Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
The Design Substrate: The Phenomenological Unity Enabling Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences
David Wang & Amber Joplin
Wang is Professor of Architecture at the Interdisciplinary Design Institute of Washington State University, Spokane. With Linda Groat, he has written Architectural Research Methods (Wiley, 2002). Joplin is a first-year doctoral student in Wang’s program. davewang@wsu.edu. © 2009 David Wang & Amber Joplin.
Educational psychologist Howard Gardner first proposed his theory of multiple intelligences in his 1983 Frames of Mind, which outlines seven categories of human intelligence: Spatial, logical-mathematical, linguistic, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal [1]. In 1999, Gardner added an eighth category: Naturalist intelligence [2]. The theory challenged the dominant view of intelligence as a general, uniform level of mental competence: If intelligence is indeed multivariate, the educational project could not be considered a one-size-fits-all task.
There is, however, a conflict in the Gardner literature in that almost all of Gardner’s qualifiers for what constitutes an intelligence require empirical measures (e.g., psychometric findings, isolation by brain damage, experimental psychological tasks, and so forth). When a qualifier largely depends on qualitative interpretation (e.g., evolutionary plausibility), Gardner calls it “sheer speculation” [3]. The conflict lies in the fact that Gardner is criticized precisely because many of his empirical parameters have not yet been demonstrated [4].
We propose that addressing the unclear role of “design” in Gardner’s system lends a degree of clarity to this conflict. Even though Gardner has done much with art [5] and creativity [6], it is striking that design is not itself an intelligence category in his system. This omission leads to such curious outcomes as Albert Einstein having a clear home within an intelligence category (logical-mathematical) [7] but not Frank Lloyd Wright, who is not even mentioned in Frames of Mind.
This omission seems to refute one of Gardner’s chief theoretical claims, which is that intelligences, as bio-physical realities, are recognized and indeed thrive within domains, which are social-cultural constructions. If the domain of architecture is not a social-cultural domain as clearly as physics is, then either some fundamental logic in Gardner’s analysis is askew, or he has identified something quite significant. Our view is that Gardner’s system suggests something unique about design, but that uniqueness needs to be highlighted more explicitly.
Our proposal is that design—what we define as the design substrate—is a pre-empirical phenomenological reality permeating all of Gardner’s intelligence categories and thus contributing to their “end state” manifestations. Design, therefore, cannot be neatly subsumed under one category. Positing design as a phenomenological substrate not only clarifies the role of design more clearly in Gardner’s system but also sheds light on the empirical-but-not-empirical conflict in Gardner studies in general.
In making this argument, we first define design, drawing from the consensus in the literature. We then provide a summary of Gardner’s theory, explaining why it inadequately accounts for design. Next, we outline a proposal by Nigel Cross, who posits design as its own Gardnerian intelligence category. We explain the limitations of this proposal on phenomenological grounds, and suggest why the design substrate is a better theoretical model. We conclude by identifying some benefits the design substrate brings to Gardner’s theory.
What is Design?
The literature on this question is
diverse, but there are common themes. One is that design ability is
resident in all persons. Victor Papanek argues that:
All [human beings] are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity. The planning and patterning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable end constitutes the design process [8].
Herbert Simon is in accord with this view: “Design (of any kind) is concerned with how things ought to be, with devising artifacts to attain goals” [9]. Similarly, William Muller contends that: “Anyone attempting to transform an existing situation into a desired new situation performs an activity that we call design” [10]. Andrew Harrison summarizes this view well by observing that design is involved in thinking and making in general:
Design appears to be a fundamental means of inquiry by which [humankind] realizes and gives shape to ideas of dwelling and settlement. Furthermore, design is a practical form of inquiry insofar as it is concerned with making and a certain commonplace usefulness, quite apart from its more esoteric benefits [11].
Our use of the word “design,” then, focuses on this general ability possessed by all persons. In fact, “ability” may not be the best word because it suggests the individual has or does not have a capacity to do a particular task. “The planning and patterning of any act toward a desired … end,” however, is so ubiquitous in all human activities that design ability is better rendered as a design substrate enabling all intelligence categories. Our provisional definition of design and design substrate is, therefore, as follows:
Design involves innate processes by which inarticulate needs achieve articulate expressions in social-cultural life. As a noun, “design” denotes the designed object itself or the act of design. But as a verb, “design” reveals itself to be much more than discrete acts but, rather, includes the inarticulate processes enabling such acts leading to designed objects. It is the phenomenological unity of these inarticulate processes that we call the design substrate.
Gardner’s System
Gardner specifies eight key traits for a
distinct intelligence: (1) potential isolation by brain damage; (2)
the existence of idiot savants, prodigies, and other exceptional
individuals; (3) an identifiable core operation or set of operations;
(4) a distinctive developmental history, along with a definable set
of expert “end-state” performances; (5) an evolutionary history and
evolutionary plausibility; (6) support from experimental psychological
tasks; (7) support from psychometric findings; and (8) susceptibility
to encoding in a symbol system [12].
For example, musical intelligence [13] is evidenced by prodigies (2) or by brain-damaged persons who nevertheless possess exceptional musical abilities (1). Core operations (3) and “end-state” conditions (4) in musical intelligence are also easily recognizable: we need no more than imagine a performance of pianist Vladimir Horowitz. As for (6) and (7), Gardner documents evidence from various psychological tests. For instance, musical abilities are shown to be “lateralized to the right-brain hemisphere” [14], and music involves a symbol system (8) defined as “culturally contrived systems of meaning which capture important forms of information” [15]. Gardner contends the only qualifier for musical intelligence is “wrapped in mystery” [16] in evolutionary history, but he also claims this category is necessarily speculative in the first place.
We can now take a closer look at the distinction between intelligence and domain, a distinction that Gardner refined after Frames of Mind. Again, while intelligence is rooted in the individual, domains are cultural venues within which intelligences can (or cannot) thrive:
… an intelligence is a bio-psychological potential that is ours by virtue of our species membership. That potential can be realized to a greater or a lesser extent as a consequence of the experiential, cultural, and motivational factors that affect a person … In contrast, a domain is an organized set of activities within a culture, one typically characterized by a specific symbol system and its attendant operations. Any cultural activity in which individuals participate on more than a casual basis, and in which degrees of expertise can be identified and nurtured, should be considered a domain [17].
This difference is important because Gardner’s focus is on “end-state” manifestations of intelligences: Given an appropriate cultural domain, an appropriate intelligence will thrive. Gardner is much less specific, however, on the generative beginnings of these intelligences. He mentions “basic essences” making up intelligences but does not systematically list these essences. Another of Gardner’s terms is “sub-intelligences” but, again, he offers no taxonomy for sub-intelligences [18]. Table 1 is our attempt at such a taxonomy on our way to revealing these sub-intelligences as the very material constituting the phenomenological substrate enabling all end-state intelligence categories.
Table 1. Eight sub-intelligences described by Gardner in his writings. FM = Frames of Mind (1983); UF = Gardner Under Fire (1998); IR = Intelligences Reframed (1999).
|
Linguistic |
Logical-math |
Bodily-kinesthetic |
Spatial |
Musical |
Interpersonal |
Intrapersonal |
Naturalist |
|
Sub-intelligences Phonology, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics (FM 1983, p.77). “Sensitivity to spoken and written language… Reading, naming and learning foreign language” (IR 1999, p. 213). |
Sub-intelligences Symbol-manipulating (FM 1983, p. 132). Numbers, mathematics, logic, science (FM 1983, p. 134). “Capacity to analyze problems logically, carry out mathematical operations, and investigate issues scientifically” (IR 1999, p. 42). |
Sub-intelligences “Control of one’s bodily motions and the capacity to handle objects skillfully—as the cores of bodily intelligence” (FM 1983, p. 206). Timing, calibration, direction, fluency (FM 1983, pp. 208-209)
|
Sub-intelligences Capacity to perceive the visual world accurately; perform transformations and modifications upon one’s perceptions; recreate aspects of visual experience (FM 1983, p. 173). Capability to produce a graphic likeness (FM 1983, p.176). |
Sub-intelligences Rhythmic, melodic, harmonic, timbre (UF 1998, p. 93). “…have tones, rhythms. Larger musical patterns in his head” (FM 1983, p. 10). “Skill in performance, composition, appreciation of musical patterns” (IR 1999, p. 42) |
Sub-intelligences Ability to notice and make distinctions among other individuals, in particular to their moods, temperaments, motivations, and intentions; read intentions and desires; influencing others (FM 1983, p. 239) “…work effectively with others” (IR 1999, p. 43). |
Sub-intelligences Access to one’s feeling life; label, enmesh in symbolic codes, draw on them to guide one’s behavior. Detect and symbolize complex sets of feelings (FM 1983, p. 239) . “To have an effective model of ones self—including one’s own desires, fears and capacities” (IR 1999, p. 43). |
Sub-intelligences Recognize instances as members of a group; distinguish among members of a species; recognize existence of neighboring species and relationships between them. Talent for interacting with, taming, caring for living creatures (IR 1999 p. 49). |
From Table 1, it can be argued that one characteristic common to all sub-intelligence operations is the proclivity to, in Papanek’s words, “…plan and pattern toward desired … ends.” In other words, the realm of Gardner’s sub-intelligences looks very much like our general observations above regarding the nature of design and design activity.
Another aspect of Gardner’s approach is his use of cross-cultural examples of intelligence categories. Take, for instance, logical-mathematical intelligence: Do cultures less dependent upon propositional (Cartesian) scientific method exhibit this kind of intelligence? Indeed they do, says Gardner, but in different ways. Examples he gives include calculations related to hunting, estimating numbers of stones in a pile, or strategic maneuvers in games requiring up to 300 moves [19].
Gardner’s interest in documenting these non-Western examples is to demonstrate the universality of his categories. For us, however, the significance is that the “end-state” manifestations of these intelligences may be much less delineated one from another in these other cultures but, rather, exist in a kind of aesthetic whole—and that this holism is perhaps more reflective of the phenomenological unity of the sub-intelligence substrate. For example, in hunting—a group activity—how exactly are the interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences separated from the logical-mathematical? Does it even make sense to insist on such separations?
We suggest that even the need to delineate seven, eight or N intelligences comes out of the European scientific outlook, which tends to stress discrete profiles of what optimal end-state manifestations might look like. In this process, not only is the phenomenological holism enabling any of these intelligences discounted—the term sub-intelligences itself betrays a judgment of value—but such discounting also ignores the essential aesthetic unity of these sub-intelligences as a whole. By aesthetic, we mean what Gardner himself has claimed repeatedly—that sub-intelligences tend to be indeterminate and hence resistant to empirical measures; as such, they tend toward holistic realities better appreciated as images than as propositions:
In the end, just where to draw the line between intelligences, on the one hand, and other essential psychological processes, on the other, will probably remain a judgment, indeed, an aesthetic judgment [20].
Gardner seems to accept the indeterminacy of these “beginning-state” sources as a settled matter, perhaps on the assumption that generative conditions are by definition hazy. Our view is that, because of Gardner’s empiricist lens, he may not fully appreciate a feature about these beginning-state sources that is indeed coherent and graspable, but phenomenologically rather than empirically.
Table 1 suggests that the sub-intelligences behave in a way not unlike Papanek’s definition of design as “patterning of any act toward a desired… end.” We call this common tendency in all sub-intelligences the design substrate. Because all sub-intelligence processes operate in just this way, it would be difficult to regard design intelligence as one discrete category, which is the position taken by Nigel Cross. We now turn to considering Cross’s proposal, and we explain why our proposal for the design substrate is a better way to clarify the role of design vis-à-vis Gardner’s system.
Design as
Intelligence
Cross reasons that spreading design
activity across the intelligence categories leads to awkward
classifications. For example, Gardner’s placement of inventors
“alongside the dancer and actor… does not seem appropriate.” To
rectify this problem, Cross posits design as its own intelligence
category, appealing to Gardner’s empirical measures for intelligence:
Design can be located in discrete regions of the brain; design has
core operations; it has a developmental history; it has an
evolutionary history; it has its own encoding systems; and it can be
tested as psychological tasks [21].
But restricting design to its own intelligence category also leads to inappropriate results. Inventors, dancers, actors as well as scientists, musicians, and so forth, all engage in processes that “pattern… toward a desired… end.” Each translates inarticulate inputs and impulses into articulate productions with cultural value. At the level of these translational processes, there is in fact little difference among inventor, actor, dancer, or musician.
Take, for example, a visionary leader like Mahatma Gandhi, whom Gardner places in the interpersonal intelligence category [22]. To be successful, such a person must possess the capacity to understand human intentions, motivations, and desires; he or she must access underlying capacities of sub-intelligences such as conflict-resolution and discerning other people’s moods, desires, and motivations. This is the design substrate at work “patterning… any act toward a desired… end” in this intelligence category. But again, all end-state intelligence categories show evidence of this designing substrate: timing, calibration, and fluency in direction for bodily-kinesthetic intelligence; or distinguishing differences in species and skill in interacting with them for naturalist intelligence, and so on.
Cross’s approach fails in that it assumes design as ultimately an end-state intelligence distinct from other intelligences on empirical grounds. The irony is that, in the analysis leading up to his proposal, Cross recognizes the inherent “ill-defined” nature of design problems [23]. We suggest that they appear “ill-defined” because design problems are still unreflectively viewed from an empirically biased (categorical) point of view. Put another way, if design must be confined to a specific knowledge domain, then the presence of processes that look like design processes (because they are design processes) in all intelligence categories may be why design problems appear as ill-defined problems.
But if “patterning … toward a desired … end” is understood as something that all intelligence categories have in common at their generative sources rather than at their various end-state manifestations, then design is not an ill-defined reality at all. But because it is pre-cognitive, the way to recognize the coherent unity of this design substrate is not by empirical measures but rather by the theoretical underpinnings of phenomenological inquiry [24]. Whether it is through Husserl’s eidetic reduction [25] in which only essences of objects and processes are brought to the fore, or by focusing on the intentionality of consciousness [26], the innate human ability to pattern inarticulate phenomena into articulate expressions can be seen as a phenomenological unity enabling all intelligence categories.
We return to the aforementioned empirical-but-not-empirical conflict in Gardner studies. Because the locus of the design substrate is pre-empirical, experimental measures will never be able to completely “prove” Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. This is at once the strength as well as the weakness of Gardner’s work. Its strength is that his theory indeed discerns that human relationships to the cosmos are enabled by a wide variety of ways of knowing, informed by a wide variety of capacities that can be called intelligences.
But the weakness of the theory lies in the insistence that empirical measures are the only means to ascertain veracity. At the end-state condition, this weakness is exemplified, for instance, by never-ending questions on exactly how many distinct intelligence categories there are. Is spirituality an intelligence category? [27] Should cooking—yes, culinary ability—be its own intelligence category? [28]. The discourse can become picayune, without grasping that the very need for explicit silos of intelligences is itself a cultural limitation of analysis.
It should be further remarked that Gardner is theorizing through his own intelligence lens. Which lens that is does not concern us; our point is that assessing the same material through a non-empirical lens might give more focus to the phenomenological nature of the beginning-state sources of Gardner’s theory. For his part, Gardner has actually expressed antipathy toward phenomenology as an explanatory resource for his theory [29].This may be one reason why the empiricist attitude renders the entire sub-intelligence realm a “sub” realm. But again, when assessed phenomenologically, Gardner’s tangle of sub-intelligences forms a strikingly unified whole characterized by a power to “pattern [all inputs] into … desired ends.” Gardner himself has acknowledged the inherent unity of this beginning-state holism and its power to enable all intelligence categories:
I justify my small set of intelligences on the basis of parsimony and usefulness. If I were to write about dozens of sub-intelligences, I might be more accurate scientifically, but the construct would then be unwieldy for educational uses. Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that sub-intelligences often work together and support one another, and for that reason, too, it makes sense to speak of eight or nine intelligences rather than one or a hundred… [30].
Additional Benefits
There are three additional benefits to
what we propose. One is that Gardner’s theory derives largely from
sociological, psychological, and neurobiological sources. It is safe
to say that, while his reliance on the empirical methods used in these
disciplines is expert, the empirical-but-not-empirical conflict in the
Gardner literature is evidence that his theory has not yet given
design and design process, which are more clearly explained by
phenomenological considerations, the place they are due. Incorporation
of the design substrate into Gardner’s theoretical base strengthens
the overall conceptual framework of multiple intelligences.
Second, our proposal contributes to the design fields in that Gardner’s theory serves to justify the inherent interdisciplinary nature of these fields (we have in mind architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, industrial design, and so forth). Ever since the Roman theorist Vitruvius, architectural education, for example, has called for exposure to a broad range of knowledge—from music to medicine [31]. The design substrate gives theoretical clarity to this breadth of exposure. It explains that the need to “pattern toward desired ends” permeates all intelligence categories. At the domain level for disciplines for which patterning toward desired ends is the explicit goal—the case in all design fields—it is no wonder that grasping how patterning toward desired ends in all disciplinary domains should be an integral part of design education.
Finally, the design substrate even clarifies why Einstein, more than Wright, can indeed be more comfortably situated in a discrete intelligence category. We suggest it may have to do with the nature of how “profession” and “discipline” are understood in our cultural worldview. Profession and discipline, after all, are sociological constructions relating more to domains than to the ontological features of intelligences. If a culture deems the productions of some endeavors particularly significant or meaningful for the broad populace, it is much easier to situate exemplars within those domains. Musical performance easily situates Horowitz within its domain; Physics, or scientific pursuit in general, easily offers a home for Einstein.
But quite aside from Gardner, it is significant that architects have always been regarded as generalists. It is much harder to situate a generalist in a single category. And the design substrate, that general underlying capacity that informs all patterning toward desired ends, tells us why designers like Wright, whose task is nothing other than patterning toward desired ends in the form of built environments, are generalists that are more difficult to classify under a particular Gardnerian intelligence.
Notes
1. H. Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (NY: Basic Books, 1983).
2. In Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century, (NY: Basic Books, 1999), Gardner added an eighth category: Naturalist intelligence.
3. Gardner, Frames of Mind, op. cit., p. 65.
4. L. Waterhouse, 2006, Multiple Intelligences, the Mozart Effect, and Emotional Intelligence: A Critical Review in Educational Psychologist, 41(4):207-225.
5. Gardner, Intelligence Reframed, op. cit., p. 28, pp. 108-109.
6. H. Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as seen through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinski, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi. (NY: Basic Books, 1993).
7. Gardner, Frames of Mind, op. cit., pp. 149-151; Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. (Chicago: Academy Publishers, 1985 [2000]), p. 3.
8. H. A Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd ed., (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), p. 114.
9. W. Muller, Order and Meaning in Design, (Utrecht: LEMMA Publishers, 2001), p. 13.
10. A. Harrison, Making and Thinking: A Study of Intelligent Activities (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978), p. 1.
11. Gardner, Frames of Mind, op. cit., pp. 62-67.
12. Ibid., pp. 99-127.
13. Ibid., p. 118.
14. Ibid., p. 66.
15. Ibid., p. 115.
16. Gardner, Intelligence Reframed, op. cit., p. 82.
17. “I have always acknowledged that the intelligences represent not basic essences but my best effort to make sense of a complex terrain. I stated quite explicitly in my first book that each intelligence is composed of sub-intelligences (music, for example, contains rhythmic, melodic, harmonic, timbre aspects); and that a full list of intelligences or sub-intelligences would add up to several dozen. The decision to list a manageable handful is just that—an effort to introduce people comfortably to a terrain that would be unwieldy if one had to absorb it in fullest detail. Who could talk sensibly of forty, let alone four-hundred intelligences?” Howard Gardner, Replies to My Critics. In Schaler, J. A. (ed.). Howard Gardner Under Fire: The Rebel Psychologist Faces his Critics. (Chicago: Open Court, 2006), pp. 277 – 344.
18. Gardner, Frames of Mind, op. cit., pp. 159-164.
19. Schaler, Howard Gardner Under Fire, op. cit., p. 307.
20. N. Cross, “Discovering Design Ability” R. Buchanan & V. Margolin (eds.), Discovering design: explorations in design studies (Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 116-117.
21. Gardner, Frames of Mind, op. cit., p. 239.
22. Cross, op. cit., pp. 109-111
23. We assume that the readership of this journal is generally aware of the theoretical underpinnings of phenomenology. For a map of the domain, see: http://www.phenomenologyonline.com/inquiry/1.html. See also: D. Wang & S. Wagner, 2007, A Map of Phenomenology for the Design Disciplines, in Architectural and Environmental Phenomenology, 18 (3):10-15.
24. For a map of the various reductive phenomenological methodologies, see: http://www.phenomenologyonline.com/inquiry/14.html
25. Wang and Keen have written on intentionality in relation to the design process; see D. Wang and J. Keen, 2001, Intentionality and the Production of Architectural Design(s): An Application of Section 37 of Husserl’s Ideas, in Architectural and Environmental Phenomenology, 12 (3):12-15.
26. Gardner, Intelligence Reframed, op. cit., pp. 53-66.
27. Ibid., p. 47.
28. “I do not believe that an intelligence should be confounded with an individual’s phenomenological experience.” In H. Gardner, Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons (NY Basic Books, 2006), p. 20; rev. ed. of Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice (NY: Basic Books, 1993).
29. Gardner, Intelligence Reframed, op. cit., p. 103.
30. Ibid., italics added.
31. Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, (Trans. M. H. Morgan) (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1914). Retrieved from: http://books.google.com/books?id=Vyzg2CAoP7UC