between subsystems and
components. Although there are very few basic types, Westland helicopters
are extensively customised for every customer. Very few people have an
overview of the design process and nobody has a detailed understanding

536 Design Studies Vol 21 No 5 September 2000

 of the entire aircraft. Helicopter engineers talk about their designs with
reference to previous versions that have particular modification clusters to
meet particular requirements, describing how they might be further modi-
fied. A description in terms of basic geometric and functional parameters
would be too unwieldy to use in conceptual design, and make premature
commitments to detailed decisions, when the characteristics designers need
to think about are distantly removed from such terms. Each previous ver-
sion is a complex but coherent combination of changes away from the
basic design, whose behavioural characteristics are relatively well under-
stood. As the designers responsible for different aspects of a helicopter
don’t have a good overview of the product and don’t have experience in all
aspects of the design, they cannot ground their explanations of behavioural
characteristics in mutually understandable structural terms. Therefore the
professional credibility and the strength of belief behind assertions gain an
importance comparable to their importance in knitwear design.

In many respects knitwear design is far simpler than the design of complex
engineering products. However, the visuospatial characteristics of garments
that designers think about bear a comparably complex relationship to the
parameters of their structural elements. Not only is the relationship between
the appearance and structure of knitted fabric complex and poorly under-
stood, but the relationships between visuospatial features and the design
requirements also depend on the complex cultural context provided by
other designs and their sources. Moreover, designers’ understanding of
these relationships is tacit and perceptual. Our observations indicate that
the effect of complexity is very similar to the effect of aesthetics in making
the relationship between structural elements and the features and behaviour
that emerge from their interaction subtle enough to force designers to resort
to subjective judgement and argumentation, as well as example-driven
thinking, when they need to think directly about interactions and emergent
global features.

7 Conclusions
Communication of design ideas by reference to their sources of inspiration
plays a major role in knitwear design. Individual designs are specified as
changes to one or more sources. Groups of objects are used to express
styles—regions in the space of possible designs. Interpreting such com-
munication is fundamentally a redesign by the listener from the same start-
ing point. It is thus reliant on the recipient sharing the sender’s knowledge
of the sources and the cultural context.

Communication by reference to other designs and other sources of design

elements is a powerful way to express complex ideas quickly, because the

Sources of inspiration: a language of design 537

 new design inherits both details and context from the object of inspiration.
Exemplars of designs and design elements also form the mental vocabulary
that designers in the knitwear and fashion industries use to create new
designs. Many characteristics of designs cannot easily be expressed in any
absolute terms without reference to examples and variations from them.
The language of design biases new designs towards existing ones, because
the more a new design differs from the stock of old designs, the harder is
it to imagine it or express it.

Communication by reference to previous designs and other sources is not

limited to aesthetic design: it is a feature of situations like the conceptual
design of helicopters, where designers think in terms of coherent feature
clusters and emergent properties rather than individual parameters and
structural elements.

Acknowledgments
Claudia Eckert’s research was supported by grant GR/J40331 from the
SERC/ACME, grant L12730100173 from the ESRC, and grant 717 from
the Open University Research Development Fund. Figures 2 and 3 are
courtesy of Zoom on fashion trends.

538 Design Studies Vol 21 No 5 September 2000

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