Much recent work in Intelligent Control has introduced and analyzed various approaches to the implementation of expert controllers. But very little attention has been given to a fundamental question : "How can a controller be designed by abstracting rules from observations of a real process?" This paper gives an overview of the concept of symbolic control and briefly compares it with expert control. A method for designing symbolic controllers is proposed, based on qualitative measures of state coordinates and their derivatives, which allows the symbolic to numeric interface to be expressed using a system of recurrence equations. The technique is illustrated with two examples, symbolic process control of a first order process and symbolic control of a simulation representing a car on a defined track.