In recent years, when art and design students have the chance to be involved in film production they tend increasingly to produce animations. Young artists and professional designers are also showing a positive interest in animation and have been developing their own techniques of production. Focusing from a high-level perspective on the series of production processes involved in time-based visual media and explicitly defining these processes as design, this paper argues that artists and designers need to establish their own methods of “design for designing”. The preparation of visual design materials in the preliminary stages of animation production is essential for developing ideas and passing these on to subsequent processes. Such consciousness concerning the importance of the objective visualization of ideas can make a valuable contribution to the originality of the creative work itself. Introducing the practice of “Frame-by-Frame Shooting” in design education, this paper considers the contribution which the use of moving images, especially animation, can make to the design process. The paper also discusses the effectiveness of self-observation in the process of “design for designing” with reference to the concept of meta-cognition. This discussion is intended to address some hitherto under-researched questions concerning moving images in the field of cognitive science.
