ABSTRACT
Design education, design research and design practice are vitalized by embracing tools through which people take lessons from nature. We use a case study to illustrate this point. Two phenomena have come together to compel case for expanded scope of design research as part of design problem solving and education: (1) multi-facetedness and complexity of the world we inhabit and (2) ardent new role design has acquired recently as a way of cross-disciplinary/cross-professional problem solving. What all this means is (1) designers should be trained about and (2) learn to use tools which enable probing into how phenomena are constituted or constructed. This is particularly useful for phenomena that occur silently, organically, but if we have interrogated them, give informed perspectives about how independent and interdependent phenomena occur or might be predicted. Proficient designing includes recognizing (through probing and discovery) interdependencies.
