Newton, Goethe and the Process of Perception: an approach to Design

4. Advice to designers Goethe suggests - and this is key advice for designers - that engagement with a phenomenon should not stop at looking. And here he displays the difference between his way of science and Newton's. He would then proceed to recreate, over and over again, in his mind's eye (i.e. entirely within his imagination), the observations he had made, actively producing (creating) in inner visualisation, every detail of what he had observed, moving between more than one image (e.g. white slits, then black slits) to develop a precise inner facility of visualisation, a precise and powerful imagination as an internal working tool. He called this discipline "exacte sinnliche phantasie" - "exact sensorial imagination" - and the aim is to think the phenomenon concretely in the imagination with nothing added and nothing left out, i.e. with utter precision. He referred to this process as "re-creating in the wake of ever-creating nature".

What is apparent here is that whilst this may be complete heresy to a conventional scientist, this repetitive reflective exercise develops and hones the central skill of a designer - the ability to imagine. It is not simply that this is a process of internal observation, it is a process of internal synthesis. Thinking a phenomenon concretely in exact sensorial imagination is instrumental to perceiving the phenomenon holistically.