Design Knowledge Management Dislikes
What Knowledge Management Overlooks
Classic knowledge management thinks in SECI cycles, cubes and levels – useful, but blind to design. Thoring and colleagues state it plainly: without an understanding of what makes design knowledge distinct, a company’s capacity to innovate declines (Thoring et al., 2022). Sticky-note intuition as a KM illusion – “the designers somehow know” – is no substitute for a typology. It merely administers invisibility.
Four Types, Not One Gut Feeling
Their unified model sorts four types of representation: Artifact Knowledge (embodied in physical form – the bottle opener, Velcro as a transfer from bionics), Design Intuition (neural, often wordless, trainable through experience and observation), Design Language (coded: diagrams, technical terms, sketch languages, software), Design Theories (condensed, testable models, standards, patterns). The transitions matter: filtering and adjusting filters between artifact and intuition; externalizing and internalizing between intuition and language; theory building and concept derivation between language and theory.
Qualities Across the Grid
Orthogonal to these lie Situatedness (context-bound to transferable), Expertise (novice to expert), Diffusion (individually to collectively accessible) and Content (technical, human-centered, procedural, declarative). Anyone who knows only “explicit vs. tacit” misses Artifact Knowledge – precisely the level that makes Radermacher’s model (Radermacher, 1996) useful for design, and the one SECI leaves out. Design knowledge sits in the thing, not only in the head and not only in the wiki.
Why Management Would Rather Not Hear It
Artifact Knowledge cannot be neatly copied into the intranet. Intuition evades the checkbox. Design Language seems “soft” until a missing term paralyses an entire critique. Theories and patterns seem too slow for quarterly reporting. KM systems optimized for documents and tickets reward the diffusion of Level C snippets and penalize the care of Level A and Level B knowledge. The illusion is that intuition fits on a sticky note. The consequence is that knowledge transfer fails quietly and innovation thins out.
Consequences for the Studio
For practice, the model means deliberately generating new design knowledge – not merely filing what already exists. For teaching: exercises along the eight dimensions and three transitions. For theory: taking artifacts seriously as stores of knowledge and systematizing their extraction into Design Language; researching “ways of seeing” as the transition from A to B. None of this is studio cosmetics. It is infrastructure for the ability to critique.
Literature Chaos as a Symptom
Thirty sources, eight categories, inconsistent terminology: Object Knowledge, Artifact Knowledge, Precedents – often the same thing under different names. Thoring and colleagues do not turn this into a niche glossary project but into a warning for management. Redundancy and the lack of a comprehensive classification are not academic pedantry. They are the reason KM teams and design studios talk past each other: one looks for tickets, the other already sees knowledge in the prototype that never made it into text.
Transitions as Innovation Work
The three transitions are the operative core. Whoever adjusts filters sees problems and opportunities others miss – “ways of seeing”. Whoever externalizes makes intuition open to critique. Whoever builds models – journey maps, 2×2s, personas as practical frameworks, not as general laws of nature – synthesizes. Innovation happens in these transitions. A KM that stores only the end products of Level C cuts off exactly where design knowledge comes into being.
Between as Knowledge Work
Between texts and probe settings operate precisely at the transitions. Language-before-spec externalizes intuition before specs freeze it. Material locks keep Artifact Knowledge tangible – the form carries knowledge about use that no ticket replaces. Whoever books design knowledge merely as brainstorming energy may like management dashboards. Whoever knows the types and transitions builds archives, critiques and lab protocols that do not leave innovation to chance.
Sources
Radermacher, F. J. (1996). Cognition in systems. Cybernetics and Systems, 27(1), 1–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/019697296126651
Thoring, K., Mueller, R. M., Desmet, P., & Badke-Schaub, P. (2022). Toward a unified model of design knowledge. Design Issues, 38(2), 17–32. https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00679
