Anna Hilton

[Modes of Making] examines the pressure to be ‘perfect’, how fearing failure and expecting perfection limits risk-taking and divergent thinking required for original and authentic work.  Finding that criticality often takes over before exploration can begin, I aimed to investigate how discovery might emerge when certainty and control is released.

By reversing the design process, where thinking typically precedes making, I experiment with the balance between discomfort and liberation through intuitive, material, and process-led making. Drawing on Schön’s concept of reflection-in-action, challenging technical rationality through randomised, intuitive, and embodied making methods, the focus changed from generating typography to investigating ambiguity, interpretation, and the construction of meaning through symbol.

By reframing design as a process of discovery rather than problem solving, the project argues that uncertainty is not an obstacle to creativity but a productive condition for it, positioning design as a way of exploring the unknown rather than resolving it.