The IDeSiGN model identifies seven universal "intelligences" called on during design thinking that are related to those Gardner has identified:
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Directive Intelligence, the intelligence used when Intending, is concerned with personal motivations, sensibilities, assumptions, recognitions, management, goals and commitments. It functions to identify basic feelings, needs, and intentions, recognize avenues of inquiry, focus attention, initiate discourse and productive behavior, establish tentative expectations and commit to a focused effort. A person using such intelligence tends to rely on their intuition, knowledge, direct perceptions, personal skills, preferences and beliefs. | |
Directive intelligence subsumes Gardner's Intrapersonal intelligence -"access to one's own feelings and the ability to discriminate among them and draw upon them to guide behavior; knowledge of ones strengths and weaknesses, desires and intelligences". |
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Descriptive intelligence, the intelligence used when Defining, involves perceptual awareness, linguistic facility, categorizing ability, and the capacity to recognize relevance, utility, and value. A person uses descriptive intelligence to discriminate entities and their attriibutes, to establish information, select imagery, declare rules, account occurrences, and specify knowledge. | |
Descriptive Intelligence includes Gardner's Linguistic capacity - "sensitivity to the sounds, rhythms and meanings of words; sensitivity to the different functions of language" but embraces all forms of signification including number, word, image, gesture, and sound. |
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Relational intelligence, is the intelligence used when Exploring, and involves the capacity to recognize and imagine similarities and differences between linguistic descriptions, logical relationships, formal patterns, chains of inference, and relational operators in order to achieve an appropriate fit between thought, intent and context. | |
Relational intelligence includes Gardner's Logico-mathematical intelligence - "sensitivity to, and capacity to discern logical or numerical patterns; ability to handle long chains of reasoning" - but is understood here to apply to anything that can be abstractly structured. |
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Contextual Intelligence, the intelligence associated with Suggesting, is the capacity to perceive, interpret and express situations, to establish content, constraints and scope, to imagine formal possibilities, to represent and communicate them, to anticipate situations, and to integrate situated knowledge of an experienced situation into higher order constructs. | |
Contextual intelligence is related to Gardner's Spatial intelligence - "capacities to perceive the visual-spatial world accurately, and to perform transformations on one's initial perceptions" but here involves all perceivable and memorable forms. |
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Procedural intelligence, the intelligence used when Innovating, is the capacity to think or act under constraint toward some end, determine what is operational, understand the causal effects of one process on another, anticipate the effect of constraints on activity, execute operations, respond to them, and assimilate procedural knowledge to guide behavior. | |
Procedural intelligence includes Gardner's Body/kinesthetic intelligence - "abilities to control one's body movements and to handle objects skilfully" but addresses all change, whether abstract or concrete. |
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Critical intelligence, the intelligence applied when Goalgetting, is the capacity to relate direct experience to relevant dimensions for assessing that experience, and to monitor, analyze, test, judge, value and integrate these findings into higher order criteria. | |
Gardner's Musical intelligence - "abilities to produce and appreciate rhythm, pitch, and timbre; appreciation of the forms of musical expressiveness" is an example of experience centered critical intelligence. However, Critical intelligence involves the assessment of any experience against relevant dimensions for that experience. |
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Reflective intelligence, the intelligence necessary to Knowing, is the capacity to coordinate and synthesize content from other intelligences into superordinate knowledge such as philosophy, theory, ritual, history and custom. | |
This extends Gardner's Interpersonal intelligence -"capacities to discern and respond appropriately to the moods, temperaments, motivations and desires of other people" to include all reflective interpretations of experience and its integration into prior knowledge. Reflective intelligence refers to knowledge of self to interpret behavior in others. |
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While Gardner's theory suggests that specialized capabilities manifest particular forms of intelligence, the IDeSiGN model of design thinking suggests that different modes of thought call on different forms of intelligence. Designing calls on these "intelligences" in different situations that, over time, result in personal aptitudes, learning styles, skills, behaviors, and knowledge. Everyone posseses and uses all types of intelligence, but applies them to different tasks in different ways, sometimes emphasizing one mode of thinking/intelligence over others, to create different histories for themselves
Gardner, Howard. 1983. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books