JUDGMENT

One of the most important distinguishing factors of defining design as a practice distinct from others is the human use of judgment. Judgment takes a holistic view of all a human being’s experiences and culminates in decisions which can precede or overrule rational stepwise decision making. This is a mysterious and difficult to examine faculty that is also so critical to understanding how designers work. In this article I attempt to define judgment as it relates to design and review the best research and writing on this topic.