Writing Is Seeing - towards a Designerly Way of Writing

In this paper, we address the problem of poor academic prose. Academic writing style has crystallised into a format that is antithetical to its main purpose: to convey complex ideas understandably. We explore this issue from the perspective of design research for two reasons: (1) designers, being visual thinkers, may particularly struggle with the challenges of academic writing and (2) the widespread lack of quality in academic prose creates an opportunity for design to stand out positively. In the paper, we present a style of writing (classic style) that is particularly suitable to the nature of design and the way designers think, and conclude by encouraging design researchers to adopt and adapt classic prose style to write up their papers and theses dissertations.