Going Down the Path of Architectural Intuition, but Whose Intuition?

How Architectural Intuition Transforms When Combined

with Empathetic Design Thinking

The most powerful design approaches can arise from combining strong initial intuitions, but they’re most likely successful when they’re accompanied by systematic verification. We can honor our gut responses and still subject them to rigorous questioning. We can be skeptical of our own ideas. And, we can also trust our own design instincts while remaining curious about experiences quite different from our own. 

The big idea: Make space to change conclusions, to go beyond our hunches. Questioning and openness are great paths to elevating potentially good ideas to great ones or replacing bad hunches with deeper insights.

An example: I interviewed a middle-school librarian about her experiences working with architects. “Interview” may be the wrong word. I met her and her husband at a diner. When we started chatting, I had an idea and asked them to tell me something they love and something they hate about architecture. I told them I was writing a book about architecture and would include their answers. She was ready with one, and it wasn’t love. Her story, an instructive and revealing story, did land in the book. 

This veteran librarian was flat-out angry, and not just a little. The architect for the renovation of her school had asked for a few minutes to (supposedly) discuss the library. Unfortunately, instead of coming with questions, he came with answers in the form of a completed and detailed drawing with the desk facing out into the hallway just outside the library. It wasn’t really an inquiry. It was a delivery.

No surprise: the meeting went poorly. Instead of a happy affirmation by the librarian (“I love it!”), the architect heard “I hate it! You DON’T UNDERSTAND what I do, what’s been successful in the past. The desk is there to relate to the students while they’re IN the library. They already know perfectly well how to find their way in. I engage the students mostly through watching and seeing what they need INSIDE the library!”

Based on a hunch, an untested one, the architect had invested a lot of time and a lot of good intentions on the library design, including that desk. It was in fact a  beautiful object and rendered thoughtfully. Unfortunately, the architect’s curiosity hadn’t been engaged with the wisdom of the very experienced user before pencil hit paper or stylus hit touch-pad. Not only was that dynamic wrong, the assumptions turned out to be wrong as well.

What happened next?

The architect could have started from scratch and reconsidered the intuitions that led to this poorly received design or, instead, could have chosen to push ahead in spite of the negative response. In this case, push-ahead won. The “formal” desk now faces into the hall and the librarian, unwilling to accept defeat, got her own table placed where she wanted it, inside the library, facing INTO the library. The architect-designed desk isn’t used at all and the hours spent designing it had no useful return on the time invested. Getting it right the first time saves hours and opens the door for loving the architecture (and even the architect).

Hearing about this experience taught me something crucial about what I call "empathetic intuition" – the ability to sense not just what feels right to us, but what might feel right to others who will inhabit and use the spaces we design. It requires a high priority for what psychologists call "Theory of Mind" – awareness that other people are also aware, with their own needs and preferences. When we start with empathy, curiosity about others is unavoidable. Respectful interaction becomes the norm and respectful architecture develops more easily.

In addition to investigating how your own empathy plays a part in your own design-thinking, you can ask yourself how you balance confidence in your design intuitions with openness to others that may challenge them? Have your spatial hunches consistently served the deeper needs of the people who use them? It’s a valuable inquiry: as you ask yourself these questions, you can also ask the users whether you got it right..

Milton