Design as Research: Positions, Arguments, Perspectives 9783035607383, 9783035609196

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Design as Research

Board of International Research in Design, BIRD

Members: Michelle Christensen Michael Erlhoff Wolfgang Jonas Gesche Joost Claudia Mareis Ralf Michel Marc Pfaff

Advisory Board: Lena Berglin Cees de Bont Elena Caratti Michal Eitan Bill Gaver Orit Halpern Denisa Kera Keith Russell Doreen Toutikian Michael Wolf John Wood

Gesche Joost Katharina Bredies Michelle Christensen Florian ­Conradi Andreas Unteidig (Eds.)

Design as Research Positions, Arguments, Perspectives

Birkhäuser Basel

CONTENTS Foreword BIRD

007

Gesche Joost

Design / ­Research Introduction 012 Katharina Bredies

Where Are We Going? An Aspirational Map

017

Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders

The Resourceful Social Expert: Defining the Future Craft of Design ­R esearch

022

Mike Press

The Myth of the Design Androgyne

028

Alain Findeli

Doing Research: Design Research in the Context of the ‘Practice Turn’

035

Claudia Mareis

Project-Grounded Responses: Design / Research

042

Introduction

060

Text / Object Andreas Unteidig

Communication in Design Research

064

Brigitte Wolf

Text vs. Artefact in Design Research? A Strange Question!

070

Wolfgang Jonas

Nothing Fixed: An Essay on Fluidity in ­ Design Research

077

Uta Brandes

Everyday Homeopathy in Practice-­C hanging Design Research

083

Cameron Tonkinwise

Project-Grounded Responses: Text / Object

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091

Visual Stances

107

Borrowing / Stealing Introduction 128 Florian Conradi

Design Research – No Boundaries

131

Rachel Cooper

Theories and Methods in Design Research – Why We Should Discuss ­C oncrete Projects

137

Arne Scheuermann

In Praise of Theft: ‘The Play with Borrowing vs. Stealing from other Fields’ … Or, the Problem of Design Research

143

Clive Dilnot

Design Prepositions

153

Ranulph Glanville

Project-Grounded Responses: Borrowing / Stealing

166

Discipline / ­Indiscipline Introduction 182 Michelle Christensen

Transdisciplinary Research through ­D esign – Shifting Paradigms as an ­O pportunity

186

Matthias Held

Indiscipline 193 William Gaver

Design, an Undisciplinable Profession

197

Klaus Krippendorff

Between Possibility and Discipline or: Design Research as Provocation to the Faint-Hearted 207 Michael Erlhoff

Project-Grounded Responses: Discipline / Indiscipline

212

Authors 227 Responders 235

CONTENTS 005

FOREWORD BIRD Gesche Joost

Design research is a ‘Wolpertinger’ in the academic world (See Figure on page 108). It mingles with other disciplines and remixes their methods; it integrates design practice deeply into scientific endeavours and breaks any rule of proper and purified science; it produces alongside new products and services, prototypes that go far beyond paperwork, and messes around with any kind of defined process. Proposing ‘Design as Research’, as the title of this book suggests, seems to be a huge provocation to any gatekeepers of proper research practices in the scientific world. But we all know there is no black and white – many disciplines today are broadening their scope to involve experimental or interdisciplinary approaches. Many are interested in engaging with new approaches that are much more linked to societal challenges and people’s everyday life experiences. Design has always been an interface to the world that we are experiencing, and therefore it is a good candidate to act as a catalyst for novel and disparate approaches. Social design collaborates with social sciences creating new methods and advancing approaches, like living labs and participatory design tools; interaction design hooks up with engineering and creates tangible computing and wearables; critical design links to artistic practices in order to create utopian and dystopian perspectives on the world in which we live in – to name just a few. Design research is in motion and gives rise to a variety of new practices – which is why it is so fascinating to take a snapshot of the current state of ­affairs. The aim of this book is to reflect on the current state of discourses and features some of the main questions on design research practices as well as on its relationship to other disciplines. Fuelled by the parallel rise of artistic research all over the world, many academics as well as practitioners are becoming curious about these new approaches’ potential. They promise to cross-disciplinary boundaries, established scientific heuristics and academic practices that might lead to something different. The expectations are diverse: Can design research redefine the role of scientific practice in between the established boundaries? Can it create a fresh look on methodological approaches? And can the research practice through design unfold views on possible futures for our society? As an emerging discipline – or trans-discipline, as some may say – design research is still on the way to answering these questions. For some years now we have observed a tremendous rise of design research practices all over the world with many international institutions putting much more effort into PhD programmes, research activities, as well as in to teaching theories and methods. Therefore, we are witnessing a growing interest in exchanging best practice examples, and in finding collaborators for this emerging field. Against a backdrop of these developments, we held a symposium on the central issues

FOREWORD BIRD  007

in design research at the Berlin University of the Arts in 2013, in cooperation with the German Society for Design Theory and Research (DGTF). We invited international experts from the field to map the various positions on the current state, as well as the possible futures of the field. What visions and aspirations are guiding the expansion of design research? Where did we want to go – and are we there yet? This symposium laid the foundation for this publication, which reflects on the debates that arose during these two days. For instance, when we asked what design research completely lacks, many of the participants said: Self-confidence! The community started the discourse and claimed a new territory; it gained attention; some even said that the community has accomplished an international infrastructure with strong institutions in many countries and a large body of published research. But on the other hand some think that the community completely lacks a capacity to engage forcefully in debate with other disciplines; it lacks consensus on what constitutes acceptable research methods and valid research results; it lacks public and academic visibility. Nevertheless, the future potential of design research is impressive: Some experts have stated that within ten years design research will grow into a true tertiary scientific branch, complimentary to the natural and social sciences; it will be a major factor for academia as well as for company concepts, and it will be mainstream! (You might doubt that becoming mainstream should be one of the most important aims for a young discipline, and I agree – but this outlook shows that establishing practices will be a major advantage for design research in order to have an impact on an academic as well as a societal agenda.) From the current dialogue we see that design research has the potential to innovate research and to address global challenges by bridging gaps between theory and practice as well as between disciplines. In this book we want to discuss and qualify questions concerning the specific qualities of practice-based design research, how it deals with its different media, and its application in practice. Divided in to four main parts this book tackles the following questions: What sorts of relationships exist between design (practice) and research (practice), and what are the borderlines, if there even are any? What sorts of text-object relationships emerge out of design research, and in what constellations can these alliances be considered useful, appropriate or possible for communicating our results? What significant theoretical and conceptual influences from other fields become translated through design research, and where does the translation stop and the difference begin? And finally, what could be considered the distinctive features of design research, and to what extent should these potentially distinctive commonalities be formalised at a disciplinary level? To tackle these questions, we asked international experts to take a personal stance on these questions and arranged their responses in the format of a debate – displaying the arguments for diverging positions and perspectives. Furthermore, we asked the authors to draw a sketch of their position – be it a theoretical concept, a comment or a metaphor for design research. The only republished material included in this compilation, Ranulph Glanville’s essay ‘Prepositions’ and his hand-drawing, were kindly made available to us, since he sadly passed away before he managed to write his stance for this publication. This book without a stance from Ranulph

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though, would hardly be complete, and so we are very thankful that he still manages to inspire us with one of his infamous intellectual provocations! Finally, we also invited ­researchers who have completed a practice-based PhD in design to add their project-grounded reflections to the debate in the form of short accounts. Our aim, overall, is to give some guidance within the debate on design research and to map out positions on basic emerging questions. As a new member within the community you might want to locate yourself and your research endeavour within one or another position on this map. As a well-established ‘Alter Hase’ you might want to know your ‘Mitstreiter’ for any academic fights you will encounter tomorrow.

FOREWORD BIRD  009

Design / ­Research

INTRODUCTION Katharina Bredies

Over the last few decades, design research has established itself as a distinct academic field, with its own journals, PhD programs and theories. During this time, the relationship between design practice and knowledge creation in design research has changed significantly: From an activity that researchers observe from a distance to an epistemic practice in its own right. This shift from design practice from being the object of research to becoming a research method has been accompanied by much debate about the framing of practice and production as part of an academic knowledge creation process. The tension between academic and professional knowledge cultures is neither particular to design nor is it particularly new. Other fields such as pedagogy, medicine or management stress the importance of practical modes of learning, and themselves have been struggling to argue for alternative modes of knowledge transfer between academia and professional work. Similarly, design researchers have been testing different constellations between one and the other: Doing research on design practice to understand the process, producing useful insights and data for design practice to improve the results, and finally using the design practice itself to generate academic knowledge. Especially for the last – and most recent – mode, the notion of ‘research through design’1 then helps to communicate the nature of this relationship towards other academics. The conflict surrounding rigour and relevance that has been accompanying the debate on professional and academic knowledge creation in general is also particularly present in design research. Rigour concerns the way in which design practice becomes an accepted and qualified part of academic practice. Relevance becomes important when design researchers decide on the subject matter of their work. Although ideally, both aspects should be addressed by practice-based design research,2 the question for design researchers and practitioners remains: When does design practice become research practice? It would belittle the academic knowledge construction process that makes scholarly knowledge trustworthy if we were to indiscriminately declare all professional practice to be research – in any field. Even if design researchers cannot and do not want to draw clear boundaries, the existing academic system still applies its long-established selection routines to distinguish reliable from unreliable knowledge. The contributions in this section of our book shed some light on the circumstances and conditions that bring academic and professional knowledge creation modes closer to each other. In this aspect, designers have struggled with the fact that the process and results of their professional practice do not easily translate into

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text-based research findings. And even if they do, practitioners might just ignore even the most relevant insights due to the unattractive formats in which they are presented. When it comes to relevance, design research has been criticised for its lack of implications for design practitioners. It almost seems as if the more scientifically rigorous the design research grew, the less relevant it became in supporting design decisions. This is a harsh accusation for an academic field that defines itself so dominantly through its focus on the practice of making. However, what might look like the usual gap between academic and professional practice could also be read as a symptom of an insufficiently defined interface between the two. Design research practitioners still regard their research area as an emergent field, with the desire to distinguish themselves from neighbouring domains in terms of content, methodology and epistemological stance. While other disciplines serve as positive role models for a well-functioning knowledge transfer from academia to professional practice and back, none of these approaches seem to represent the relationship of academic and professional practice that design researchers are looking for. A prospective PhD student in design research therefore has to wonder: What are the useful, appropriate and valid models that I can apply in a practice-based research project? It is this question to which the four authors in the first part of this book offer some answers. They discuss how and to what extent design practice can and should be part of design research practice, looking deeper into how academic design practice and professional design practice differ, and share their visions of a well-working relationship between the two. From the tenor of their contributions, it seems as if the strict separation between academic and professional practice has become more of a rhetorical than an actual problem for design researchers. The inherent optimism expressed by our contributors is that the gap between academic and professional practices is not quite as wide as it appears to be in the discourse. Indeed, we might get the impression that the current discussion does not mirror all the significant changes that the theory as well as the reality of academic research has undergone since the 1980s, which has benefited design researchers rather than excluded them. The bottom line is that good practice increasingly relies on profound research, and that good research always involves particular practices that are not so different from designing. The two first authors, Liz Sanders and Mike Press, approach the relationship of design and research practice from a professional point of view. Both report on how today research has become a natural and crucial part of design practice, and elaborate on desirable and promising models of research in a professional and business context in the future. Alain Findeli and Claudia Mareis, the other two contributors to this part, take an analytical stance to examine the relationship from a more academic perspective, reflecting on the theoretical and epistemological foundations behind practice as part of research.

INTRODUCTION 013

Liz Sanders introduces herself as a researcher trained in anthropology and e­ xperienced in design consultancy. From this perspective between the traditional academic and professional realms, she describes the current use of design and research methods in professional design practice, but only to set the playing field for aspirations of where the field might hopefully go. Her method of discussing the topic is by creating maps that visually lay out the relationship. Her most recent map is an attempt to lay out the landscape of design and research methods. It takes the speculative aspect of designing into account: the further into the future a project should think ahead, the more design and research tend to blend. In Sanders’ scenario, design and research are not the most meaningful distinctions. Instead, the intentions behind the engagement with prospective users become much more important. A well-known contributor in the area of participatory methods, she locates the approaches of design for or with prospective users on a spectrum ranging from provoking to serving people. In a similar manner, Mike Press argues that debating the question of design versus research practice has lost its relevance, given the diverse forms of collaboration that already exist today. Therefore he is concerned about the different relevant knowledge sources in design research projects, such as researchers, professionals, prospective users or politicians, and with how to deal with them comfortably. Without clear boundaries between academia, business and social engagement, diverse actors from all of these domains are drawn together by a common concern rather than separated by their original professional domains. This calls for design skills such as the ability to moderate and constructively work with the constraints of a given situation. Press therefore brings on the image of the design researcher as the social expert, following Richard Sennett’s concept of ‘sociable knowledge’, the ability to efficiently communicate and share professional knowledge and experience. While presenting arguments for a similar entanglement of design and research practice, Alain Findeli approaches this relationship from an epistemological point of view. As a dyed-in-the-wool philosophical pragmatist, he takes the inseparability of both practices as an a priori assumption. In his project-grounded research model, practical experience is key to generating any new knowledge. Consequently, design research does not make sense without a design project. The challenge is then to identify the more fundamental issue behind the design activity, which can be reinterpreted and reused in other design situations. According to Findeli, design research can be better characterised through its attitude than through its subject matter, which is too broad to deal with from a single disciplinary viewpoint. Hence, design research is by definition a transdisciplinary field. Findeli sees the past development in establishing design research as an academic field as reasonably advanced enough to provide a productive working environment. In terms of academic contribution, there is however plenty of work ahead of us when it comes to questions of aesthetic theory, creativity theory, design epistemology, design thinking, the design process or the phenomenology of use.

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Claudia Mareis’s review of practice theory and the role of design research in this discourse similarly builds on the general assumption that practice makes up all research activities, not merely those of design researchers. She recapitulates the seminal authors that initiated the ‘practice turn’ in the constructivist science and technology studies in the 1980s. A lot of these authors have been readily received in the design research community as well, especially with regard to the concepts of tacit knowledge and material agency. Mareis draws our attention to Knorr Cetina’s concept of knowledge cultures and practice not as a monolithic but highly situated and variable thing. Based on this concept, she analyses design research in terms of a particular knowledge culture in academia. Mareis’s judgment of the theoretical framing for the design and research practice relationship is then critical. She concludes that the struggle of design research to become an independent academic field led to an exaggerated focus on practice as a distinctive feature. From the early post-war design methods movement to the most recent and increasingly popular model of ‘research through design’, she states that they describe a far less sophisticated relationship between theory and practice than the practice theories in constructivist science and technology research offer. The statements by the researchers who carried out a practice-based PhD show the discrepancies between the claims of these four authors and their specific experiences from the PhD projects. In the stances, we get the impression that research and practice blend more and more. In contrast, the researchers’ comments illustrate the struggles in making this relationship work in reality. Since we were asking for differences between design and design research practice, differences is what we got: The freedom from constraints; the opportunity to reflect upon and criticise practice; and the different purposes that design and research practice serve. In ­research, it is necessary to make explicit, contextualise, communicate and justify design decisions that often remain implicit in a professional context. The deep ­reflection, the profound engagement with methodology, and the need for a highly structured approach is often radically new to PhD students in design in the early phases of carrying out their research. Likewise, the role that artefacts play in a ­research process is often entirely different: they do not need to function, but rather to provide explanatory power and serve as theoretical considerations in their own right. However, the PhDs also acknowledge the basic investigative qualities of ­design practice on the one hand, and the amount of design decisions included in research practice on the other. While some phases – like the beginning and the end – might appear very different in research, those differences indeed blur in the process up to a point where they cannot be separated anymore. It seems as if this is when theoretical reflections effectively influence design practice, and when practice reflects back on the conceptual considerations. The PhDs report that once they regarded text, concepts and theories as just another design material, writing became an integral part of the professional practice as a researcher. And it might turn

INTRODUCTION 015

out that in a few years time, the question of design and research practices will no longer provoke such debate.

1

2

The term refers to the prominent distinction drawn between research for, about and through d ­ esign. ­Research through design was introduced by Frayling. The distinctions have since been refined by ­Jonas and Findeli, e.g., and have been adopted by HCI as well. See Jonas 2007; Zimmerman et al. 2007; ­Frayling 1993; Findeli 1999. See Findeli 2004.

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WHERE ARE WE GOING? AN ASPIRATIONAL MAP Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders

Introduction The aim of this chapter is to provide young researchers and individuals new to the field with views on where the field might be going as opposed to a focus on views about where it has been or where it is now. I will do this with maps that point to the future and describe where we are right now, where we could go in the future and what we can do when we get there including what further destinations might emerge. I will share aspirations, i.e. dreams for the future, instead of predictions.

Sitting on the Border I should explain a little about my background before presenting the maps. I was educated in psychology and anthropology simultaneously. With an advanced degree in Experimental and Quantitative Psychology, I was expected to enter the academic community as a university researcher and educator. Instead, I was hired as an ‘experiment’ in interdisciplinary design in a design consultancy in 1981. This unique situation let me play and learn on the border between the real world and academia. To make a long story short, I have by now worked for over 30 years in the front end of design, the fuzzy front end, where the aim is to figure out what to design and what not to design. I learned how to work in the front end of design while I was a design research practitioner. Today I spend most of my time teaching what I learned in practice to students at universities. Since I have been working at the front end of design practice and design research for a long time, I have witnessed first hand many of the changes that have taken place.1 When I started in 1981, design was mainly about giving shape to the future. But today the action has moved also to the front end where design is about making sense of the future.

Making Maps In 2006 I was asked to write a paper describing the state of design research in practice at that time.2 The field was in a state of flux and it was confusing to many people.

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I was struggling to explain what was going on and then I discovered that if I could make a map, I could see what I was talking about and then tell others where I was and what I saw there. So here is the 2006 map that positions the design research approaches of the day relative to one another in a map-like landscape. (See Figure 1 on page 109.) This map is based on a grid where the latitudinal lines describe the degree to which the approaches placed on the map are research-led or design-led. Approaches lead by people trained as researchers can be found in the bottom half and approaches lead by designers in the top half. It has longitudinal lines describing the degree to which the approaches fall to the expert-driven side or the participatory side. Approaches that are practiced from an expert mindset can be found on the left whereas participatory approaches can be found on the right side of the map. This map has been useful for visualizing and understanding the relationships between the various design research approaches that are used in practice. I have used it as a tool for planning design research projects. For example, the top half of the map is good territory to be in when you are exploring in the front end of the design process and the lower half is most effective later in the process, for example, when you are validating concepts or usability testing prototypes. The map has also proved to be useful as a learning tool for students who are just beginning to get the lay of the land. This is especially true in courses where students come together from a number of different academic disciplines. I invite the students to mark the ‘places’ on the map that they are familiar with as well as the places they would like to explore in the class that they are taking with me. I have noticed that over time there have been more additions on the top half of the map, the design-led side, than there have been on the bottom half of the map where the research-led approaches sit. This revised version of the map3 shows a few of the emerging methods with more of the examples of new methods appearing in the top half. (See Figure 2 on page 109.) For example, the design-led approach that began with cultural probes4 lead to empathy probes,5 design probes,6 as well as reflective and primitive probes,7 among others. I started using a new map in 2012. (See Figure 3 on page 110.) Unlike the 2006 map, the new map was not a reflection of the current situation. It was a reflection of where things might be heading, or at least where they seemed to me to be heading at the time. The 2012 map positions approaches that are both design and design ­research practices. There is just not much distinction between design and design research anymore, especially in the front end of design. The 2012 map shows a mapping across time as opposed to a mapping in space. The 2012 map is a concentric set of rings that radiate outward from the current core of designing (the back half circle) toward the edges of time. The three layers of time emanate outward from the core. The first layer around the core refers to the world as it is, the second layer to the near future, and the third layer to the speculative future. Note that approaches that are practiced from an expert mindset can be found

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on the left whereas participatory approaches can be found on the right side of the map. In the slice to the right, service design and social design are seen as manifestations of the intent to serve people. In the middle, user experience and embodied interaction aim to engage people. In the slice to the left, design interventions and critical design intend to provoke or stir people up. Design fiction sits midway between engaging and provoking on the outside ring of the speculative future. The rest of the outer ring is empty and evokes thoughts about what will sit between serving and engaging in the speculative future.

A New Map What I most want to share with the young researchers and individuals new to the field is a third map. It is a hybrid map that combines the previous two maps to give a view of where we might go in the future in the context of where we were in 2006. (See Figure 4 on page 110.) Note that the two maps overlap, but not completely. They intersect only on the top part of the 2006 map where the design-led approaches have been active in the last ten years. Thus, the growth in future design and research landscapes will come more from design-led than from research-led approaches. The hybrid map exposes vast new territories for exploration in design practice and design research. There are more rings of time in the new map because the point of making the map is to provoke dreaming about what could be. The rings here represent not only increasing scales of time, increasing scope of context, but also increasing levels of complexity, and increasing impact of the future consequences of design. Similar thoughts of extending design to be an anticipatory practice are also discussed by Tonkinwise.8 We can see there are three basic directions of intent – provoking, engaging and improving that are similar to the slices of intent from the 2012 map. However, the slice previously referred to as ‘serving’ has been renamed to ‘improving’. There are no longer boundaries (dashed lines) between the slices. The slices have become directions of intent. It is now easy to move across the intentional states as the aims of the project demand. However, there is usually one vector of primary interest and intensity. There is also a hidden connection between provoking and improving that you can see when the map is three-dimensional. If you cut the diagram out, form it into a funnel and then tape it together along the straight edge, you will get a map that positions provoking next to improving.

WHERE ARE WE GOING? AN ASPIRATIONAL MAP  019

Directions of Intent One direction of intent points to design for provoking. For example, we might provoke people to think about or act upon what they see. Sometimes we provoke people in order to incite change. The approaches that are positioned in the direction of provoking include design interventions (which might also lean toward improving), critical design and design fiction. The second direction of intent points to design for engaging. We might use design / design research to engage people for the purpose of entertainment or learning. Interaction design is in the innermost ring with embodied interaction in the next ring. And the third direction of intent points to design for improving. For example, we might use design / design research to improve the environment in order to improve people’s lives. This direction of intent tends to be participatory in that we are co-designing with the people who constitute the experts of their own lives and whose lives are at stake. The approaches that are positioned in the direction of improving include service design and social design. Transformation design sits between improving and engaging. Transition design9 also appears to be on the trajectory that is aimed at improving. The hybrid map is still a sketch at this point so the positioning of approaches on it is approximate and the labels are tentative. The positionings of the approaches will vary based on the perspective of the viewer or map user. Feel free to play with the map and move things around so that it makes sense to you.

Making Sense of the Future by Giving Shape to It In the past designers were called upon mainly to give shape to the future. In fact, many people still see design in this way. But now design / research practitioners are being called on to help make sense of the future. It used to be that making sense of the future was the step that came before the step of giving shape to the future. This is no longer always the case. We are now exploring new landscapes where we make sense of the future by giving shape to it. New forms and means of visualisation in multidimensional spaces are enabling this exploration. What we see now is the blending of research and design to the point where they cannot be pulled apart. Designers do research and researchers use design methods. As our design / research activities begin to move into the outer rings of the hybrid map the scale, level, scope and the impact of the consequences of our work will become greatly magnified. We need to find new ways to give shape to the future so that the consequences of our decisions and actions can be explored in advance. So let’s dream about what might be in the outer rings of the hybrid map. How can we learn to give shape to proposals that help us to see and make sense of the future?

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Thanks Thanks to Sapna Singh at The Ohio State University for wide-ranging discussions about the future of graduate design education and to Pieter Jan Stappers from TU Delft for insightful comments about the hybrid map.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Sanders, L. and Stappers, P. J: ‘From designing to co-designing to collective dreaming: Three slices in time’. ACM Interactions, 2014. Sanders, E. B.-N.: ‘Design research in 2006’, Design Research Quarterly 1, no. 1, Design Research Society, September 2006. Sanders, L.: ‘An evolving map of design practice and design research’, Interactions Magazine, November 1, 2008. Gaver, W., Dunne, A., and Pacenti, E,: ‘Cultural probes’, Interactions, Vol 6, Issue 1, Jan / Feb 1999. Mattelmaki, T. and Battarbee, K.: ‘Empathy probes’, in PDC 02 Proceedings of the Participatory Design ­Conference, T. Binder, J. Gregory, I. Wagner (Eds.), Malmo, Sweden, 2002. Mattelmaki, T.: Design Probes, Ph. D. diss., University of Art and Design Helsinki, 2006. Loi, D.: ‘Reflective probes, primitive probes and playful triggers’. Working paper, EPIC07: Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, Keystone, Colo., October 2007. Tonkinwise, C.: Prototyping risks when design is disappearing, Current 06: Designing Wisdom: Prospects, Practices and Provocations, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, 2014, pp. 16–20. Irwin, T., Kossoff, G., Tonkinwise, C. and Scupelli, P. Transition Design: 2015, white paper from Carnegie Mellon University School of Design, 2015.

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THE RESOURCEFUL SOCIAL EXPERT: DEFINING THE FUTURE CRAFT OF DESIGN ­RESEARCH Mike Press

Design and research are indivisible. Today’s designers – especially those who work in service, product, environmental or interaction design – are users and creators of knowledge, transferring that knowledge to (and creating it with) users, clients and co-creators. Perhaps twenty years ago when we were still in the process of defining design research, then debates over the relationship between theory and practice, academia and the professional domain, had some relevance. No longer. The trick, therefore, is to create and define models of design research practice that work across ‘professional’ and ‘academic’ spheres, that acknowledge there are hybrid practices within design that create knowledge in diverse ways, arising from different contexts. These models also have to be constantly fluid and adaptable. We may have moved on considerably in twenty years, but we remain in a state of beta. And we always will. One aspect of our practice that we perhaps have not shifted away from as much as we might is an approach to research that is self-centred and self-obsessed, inwardly directed and egotistical. We find elements of this in both of our ‘worlds’ – academia and professional practice. In short, it’s anti-social. This is a culture of research and practice that has no place in the twenty first century (to be honest, it should not have had a place in any century). It is time to move on and be radical in our practices and ambitions. My argument is to reframe design research around the notion of social expertise, and indeed of social knowledge: knowledge that is open, shared, created collaboratively and co-operatively. At times it is created in universities, other times outside it, and very often involving partners that span professional domains. It is knowledge that is democratic, that involves all kinds of people in its creation and meets their wider needs. It is part of our collective commons.

Defining the Social Expert Antonio Stradivari was the Steve Jobs of his age: a hectoring obsessive, who ruled his Cremona violin workshop with a ruthless vision of perfectionism. The craftsmen he employed were chained to their workbenches: they really were. When not

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crafting the finest violins and cellos the world has ever seen, the apprentices would sleep on bags of straw under their bench. It is a model of autocratic leadership that many have emulated since; but you do wonder why they bother. When the 93-year-old Stradivari died in 1737, the quality of his workshop’s musical instruments died with him. Despite the best efforts of his sons and master craftsmen to maintain the preeminent quality and reputation of the Stradivari name, the instruments they turned out were not a patch on those that had preceded them. Great efforts were made to analyse the pattern of the original instruments, the materials, even the precise formulation of the varnish, in a vain attempt to create a design template that could replicate his original genius. But these efforts fell flat, in every sense of the word. According to Richard Sennett in his book The Craftsman,1 the dramatic collapse in quality can be attributed to Stradivari’s very style of professional expertise. Antonio Stradivari, Sennett argues, was an antisocial expert. Antisocial expertise is driven by a competitive zeal which occludes the notion of co-operation, holding up world class excellence as the one goal, and based on a strict sense of hierarchy. The antisocial expert lacks essential skills required to ensure that the good work they do can live on after them; their unique expertise is held within the firewall of their own tacit knowledge. As Sennett explains: ‘There is an inherent inequality of knowledge and skill between expert and non-expert. Antisocial expertise emphasizes the sheer fact of invidious comparison. One obvious consequence of emphasizing inequality is the humiliation and resentment this expert can arouse in others; a more subtle consequence is to make the expert himself or herself feel embattled’.2 Sennett contrasts this with sociable expertise, making the case that ‘A wellcrafted institution will favour the sociable expert; the isolated expert sends a warning signal that the organization is in trouble’3. Sociable expertise is the very essence of craftsmanship – a concept elaborated and explored so expertly by Sennett. The social expert relies on good work and transparent practices for the basis of their authority. Driven by a desire to improve one’s own work, ‘the sociable experts tend to be good at explaining and giving advice to their customers. The sociable expert, that is, is comfortable with mentoring, the modern echo of medieval in loco parentis’.4 Sennett’s sociable craftsman ‘conducts a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking’5 and is in many senses crafting knowledge transfer. Karen Yair in Crafting Capital has described this ‘craft thinking’ which ‘enables innovation by working with – rather than against – the restrictions of a given situation. In this analysis, craft thinking applies both to engineering and to team working: Sennett describes the craftsperson as a ‘sociable expert’, able to facilitate innovation by stretching the competencies of others within reasonable parameters’.6 This is precisely the model of design research and practice relevant for our age – an age of open design, ever-evolving collaborative partnerships between crea-

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tive microbusinesses, social design, user-centredness, knowledge transfer, empowerment and inclusivity. Let us pull out three key arguments in favour of this as a useful and usable model of design research.

Co-designing with Consumers First, the rise of open design and innovation, linked to technologies that provide ‘consumers’ with potential to become creative ‘prosumers’ requires that designers need to shift to encouraging more creative and designerly self-reliance in others. Charles Leadbeater, in Production by the Masses, argues that professionals (designers, for example) ‘should educate us towards self-help and self-reliance as much as possible. Modern society trains us to be workers and consumers. Postindustrial institutions should train us for self-management and self-assessment’.7 Both the opportunity and the challenge here is for designers to see their priorities increasingly in terms of constructing robust systems of scaffolding within which people feel confident and enabled to design and construct new futures for themselves. It is an opportunity in the sense that it represents an ambitious and highly relevant ‘new frontier’ in design. It is a challenge in that it runs counter to the ego-oriented view of design in which designers are ‘gods’ of new universes of their own making.

Designing Public Services Second, the design of new forms of public services demands a wholly new form of design practice, the success of which relies critically on the social expert model. In recent insightful research into the future of the UK design consultancy industry, Cooper, Evans and Williams set out a number of likely future business models for design. One they entitle SIG (Special Interest Group) Niche Network and describe it thus: ‘“Facebook” social network approach: essentially a C2B2C (consumer to business to consumer) model. The structure involves co-design / participation between design communities and special interest groups regional hubs. The designer’s role is as facilitator and mediator. Fees would be based on scale of contribution and would be reliant on “long tail” economics, outsourcing production and distribution. High public sector engagement such as the re-design of services. Other clients would include subgroups, empowered communities, and local authorities’.8 This would appear to describe much of the work undertaken by consultancies such as Engine, Taylor Haig, Snook, The Young Foundation and others. The design researcher as social expert is clearly essential for such work.

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Construction of Social Problems Third, and intimately linked to the above argument, design provides the potential for people not just to co-design services, but to construct social problems. As such it offers potential to enable new forms of participatory democracy. The danger of service design for public services is that it becomes incorporated within the institutional paradigm that it has the potential to challenge, and thus becomes just another technocratic tool of the public sector. Simon Blyth and Lucy Kimbell have provided a vital analysis that comes out of service design practice, but which suggests a significant shift of emphasis: ‘Rather than claiming to solve social problems, we want to argue for the relevance and value of Design in actively, critically and reflexively contributing to their construction … We want to invite designers to make this more clearly part of their practice. We think there are things about Design that make it particularly good at doing this, although the positioning of design-as- problem-solving tends to have ignored them’.9 Again, this helps us in defining the challenges and practices of a design researcher as social expert working in this field.

Resourceful Social Expertise These three zones of new design practice – co-creative prosumption, design for public services, and the construction of social problems – will be critical for our future and design wholly new models of design research. He may have crafted damned fine fiddles, but I have severe doubts that Antonio Stradivari would have been particularly good at facilitating workshops for co-designing new long-term care services for those with dementia. But I may be wrong; he may have had more than one string to his bow. But these zones in some cases lay far beyond the familiar and comfortable territories of design. That some designers have succeeded, in some cases spectacularly well, in rising to the challenges, suggests that we need to identify the essential characteristics of leadership that can ensure success. My ‘feeling’ for this (in the absence of any actual data) is that a critical requirement is resourcefulness. Emily Campbell makes the following points with regard to resourcefulness and design: ‘Resourcefulness is ingenuity: the ability to think on your feet; the ability to adapt one solution to another problem; the ability to make something out of little or nothing. But resourcefulness is also the confidence that comes with knowledge: having a skill or a range of skills at your disposal; knowing enough to make a wise choice; having analogous experience; having connections to draw on and knowing how to collaborate. This knowledge feeds the ingenuity, and vice versa’.10

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As such the design researcher is a resourceful social expert who is able not only to generate new insights on complex problems by collaborative and participatory means, but also to transfer and exchange knowledge of that process itself to all the participants. In this way the boundaries of knowledge are rapidly extended and the potential for creative solutions is multiplied many times over.

Some Future Priorities If we accept that this is the case, then how should academic design researchers interact with the world around them? First, they should focus on developing productive knowledge-based relationships with micro-businesses. We are currently witnessing a massive rise in micro businesses – largely in professional domains. What hampers their development is the lack of access to research and development expertise and knowledge. That is where academic design researchers could become ideal partners, and through projects such as Design in Action in Scotland,11 they already are. Second, a vital part of the knowledge that universities need to provide is analyses, tools and methods that enable co-design and co-creation to take place. While universities certainly do not have the monopoly of good ideas with regard to this, they have a vital role to play. We are currently developing an innovation hub in a Scottish hospital that will provide opportunities for patients and carers to redesign the provision of healthcare. Design researchers, working alongside clinicians and patients can evolve new approaches and new design tools. Our task is then to evaluate them and disseminating our collective findings. Third, design researchers also have to reconsider their role to better support user innovation to flourish and contribute to national wealth and welfare, providing direct access to user communities. Academics tend to focus their external relationships with companies or clearly defined public sector or voluntary organisations. Working in partnership with loose, ever-shifting groups is a challenge to our bureaucratic ways of doing things. But we have to find a way to adapt. The role of the design researcher is a diverse and challenging one. It centres on recognising what we do as a form of social expertise that we approach with resourcefulness. Furthermore it requires us to constantly redefine our practices and methods, to treat research as a design project: we fail fast, we redefine, we prototype like we’re right, we listen like we’re wrong. We never forget that design research is in a state of constant beta.

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Sennett, R.: The Craftsman. London, Penguin, 2009. Ibid., p. 249. Ibid., p. 246. Ibid., p. 248. Ibid., p. 9. Yair, K.: Crafting Capital: new technologies, new economies. London, Crafts Council, 2012, p. 4. Leadbeater, Ch.: Production by the masses: professionals and postindustrial public services. London, Demos, 2009, p. 186.   8 Cooper, R., Williams, A. and Evans, M.: ‘New Design Business Models – Implications for the Future of ­Design Management’, in: Cooper, R., Junginger, S. and Lockwood, T. (Eds.), The Handbook of Design ­Management, Berg Publishers, Oxford, UK, 2011, pp.495–511, p. 24.   9 Blyth, S. and Kimbell, L.: Design Thinking and the Big Society: From solving personal troubles to designing social problems. London, Actant and Taylor Haig, 2011, p.10. 10 Campbell, E.: You know more than you think you do: design as resourcefulness & self-reliance. London, RSA Projects, 2009, p. 2. 11 www.designinaction.com

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THE MYTH OF THE DESIGN ANDROGYNE Alain Findeli

It is indeed a nice opportunity to be invited to summarise one’s personal convictions about some choice and ‘much-debated’ issues in the field of design research. There is no doubt that issue concerning the distinction and, more important, the relationship between design practice and design research practice has occupied my mind and my teaching for quite some time now. I just had a look at the editorial in the summer 1999 issue of Design Issues and I wonder what else I could add that would not be déjà-vu, that would not just be repeating myself by merely referring to a few milestones that paved the way to the project-grounded research model1. These successive prototypes of the ‘primary generator’2 have been put to work in various contexts, leading to the following observation: the fundamental epistemological framework of the model (pragmaticism) remains sometimes difficult to understand, especially by students and colleagues trained in the Cartesian intellectual culture, but once the spark ignites, its fruitfulness is warranted (I adopt Goethe’s proto-pragmatist criterion, fruitfulness, to test the validity of a theoretical proposal). The main characteristic of the model is summed up in the central maxim of the pragmatist gospel: ‘If thou wantest to really understand the world, put it into project’. In other words, this epistemological principle posits that valid and trustworthy knowledge is best produced in experiential situations of inquiry. Our task as researchers remains to make sure the inquiry is rigorous and conducted according to what the research community at large recognises as being scientifically consistent and valid – provided one cares about such orthodoxy (I assume this issue will be discussed elsewhere in this book). In John Dewey’s terms, the task is to turn a merely empirical (project) experience into an experimental one. Why insist on the above maxim? Because the concepts we use and produce through our thinking activity, if situated in experience, become alive and significant, instead of remaining abstract like mathematical concepts. In the two first chapters of The Quest for Certainty ,3 Dewey observes that the space of abstraction (or pure theory) is much more comfortable than the ever-changing sublunary world we inhabit, so that the temptation is strong to escape from the latter to play around with concepts and build attractive theoretical models that have little relevancy to the experiential world. Moreover, by choosing as experimental situation of our research question a [design] project situation, that is a situation where a design question is at stake, we guarantee (and test) not only the liveliness and agility of our concepts and models, but also their operative capacity, their potency, in short: their fruitfulness. To paraphrase Dewey again, design research is to be ‘prophetic’, not merely descriptive.

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The question raised by the issue of ‘Design / Research’ thus finds a preliminary answer: one needs a design question to pursue a research question. In scientific jargon: the recommended terrain for a proper design research inquiry, its laboratory, is the field of a design project. Let us now see how these two interrelated questions can be chosen, better said: constructed. The research question is obviously the leading question, since our goal is to engage in research. But what then are (good) design research questions, what do they look like, where do they arise, where can we find them, borrow them from? Here is a better way to ask: What should the answers to these questions be good for? In one of his lectures, Ezio Manzini once stated, ‘The purpose of design research is to produce knowledge useful for design practice’. The statement can be read in two ways: specifically or generically. Specifically it addresses what is usually called ‘research for design’, meaning that in order to carry out a specific design project, some form of relevant knowledge is necessary. The more complex the situation is, the more sophisticated (and multidisciplinary) the necessary knowledge must be. The relevant knowledge is either available (‘search’ situations) or it must be produced (‘research’ situations). In the latter case, it is usually not transferable to other design situations. The generic is more ambitious, since it calls for the production of a form of knowledge that is fundamental or generalisable enough to be useful to design practice ‘in general’, whatever the specific project situation or brief may be. Using the same widespread terminology, it is therefore research for design, carried out with the scientific ambition of research into design, and preferably through design, if one adopts the project-grounded method. Needless to add, my conviction is that, provided we replace usefulness by relevance, such endeavour is a worthy programme for design research. The difference I make between usefulness and relevance is the following: usefulness refers to the instrumentality of a ready-to-hand toolkit, whereas the property of relevance presumes that its fruitfulness must be constructed anew by the designer-researcher according to each situation, through a sort of permanent hermeneutic process. In Goethe’s phenomenological terms, it requires that one has visualised (mentally) the archetypal model (Urmodell) clearly and vividly enough to understand what form it should be given in each specific situation in order to be able to proceed with the design process. From this standpoint, the task of design research is to generate such archetypal models. Since, as I mentioned earlier, all this is mere repetition, I will now carry on in aphoristic manner: • The purpose of design research is to improve design practice. • Attentive knowledge of design practice is necessary if one attempts to improve it. • To describe and understand design practice, it may be convenient to distinguish: the product, the process, the actors (see for instance the model of the Eclipse of the Object 4).

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• Knowledge of the purpose of design practice is necessary if one attempts to improve it. • The purpose of design practice is to improve or at least maintain the habitability of the world of all people involved in the design project under consideration. • Habitability is therefore a central scientific subject matter of design research. • Another term to describe the science (or discipline? see ‘­Discipline / Indiscipline’) of habitability is: extended human ecology. • Design cannot claim human ecology as its proper scientific field: geography, mesology (Augustin Berque), ecology, environmental psychology, anthropology, semiotics, etc. obviously also have a say in this domain. • There is however a specificity to the designerly approach to human ecology: 1) it is eager to extend its concerns, not only to the physical, biological and psycho-societal but also to the spiritual / cultural dimensions of habitability in the outer and inner, individual and collective, worlds; and 2) its approach is diagnostic, projective and ameliorative, not merely analytical, descriptive or interpretive. • If, for all these reasons, design deserves to be considered as a discipline (my claim), its main characteristic is not the originality of its subject matter, of its scientific object, which it shares with other disciplines, but its implicit philosophical anthropology, i.e. the ‘theory’ of the human being it adopts. In this respect, Moholy-Nagy could not be more perspicuous by stating that design was not a profession but an attitude. • The research question vs. design question polarity can therefore be displayed in a new light: behind every design question, there lies a more fundamental research question that deals with the human habitability of the world. This extremely general question expresses itself each time anew, each time there is a design project to be carried out. The task of the design ­researcher is to uncover the specific anthropological issue at stake and to elaborate the proper research inquiry; the task of the designer is to deliver an adequate proposal to the actors / stakeholders.

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Thus goes the myth of the Design Androgyne, neither practitioner nor researcher, but both. Now, referring to the original working title of this book, ARE WE THERE YET? Let us break it down into 3 questions:

1. Where is THERE? If THERE means that which our community recognises as design research has gleaned enough credibility and respectability to secure a seat in the academic arena, then one can say that we have achieved it in many countries. Thanks to their great familiarity with abductive and analogical reasoning, designers have managed to quickly grasp the basics of their new profession as researchers. They now master the academic / scientific rhetoric and the corresponding methodological toolbox; they publish in well-respected scholarly journals, including the ones they have created; they organise international conferences, seminars and workshops; they have built doctoral programmes and research labs; they have formed research societies and communities, manage lists and newsletters, collect archives, and even already have a history; in brief, they have collected all the ingredients necessary to construct a research tradition. True, access to significant research grants and contracts is still somewhat wanting, but we’re underway. If, however, THERE means that a consensus has been reached around a dominant paradigm for research that is robust enough to be able to progress to more innovative steps of development instead of indulging into a kind of autistic solipsism, then we still have a long road to travel, since important so-called ‘unanswered questions’ still lie in front of the door. Let me pick a few I would be happy to find the leisure to grapple with: • There is still the lack of aesthetics proper to design: the bits and pieces we have borrowed from major philosophical aestheticians are not really fit for the job (see ‘Borrowing / Stealing’). Our contribution to experiential, everyday aesthetics could be much more decisive. How, to offer an example, do we describe and prescribe the aesthetic quality of a service, of a public policy? • I don’t think we should satisfy ourselves with the creativity theories on which our practice has relied since the 60s. A more updated model should be developed, and the artistic reference temporarily abandoned (maybe see ‘Text / Object’?).

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• Related to the latter, our epistemology of design, i.e. our theory of the project, still remains to be worked out, otherwise it will be our neighbouring disciplines that will keep inventing and defining our central concepts (see ‘human-centred design’ by computer sciences, ‘design thinking’ by management sciences, ‘experience design’ by cognitive ergonomics, ‘evidence-based practice’ by the medical sciences). To paraphrase Otto Scharmer’s Theory U, there is a blind spot in design theory, which concerns the inner space from which our practice originates: we usually pretty well know what we do (our end products) and how we do it (our methodological tools) but ignore the inner source from which we operate, what the author names ‘the quality of attention’. To be clear about the relationship between the inner and the outer world in design, what I have termed the ‘anthropological issue’, I consider one of the most pressing and stimulating research (and pedagogical) challenge currently, since, in keeping with Scharmer, ‘the success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener’.6 • Another epistemological obstacle has to do with design thinking. How can we content ourselves with the current ‘working’ definitions? A more accurate and discriminate characterisation of the complex logics at work while designing would be most welcome. While deductive and strictly inductive logics, reputedly pivotal in scientific inquiry, are rather accidental in design, designers manipulate a large palette of different logics: the already mentioned abductive and analogical, but also deontic, rhetorical, hermeneutic, semiotic, phenomenological, narrative, heuristic logics. At what stage of the process are these more effective? How should they relate to each other? Are they always compatible? Such are some research topics at hand. • We have witnessed an indisputable progress in the description and understanding of the design process, with a multitude of diagrams currently on the market. However, the emphasis has largely been put on the conception phase, as if the reception phase would follow almost automatically. I think an effort should be made to better understand the phenomenology of use in order to properly address what it means to inhabit the world. • A last word on the co-design process and the correlated concepts of expertise, accountability, responsibility, engagement,

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empowerment, democracy, etc.: maybe some astute ‘borrowings’ (‘Borrowing / Stealing’) from the sociology of organi­sat­ ions, ANT, political science, management theories, etc. would be welcome here. The ideal configuration would indeed be a multidisciplinary research situation.7

2. Who is WE? WE is obviously both the design and design research communities. The DNA of the latter has, since the beginnings, been mainly anchored in the British and Usonian intellectual traditions. An opening to a richer intellectual ‘biodiversity’ would be welcome. I am, personally, quite curious to follow what the potential contribution of the recent and belated awakening of a French and francophone research community will be: will its recent (and also belated) discovery of the pragmatist philosophical tradition convert it to the dominant paradigm or will its Cartesian DNA galvanise it? The same could be said, of course, of the German, Chinese, Australian, Korean, Turkish, Italian, etc. potential contributions. If we turn to the design community, one realises that the opening of such new fields of practice as UX design, service design, public policy design and social ­design requires very complex knowledge and sophisticated methodologies in order to be properly addressed. Whereas some of this knowledge is readily available in ­related disciplines, some of it is still lacking and must therefore be produced by r­ esearch.

3. When is YET? YET is never, hopefully! The main property of a myth is its timelessness: it remains alive but must be revived indefinitely. Sometimes it falls asleep; sometimes its voice is audible again. The myth of the Design Androgyne is not new: already at the Bauhaus, where the new figure of the designer was being shaped, they idealised the union of the Form- and Werkmeisters, two separate kinds of teachers in Weimar, within a single person in Dessau: the ‘young master’. The famous ‘art and technology’ ­polarity of the Bauhaus was one possible incarnation of the universal and ageless ‘spirit and matter’ metaphysical and archetypal polarity.8 Whereas, more than a century ago, it was with the definition of design practice that they started to struggle, now it is the ‘perspectives on design research’ that busy us. Thus goes the myth of the Design Androgyne.

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1

2 3 4 5 6 7

8

Findeli, A. (1999), ‘Introduction’ to the special issue of Design Issues on design research, XV, 2, 1–3; ­Findeli, A. (2003), ‘Theorie und Praxis: Eine neue Einheit. Ein funktionstüchtiges Modell für die Designforschung’, hfg forum, 18, 70–80; Findeli, A., (2005a), ‘Die projektgeleitete Forschung: eine Methode der Designforschung’, in Michel, R. (Ed.), Erstes Designforschungssymposium, Zurich, SwissDesignNetwork, 2005, pp.40–51; Findeli, A. and Bousbaci, R. (2005b), ‘L’éclipse de l’objet dans les théories du projet en ­design’, The Design Journal, VIII, 3, 35–49; Findeli, A. (2006), ‘Qu’appelle-t-on ‘théorie’ en design? Réflexions sur l’enseignement et la recherche en design’, in Flamand, B. (Ed.), Le design. Essai sur les théories et les pratiques, Paris, éd. IFM, 77–98 ; Findeli, A. and Coste, A. (2007), ‘De la recherche-création à la ­recherche-projet: un cadre théorique et méthodologique pour la recherche architecturale’, Lieux ­Communs, 10, 139–61; Findeli, A. et al. (2008), ‘Research Through Design and Transdisciplinarity: A Tentative Contribution to the Methodology of Design Research’, in Minder, B. (Ed.), Focused – Current design research projects and methods, Berne, SDN, 67–94; Findeli, A. (2010), ‘Searching for Design Research Questions. A conceptual Clarification’, in Rosan Chow, Wolfgang Jonas and Gesche Joost (Eds.), Questions, Hypotheses and Conjectures, Berlin, iUniverse, 286–303. Sorry for self-quoting. Darke, J.: ‘The Primary Generator and the Design Process’, Design Studies, 1, 1, 36–44. First published in 1978 in lttelson, W. H., Albanese, C., and Rogers, W. R. (Eds.) EDRA9 Proceedings, University of Arizona, 1979. Dewey, J.: The Quest for Certainty, N.Y., Minton, Balch & Co, 1929. Findeli, A. and Bousbaci, R.: ‘L’éclipse de l’objet dans les théories du projet en design’, The Design ­Journal, VIII, 3, 2005, p. 35–49. Scharmer, O.: Theory U, San Francisco, Berret-Koehler, 2009. Ibid., p. 7 Findeli, A. et al.: ‘Research Through Design and Transdisciplinarity: A Tentative Contribution to the Methodology of Design Research’, in Minder, B. (Ed.), Focused – Current design research projects and methods, Berne, SDN, 2008, p. 67–94. Findeli, A.: ‘The Bauhaus Project: An Archetype for Design Education in the New Millenium’, The Structurist, 39/40, 1999–2000, p. 36–43.

References The nature of the editors’ brief (‘contribute a personal stance’) explains the following, seemingly complacent, list of references. This essay turned out to be a welcome opportunity to do some housekeeping in past material and to find out if I could construct a thread that would give it some coherence. Darke, J. (1979). ‘The Primary Generator and the Design Process’, Design Studies, 1, 1, 36–44. First published in 1978 in lttelson, W. H., Albanese, C., and Rogers, W. R. (Eds.) EDRA9 Proceedings, University of Arizona. Dewey, J. (1929), The Quest for Certainty, N.Y., Minton, Balch & Co. Findeli, A. (1999), ‘Introduction’ to the special issue of Design Issues on design research, XV, 2, 1–3. Findeli, A. (1999–2000), ‘The Bauhaus Project: An Archetype for Design Education in the New Millenium’, The Structurist, 39/40, 36–43. Findeli, A. (2003), ‘Theorie und Praxis: Eine neue Einheit. Ein funktionstüchtiges Modell für die Designforschung’, hfg forum, 18, 70–80. Findeli, A., (2005a), ‘Die projektgeleitete Forschung: eine Methode der Designforschung’, in Michel, R. (Ed.), Erstes Designforschungssymposium, Zurich, SwissDesignNetwork, 2005, pp.40–51. Findeli, A. and Bousbaci, R. (2005b), ‘L’éclipse de l’objet dans les théories du projet en design’, The Design ­Journal, VIII, 3, 35–49. Findeli, A. (2006), ‘Qu’appelle-t-on ‘théorie’ en design? Réflexions sur l’enseignement et la recherche en ­design’, in Flamand, B. (Ed.), Le design. Essai sur les théories et les pratiques, Paris, éd. IFM, 77–98. Findeli, A. and Coste, A. (2007), ‘De la recherche-création à la recherche-projet: un cadre théorique et méthodologique pour la recherche architecturale’, Lieux Communs, 10, 139–61. Findeli, A. et al. (2008), ‘Research Through Design and Transdisciplinarity: A Tentative Contribution to the Methodology of Design Research’, in Minder, B. (Ed.), Focused – Current design research projects and methods, Berne, SDN, 67–94. Findeli, A. (2010), ‘Searching for Design Research Questions. A conceptual Clarification’, in Rosan Chow, Wolfgang Jonas and Gesche Joost (Eds.), Questions, Hypotheses and Conjectures, Berlin, iUniverse, 286–303. Scharmer, O. (2009), Theory U, San Francisco, Berret-Koehler.

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DOING RESEARCH: DESIGN RESEARCH IN THE CONTEXT OF THE ‘PRACTICE TURN’ Claudia Mareis

Design research is currently going through a remarkable upward trend. Since fundamental systematic efforts towards a scientific foundation of design began with the design methods movement in the 1960s, one has been able to observe design research taking shape as a practice-based research model in the course of numerous educational reforms at art schools and universities up through today. In this model, research object and method seem to merge seamlessly. In fact, primarily a practice-based research through design is preferred, one that also involves – aside from a complex new definition and negotiation of research actors and methods – a distinct discourse of the praxeological.1 This brings practice-based design research closer, at least superficially, to more recent approaches in social and cultural sciences that have devoted themselves to the research of practice theory against the backdrop of the so-called ‘practice turn’. Comparable to these approaches, the practice-based design research is also profoundly concerned with the reciprocal relationship of practice and theory construction as well as seeks new ways of understanding knowledge production in research, in the mode of design-practical action. However, design research also arises from a discourse tradition that differs in conceptual terms from the genesis of other practice-theoretical approaches. Thus, the question arises as to how practice-based design research is informed by fundamental postulates and premises in the cultural and social sciences that generally form the basis of the approaches of practice theory. This question will be explored here in a simultaneously theoretical and historical discussion that localises practice-based design research.

Practice Theories: Material Agents and Knowledge Cultures The diagnosis of the practice turn2 was launched in the social and cultural sciences. This happened in the context of (socio-)constructivist science and technology studies as practiced in the 1980s by researchers, like Bruno Latour, Steven Woolgar or Karin Knorr Cetina.3 In addition, works from French sociology and cultural theory, such as Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice or Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, paved the way for a scientific acknowledgement of practice theories in the 1970s and 1980s.4 In this context, sociologist Donald Schön’s study, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (1983), should be emphasised

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with regards to design.5 Here, Schön explains the significance of practical, experience-based knowledge against the backdrop of contemporary social debates on knowledge and technology. Referring to Michael Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowing, Schön directs the attention to the implicit knowledge of the practice that oftentimes manifests itself not in words but in action and practical doing.6 Schön’s study on trained specialists – who generated valuable insights into this practice, either in the context of or when exercising their practical activity – would form the important theoretical groundwork for practice-based design research over the following decades. The numerous works that have accumulated under the guiding concept of the practice turn in recent years represent the attempt to better understand the heterogeneous field of practice research by concentrating on and systematising practice theories, while developing a profound comprehension of the complex dimension that is practice. Although both the research field as well as the approaches for this enterprise have proven to be quite varied, there still seems to be a common set of interests and questions that interconnect practice theories. Theodore Schatzki, who edited The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (2001) with Karin Knorr Cetina and Eike von Savigny, explains the common interest as follows: ‘A central core … of practice theorists conceives of practices as embodied, materially mediated arrays of ­human activity centrally organised around shared practical understanding’.7 To ­Andreas Reckwitz, practice theory represents a subcategory of social and cultural theory, which neither understands the social – as opposed to many common theories – as a mental feature nor locates in discourses and interactions, but which rather understands the practices themselves as the central location and mode of the production and passing on of social and cultural meaning.8 In addition to focusing on material objects, technical apparatuses and instruments, such a practice-theoretical analysis also looks at bodies, spaces and routines with(in) which their practice is actually realised and implemented: ‘A practice is thus a routinized way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the world is understood’.9 Particularly pertinent examples of practice-theoretical approaches can be found, as mentioned before, in the science and technology studies. These studies fostered such approaches in order to better describe and identify the far-reaching material dimension of knowledge and production of knowledge mostly neglected in science theory. It is precisely this dimension of a materiality of knowledge that currently attracts the interest of many design researchers. For example, in Designerly Ways of Knowing (2006), Nigel Cross refers to a design-specific knowledge that was not only materialised and embodied in design processes but also in their products.10 As the sociologist John Law puts it, knowledge always takes on a material shape, whether in ‘conversations, conference presentations, in articles, preprints, patents, or even in the embodiment through competent scientists and technologists’.11 This perspective entails as a further consequence – at least for the science and technology studies – that not only human but also non-human material actors and

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entities be considered to determine the action. This viewpoint is prominently represented in the actor-network theory developed and propagated by Bruno Latour, Madeleine Akrich, John Law and others in the context of lab and technique studies.12 Karen Bardad’s post-humanistic approach of agential realism essentially shares the view that the capacity to act is not restricted to human actors.13 Theodore Schatzki puts this in a nutshell: ‘Practice theory also joins a variety of “materialist” approaches in highlighting how bundled activities interweave with ordered constellations of non-human entities’.14 The possibilities of design and shaping of such materialand practice-based knowledge production that connects human and non-human actors hence seem correspondingly far-reaching and consequential. This also implies that a practice-theoretical approach to scientific and design practice as presented here is designed inter- and multidisciplinarily per se: research is not understood as a delineated place of knowledge production or knowledge but as a hybrid formation of multiple practices and cultures of knowledge.15 With regard to design research, one can observe various knowledge practices and cultures that are mutually influenced and shaped by aesthetic, technical, social or economic deliberations and concepts. At this point, the reference to the concept of culture with regard to knowledge production is key: on one hand, with the expression of ‘knowledge culture’ introduced by the sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina, attention is drawn to the concrete practices of knowledge production, and on the other hand, the fundamentally cultural dimension of knowledge is emphasised. According to Knorr Cetina, linking the concept of culture enhances the concept of knowledge and practice in several respects: culture points, firstly, ‘to the fractures in unity and uniformity of practice’, secondly, to the ‘thicket of a wide variety of patterns that overlap and accumulate in life-world contexts’ and, thirdly, the cultural concept adds a ‘sensibility to symbols and meanings’ to the concept of knowledge and practice.16 Knowledge cultures thus differ from each other in many ways: they do not only exhibit different, partly also contingent formations of practice and practices, but they differ in their evaluation and historical perpetuation as well. In the following, the goal is to question and illustrate how, from a historical perspective, specific knowledge cultures in design were formed, and which practice-theory models were able to establish themselves in this process of becoming a discipline.

Unfolding Between Practice and Theory17 The aforementioned aspects and interests holding together and advancing practice theories are currently also intensely discussed in practice-based design research: Which role does materialised or embodied knowledge play in the design processes? How can designers’ practical competences be identified as genuine methods of

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knowledge production in research as well? Here, the attributions to and expectations of design research basically materialise from a methodological point of view, that is, by questioning and treating design and creative practices in the context of research projects as epistemic practices, or, rather, research methods.18 However, there are also relevant differences between the above-mentioned social and cultural science approaches that emerged in the context of the ‘practice turn’ and practice-based design research. A fundamental difference seems to be in the degree of attention given to the complex cultural and social dimension of design research. It is precisely this dimension that to this day is often obscured or marginalised in design research debates – in favour of a standardising and programmatic view of design research as essentially practice-based or practice-led research. The simple fact is that the current definition of design practices as research practices is not only based on epistemological but also on social motivations as well as historically determined motives and ideologies. Yet developing a differentiated understanding of that fact should in many respects be fundamental to design research. In this regard, the history of design research itself and its development into a discipline in the 20th century is an important aspect. As stated by sociologist Franz Schultheis, the emerging discipline of design research has had to assert itself in the face of a dominant academic curriculum to this day – and to legitimise its au­tonomy claim ‘in the shape of a sufficiently distinct ensemble of independent epistemological, theoretical, and methodological coordinates and rules’.19 As a consequence, the method discussions found in design research today are to be understood as part of an academic discipline-formation process. According to Schultheis, the selection and development of research methods that are deemed suitable as well as the creation of convincing arguments for their scientific validity are key to forming a discipline. In this context, it seems as if design research sees an essential unique feature and a significant differentiating factor vis-à-vis other disciplines in its almost notoriously reclaimed relation to practice. Yet precisely this process of becoming a discipline and the relation to practice renegotiated in this process time and again seem to be difficult for design research as well. This is because the history of design and design methodology in the 20th century cannot be understood as a clearly delineated scientific specialisation per se, but rather as a ‘praxeological hybridisation’ of practices and knowledge from the fields of design, art, science and economy. For example, designers from the Bauhaus school in the early 20th century were already discussing design projects and practices in the context of contemporary scientific, technological and economical questions.20 In the post-war period, the exchange between design practice and ­science saw a further intensification. The 1960s saw an avid interest in transferring scientific methods to design. At the Ulm School of Design, which is deemed the successor to the Bauhaus in Germany, the perception was that the tasks of design in the post-war period – due to their complexity – could only be solved by scientific-systematic methods.21 At the same time, the design methods movement was launched

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in the Anglophone region: here, actors from various scientific and professional fields pursued a scientification of design by systematising design methods.22 The design activity, understood as a method of construction and synthesis, was categorically distinguished from the scientific activity of analysis in the design methodology of that time.23 The fundamental difference between design and science thus was considered to consist in the different objectives of these two fields. It was assumed that the ‘scientific method’ served to discover and analyse things that already exist, ‘while the method of design’ was meant ‘to invent’ things ‘that do not yet exist’.24 This comparison between design and science resulted in an idealised image of design that was supposed to go beyond theory and practice and open up ‘new insights’, as Otl Aicher once tellingly stated.25 In the 1970s, for example, Siegfried Maser said theory essentially served ‘the improvement of practice’, which is why design theories are supposed to primarily address ‘the practitioner’.26 At the same time, however, such postulates were also accompanied by a close entanglement of understandings of theory and practice that even the most recent method discussions in design research still seem to be unravelling – especially with regard to all the various practice-based and practice-led research approaches that have emerged over the last couple of years.27 As is generally known, the design methods movement collapsed after merely a few years, due to internal differences. For example, the designer John Chris Jones blamed the postulated approach of method-based designing for the fact that design was regarded as a completely rational, objectifiable process and for obscuring the question of the importance of intuition and creativity in design processes: ‘The language used to describe designing became more and more abstract. The words lost touch with how it feels to be a designer and how it feels to inhabit the systems being designed’.28 The synthesis of practice and theory of designing, which was supposed to be implemented by the design methods movement, initially appeared to have suffered a severe setback. In short, he criticised a demystification of designing due to the forced systematisation and rationalisation of design practices. Based on this criticism, which ultimately also was directed at the expertocracy and scientification tendencies of the 1960s, practical models of design research that manifest a close relation to the practical life-world of designers as well as a high practical relevance have been favoured to this day. The project of design research is ‘about the active life of the contemporary human’, as summed up by Alain Findeli.29 In this respect, however, it is important to consider that the required practical relevance – both in methodical and normative terms – could transform itself from a potential of design research to its blind spot. From Clive Dilnot’s perspective, design theory and research suffers not only from a resistance to academic culture, which refuses to value design as an independent discipline and knowledge culture, but also from the persistent opposition of design practitioners who want design to be understood merely as that which designers do.30

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With the research through design approach, a model was proclaimed at the beginning of the 1990s, persisting to this day, which was supposed to take into account the requirements of a design research that is practical, and preferably independent from other academic disciplines. However, this model does not obtain its legitimisation from a particularly differentiated perception of the relationship of practice and theory, as the practice theories mentioned in the beginning suggest, for example. On the contrary, it seems to obtain this legitimisation from a rather simplifying comparison of design versus science, of practice versus theory, as already propagated during the design methods movement. In his well-received text on research in art and design, Christopher Frayling noted in 1993 that scientific research was commonly associated with ‘words rather than deeds’, while research in art and design was ‘what artists, craftspeople and designers do all the time’, thus ‘deeds not words’.31 The emphasis made with this interpretation, one which design researchers (irrespective of Frayling’s intention) have in the past readily seized upon, is on the active action potential of designing. This emphasis has been sometimes exaggerated and idealised as a counterpart to the ‘analytical’ sciences’ supposed passivity and incapacity to act, but it has, without doubt, also produced productive effects and results in the area of practice-based design research. However, an overly simplifying construction of design and science obscures the fact that it is not only design research that derives its purpose and insights from its practices; clearly, any research and knowledge production is based on a more or less systematic set of material, technical, aesthetic and social practices. The merit of the practice turn in the social and cultural sciences is precisely to identify this field of practices and its far-reaching significance for social and cultural creation of meaning. The practice-theoretical approaches of the practice turn offer differentiated and productive models for practice-based design research in order to deal with the question of the relationship between practice and theory in an appropriate complexity and timeliness – without having to abandon the claim for practicality. The other way round, the social and cultural sciences might benefit from the close relationship design researchers have established during the past years with the practical dimension of knowledge production and its societal contexts of application. Looked at in that light, the assumed frontier between theory and practice is less an ontological problem than a matter of an interdisciplinary knowledge production and dissemination.

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  1 Elkins, J.: ‘A Glossary of Terms’, in Elkins, James (Ed.): Artists with PhDs. On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art. Washington 2009, p. xvii f.   2 Cf.: Schatzki, T. R., Knorr Cetina, K., Savigny, E. von (Eds.): The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, London, 2001.   3 Latour, B., Woolgar, S.: Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton 1986. Knorr-­ Cetina, K.: The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of ­Science. Oxford 1981. Pickering, A. (Ed.): Science as Practice and Culture, Chicago, London 1992.   4 Bourdieu, P.: Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge and New York 2010 [1977]. Certeau, Michel de: The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley 1988.   5 Schön, D.: The Reflective Practitioner. How Professionals Think in Action, New York 1983.   6 Cf.: Mareis, C.: ‘The Epistemology of the Unspoken: On the Concept of Tacit Knowledge within Contemporary Design Research’, in Design Issues, 28/2, 2012, pp. 61–71.   7 Schatzki, T. R.: ‘Introduction. Practice theory’, in Schatzki, Theodore R.; Knorr Cetina, Karin; Savigny, Eike von (Eds.): The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London 2000, p. 2.   8 Reckwitz, A.: ‘Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing’, in European Journal of Social Theory 2002, 5/2, pp. 243–263, here p. 249.   9 Reckwitz, A.: Toward a Theory of Social Practices, p. 250. 10 Cross, N.: Designerly Ways of Knowing. London 2006, p. 9. 11 Law, J.: ‘Notizen zur Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie: Ordnung, Strategie und Heterogenität’, in Belliger, ­Andréa; Krieger, David J. (Eds.): ANThology: Ein einführendes Handbuch zur Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie. Bielefeld 2006, pp. 429–446, here p. 431. 12 Cf.: Latour, B.: Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford 2005. 13 Barad, K.: Agentieller Realismus. Berlin, Suhrkamp 2012. 14 Schatzki, T. R.: Introduction. Practice theory, p. 3. 15 Reckwitz, A.: Toward a Theory of Social Practices, p. 250. 16 Knorr Cetina, K.: Wissenskulturen. Ein Vergleich naturwissenschaftlicher Wissensformen, Frankfurt a. Main 2002, p. 21f. 17 This section contains revised and extended passages from the essay: Mareis, Claudia: Eine multidiszi­ plinäre Geschichte. Designforschung, Kreativitätstechniken und Methodenfragen, in Mareis, ­Claudia; Windgätter, Christof (Eds.): Long Lost Friends. Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Design-, Medien- und ­Wissenschaftsforschung. Zürich / Berlin: Diaphanes 2013, pp. 207–224. 18 Cf.: Gray, C.; Malins, J.: Visualizing Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design, ­Aldershot 2004. 19 Schultheis, F.: ‘Disziplinierung des Designs’, in Michel, Ralf (Ed.): Forschungslandschaften im Umfeld des Designs. Zürich 2005, pp. 65–84, here p. 72. 20 Galison, P.: ‘Aufbau / Bauhaus. Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism’, in Critical Inquiry, 16/4, 1990, pp. 709–752. 21 Maldonado, T.; Bonsiepe, Gui: ‘Wissenschaft und Gestaltung’, in Zeitschrift ulm, 10/11, 1964, pp. 5–42. 22 Jones, J. Ch.: Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures. London 1970. 23 Cross, N.: A History of Design Methodology, in Vries, Marc J. de; Cross, Nigel; Grant, Donald P. (Eds.): ­Design Methodology and Relationships with Science. Dordrecht / Boston / London 1993, pp. 15–27, here p. 18. 24 Gregory, S. A.: ‘Design and The Design Method’, in Gregory, Sydney A.: (Ed.): The Design Method. London 1966, pp. 3–10, here p. 6. 25 Aicher, O.: die welt als entwurf. Berlin 1991, p. 196. 26 Maser, S.: ‘Theorie ohne Praxis ist leer, Praxis ohne Theorie ist blind’, in Form. Issue 73, 1976, pp. 40–42, here p. 42. 27 For a detailed analysis see: Mareis, Claudia: Design als Wissenskultur. Interferenzen zwischen ­ Design- und Wissensdiskursen seit 1960. Bielefeld 2011. 28 Jones, Design Methods, p. xi. Cf.: Jones, John Christopher: ‘How My Thoughts About Design Methods Have Changed During the Years’, in Design Methods and Theories, 11/1, 1977, pp. 50–60. 29 Findeli, A.: ‘Die projektgeleitete Forschung: Eine Methode der Designforschung’, in Michel, R. (Ed.): ­ Erstes Design Forschungssymposium. Zürich 2004, pp. 40–51. 30 Dilnot, C.: ‘The State of Design History, Part I: Mapping the Field’, in Margolin, Victor (Ed.): Design ­Discourse. History. Theory. Criticism. Chicago / London 1989, pp. 233–250, here p. 233. 31 Frayling, C.: Research in Art & Design. Research Papers 1/1. Royal College of Art London 1993/94, pp. 1–5, here p. 1.

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PROJECT-GROUNDED RESPONSES: ­DESIGN / RESEARCH What made the design practice in your PhD project qualify as research practice – what did you do differently than if you would ‘just’ design?

Undertaking my PhD through practice-based research enabled the ability to conceive and position the thinking, theorising and implementation of projects through a series of themes leading to designed outcomes. Through developing ‘fields of enquiry’, practice-based research allows for the emergence of new modes leading to the establishment of innovative design processes and methodologies in solving ­issues of material thinking and production. This opportunity for design led experimentation augments practice-based research informed through the tactile procedures of design and making. Practice-based research differs greatly from professional designed work for it avails the constraints of delivering projects that rely on existing processes of knowledge for their real-world implementation. Whilst practical knowledge is brought into practice-based research it nevertheless is ‘freed’ from the expectations of client and manufacturer. Research by practice offers the foundations in which combinations of design innovation, material research and making can begin a rethinking of how space and spaces, objects and technologies can function differently and be more sustainable within our societies and urban built environments. Benedict Anderson, Professor of Spatial Design (University of Technology Sydney) Dissertation: The Architectural Flaw, 2005. Royal Melbourne University of Technology (RMIT)

This question needs to be flipped, as it was the nature of research and knowledge that was transformed through the lens of design practice rather than working to qualify practice as research. My design practice prior to undertaking a PhD was conducted as a mode of ­enquiry regarding the concept of ‘interior’ through material, spatial and temporal productions. The PhD was taken up as an opportunity to foreground this on-going experimentation and to engage with a community of practice addressing design and research. I think that it is important to note here that my PhD was through practice – design as a verb; i.e. designing and hence generated research through designing. This has different nuances to ‘design’ as a noun and as noted below, I am not a designer of artefacts.

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The mode of PhD I enrolled in at RMIT was / still is one that emphasised the PhD as part of one’s on-going practice – as situated in the practice. Thinking through doing was valued. This did not require a separation from practice, as projects are already understood as laboratories for experimentation. However the PhD became a critical space that enabled (demanded) a focus on research aspects of my practice that otherwise get overshadowed in the midst of demands such as budgets, deadlines and marketing. Perhaps the question is better posed as: ‘what made your creative practice research qualify as a PhD, i.e. a significant contribution to knowledge?’ This expectation required me to work through several concepts that are intricate to knowledge and knowing, for example ‘context’ and the aim to fill gaps as a way of making a contribution. The effect of design as a discipline moving into areas of research and knowledge heightens contemporary critiques of knowledge. Dominant concepts of knowing through research are based on a scientific paradigm and in particular an analytical model – an activity of self-knowing where cognition is foregrounded. In the disciplines of interior design and art, where my research is situated, the idea of the scientific paradigm that confirms the value of research as one of repetition by others to achieve the same outcome is neither a useful measure nor orientation in attending to subjectivities and production of the ‘new’. Hence many questions about the definition of research and underpinning givens such as evidence, truth and value needed to be rethought and transformed from assuming they ‘just’ are. Suzie Attiwill, Deputy Dean, Learning & Teaching; Associate Professor of Interior Design (School of ­ rchitecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne) A Dissertation: ?interior, practices of interiorization, interior designs, 2012. School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University

The simple answer is a shift in ‘purpose’ – why and where design happens. My BA degree is in orthodox product design; my foundation and methods are therefore based on the design of objects developed within the normative constraints of materials, manufacture and commerce etc. The purpose of these objects (and design) being orientated towards the consumer in the context of everyday life. My motivations shifted during an MA in Design Products at the Royal College Art as I became more interested in questioning the systems and paradigms that direct the design industry rather than simply becoming a part of it. The shift from design to design research did not happen overnight nor was it particularly conscious, I simply embraced the opportunity, provided by an open-minded and revolutionary course, to experiment with design practice and the purpose of its objects.

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Between completing my MA and beginning the PhD I was employed both as a design researcher in academia and as a designer working for large corporate clients. Whilst my approach remained relatively constant in these posts, the expectations were completely different. In the commercial sector I found it virtually impossible to be critical (the message has to be optimistic), or too conceptual (the market is extremely conservative). Essentially, for a number of reasons, there is little scope for the designer to forge completely new paths, or to consider the implications of a ­particular technology. My PhD began by examining these reasons, and the complex systems that constrain and influence product (and technological evolution). The practical element built on this to first explore new constraints and goals and then develop products within and for them – the purpose being to question and expand the role of design (and technology) rather than simply exploit it. James Auger, Associate Professor (M-ITI) Dissertation: Why Robot? Speculative design, the domestication of technology and the considered future, 2012. Royal College of Art

The design practice in my PhD thesis is qualified as scientific research due to its systematic reflection from a feminist point of view. In this context, design is neither a service nor a production site of marketable products. It is regarded as socio-political practice that currently produces results that are either gender stereo­ type or gender blind. In order to establish a gender sensitive design research and practice, I develop a design methodology that follows Donald Schön’s concept of the ‘Reflective Practitioner’.1 Blaming scientific rationality for the serious divorce between science and research on the one hand side and practice on the other, he describes the relationship between theoretical knowledge and action in ­pro­fessional practice as a ‘process of reflection-in-action’ where thinking and doing are closely interlinked. He claims that this process is ‘central to the art’ by which practitioners sometimes deal well with situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, value conflict’,2 that makes them to ‘researchers in the practice context’.3 In this concept, research and practice are not separated spaces any more. Consequently, the intention of my design methodology is to make designers to power aware and gender sensitive practitioners in research as well as to power critical and gender sensitised researchers in practice. In this context, the design practice plays a double role: On the one hand I use the dimensions of human-centred design as basic reference points for my theoretical and methodological reflections, interconnecting them with corresponding feminist epistemologies and gender theories. On the other hand, I use the design projects as case studies to evaluate the whole process from information, ideation to use according to feminist criteria like gender equality, social justice, empowerment and plurality. Aiming at establishing design as a gender sensitive applied science or a gen-

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der reflected scientific practice, doing design becomes inevitably a part of doing gender research. Sandra Buchmüller, Research Associate (University of Bremen) Dissertation: Gender powers Design – Design powers Gender. A draft of a power critical and gender informed design methodology (Original German Title: Geschlecht macht ­Gestaltung – Gestaltung macht Geschlecht. Der Entwurf einer machtkritischen und geschlechterinformierten Designmethodologie), 2015. Berlin University of the Arts (UdK)

My PhD thesis explores the emergence of temporary urban interventions and practices, as the phenomenon of informal occupation of unused or neglected urban space, as well as the implications that this process has on the urban structure in which they take place. Within this topic I analyse relations between temporary urban interventions and the social, economic and political development of the area in which they occur. My thesis focuses on the phenomenon of temporary urban interventions as an instrument of informal planning in the context of managing the city resources on a micro-scale. It is important to emphasise that this is a dynamic field and not an instrument in the conventional sense of the word, and that these types of interventions, see spatial resources as a testing ground for the reorganisation of the city at the micro-level. Also, they are explained as the direct practice of civil society actors, who adopt new models of programming and spatial acting with the aim of redefining the urban structure at micro-extent. Temporary urban interventions encouraged by citizen participation emerged as new kinds of local initiatives during the economic crisis, as modern, creative and effective approaches to solving social, economic and spatial problems. I’m currently focusing on initiatives requiring space, as well as spaces that are desperately empty. In 2013, my research project ‘The Map of Action’ showed that in the last few years there was a marked rise in interest amongst civil initiatives in the local context to put unused urban resources to work with the intention of participating in urban development. Guided by the idea of the right to the city and taking the opportunity to improve everyday life, they now employ short-term tactics to change conditions of life in the city. The challenge lies in turning them into long-term strategies without exploiting them for neo-liberal purposes. The idea to do the PhD research about the informal occupation of urban spaces came from the practice I’ve been using for years. I was struggling with linking academic research and knowledge and my community activism. Academia provides access to information, and through participatory action research one can get more information from ‘the field’ and get a better perspective on topics that should be changed and improved. Also, participatory action research can be seen as a method of direct education, by generating new knowledge from real-life experiences. There is no need to see a contradiction in being politically active in solving a problem while at the same time being scholarly engaged in researching that prob-

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lem. Confronting these two can help in overcoming the ethical dilemmas and tensions. I believe that practice / urban activism can contribute to academic research, and vice versa, that academics can engage in activism in various ways. Iva Cˇukic´, Researcher (Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade) Dissertation: The Role of Temporary Urban Practices in Activation of Spatial Resources, 2016. ­Faculty of ­Architecture, University of Belgrade

Ideally, for me, there would be no ‘versus’ between design and research. This is because for me design and research are about inquiring, positioning yourself, problematising what is taken for granted and deciding what side(s) one wants to work, produce, communicate for and with. However, I’m aware that for designers it is often difficult to take this time-consuming and conflicting approach, as it includes radically questioning what we are designing for. In terms of doing practice-based research within the setting of the PhD, it meant for me that for the first time since working as a designer I had the chance to slow down in order to read and reflect. This didn’t mean that the work was less intense, but it meant that I could let my practice / the doing sit still for a while in order to read, reflect and look critically at the blockages, dilemmas and contradictions that came up in my practical work. What was especially appreciable about this process was the fact that even failures became productive moments as they forced me much more than ‘success’ to focus on analysing, making visible and communicating the dynamics going on behind the design outcome. One of the things that really grew on me and that transformed my design practice throughout my PhD was the desire to do long-term projects, where you can’t let go of something just because the funding ended or because you momentarily came to a dead end. The other is that writing has become an integral part of my practice: I now use writing as a reflective process, as a way to take a step back from the messiness of practice, to try to sort out some of my thinking and as an effective way to remind myself that things can always be done differently. Bianca Elzenbaumer, Research Fellow (Leeds College of Art) Dissertation: Designing Economic Cultures – Cultivating Socially and Politically Engaged Design Practices Against Procedures of Precarisation, 2014. Goldsmiths, University of London

While I was doing research for my doctorate, my design studio EOOS was simultaneously responsible for the worldwide shop design for brands like Adidas and Giorgio Armani. I was travelling a lot and saw many of the shopping high streets around the world. As designer I was used to intuitively run through the shopping streets analysing competitors during one-day trips. I always came back with lots of photo-

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graphs of show windows and shop interiors. Initially, I was looking at those images as a designer, and this research material was used to inform my practice. Design practice and research practice came together one day when I was studying the rites of passage performed by faraway archaic tribes. I was studying their visual and performative strategies: nakedness, disorder and dressing so as to make everyone equal (communitas). With that visual strategy in mind, I went through shopping streets after Christmas time and recognised these strategies in the seasonal sale windows. Naked mannequins, boxes with disordered fashion items, mannequins dressed with paper dresses and hand written ‘50% off’ in couture fashion stores. The seasonal sale is a time when visual strategies are turned upside down: striking ugliness instead of beauty. I came up with my hypothesis that the seasonal sale in fashion business is a passage rite from one collection to another. The previous fashion collection is sacrificed in the shop window by using the visual dramaturgy of ancient passage rites. Cutting the price by half in consumer culture is equivalent to cutting the goat’s throat in ancient times. At EOOS, we have a research strategy we call ‘Poetical Analysis’. This is the search for intuitive images, mythologies and rituals to start off a design process. In that sense, I applied this artistic research practice to my academic research practice in a very direct way. In design practice, you search as long as it takes for an idea pops up. There is no need to do further research after the idea has arrived. In academic research, you have to contextualise your findings and make them comprehensible. So maybe the first part is quite similar, but then theory and practice split up. Harald Gründl, Founder (IDRV Institute of Design Research Vienna) Dissertation: The Death of Fashion. The Passage Rite of Fashion in the Show Window, 2007. University of ­Applied Arts Vienna

What separates research from ‘just’ designing is having a clear question in the beginning, and clearly communicable findings in the end. This may sound easier than it is … In my PhD thesis, I followed Alain Findeli’s approach of research through design (RTD). I separated my research project from my design project. My research project investigated how people experience haptic representations of digital content. I pursued this research project through a design project – which was, in turn, concerned with the question of how digital contents can be made tangible, through haptic displays. In order to transfer the insights from my design project to my research project (a very important step in RTD), I conducted a ‘repertory grid technique’ (RGT) study. In this study, I investigated people’s experiences with my prototypes, which helped me to provide answers to my research question. I remember talking to Clive Dilnot at the DFG Roundtable event about how theory and practice should be like a dancing couple: following a common rhythm,

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augmenting each other, moving forward together, leaving each other freedom, and creating a complete, shared whole. I really like this picture, and I often think of it. Young design researchers may find themselves facing a ‘chicken and egg’ problem: no artefact, no research question. I would suggest starting with people’s needs and problems in everyday lives, developing a hunch of what might be wrong in the world and how it could be changed. Then, go ahead and follow the designer’s instinct but look through the researcher’s eyes. Fabian Hemmert, Researcher (Design Research Lab, Berlin University of the Arts) Dissertation: Encountering the Digital: Representational and Experiential Embodiment in Tangible User ­Interfaces, 2014. Berlin University of the Arts

To me the fundamental difference between the practice of design and research in design is context and goal. Design practice (or most of it) takes place in a commercial context and the purpose of the design is to fill a function, satisfy a client and to be successful in a commercial arena. Research in design takes place in an academic context where the goal is to create new knowledge and to share this knowledge in an accessible way. Design practice is extremely strained time-wise – every hour counted and accounted for. In research there is time, and needs to be time, to ­reflect, to read and to let things and ideas grow. Because of its academic context, ­design research does not need to be successful in a traditional sense. Sometimes a failure can result in more profound insights and processes; vagueness and critique often lead to more understanding and depth. In this vague and slow process, truly innovative things and concepts can appear. Research, certainly, has its restrictions and dilemmas, too, in terms of financing, publishing, teaching and academic demands. But my firm belief is that every field needs a space for self-critique and development and that research provides such a space. Designers give shape to most of our material world, from transportation and public places to the things we surround ourselves with at home and in workplaces. All of this is created in a commercial context with very little time for ­reflection. Fields such as film and media, literature of architecture has a long tradition of studies and critique that deepen and enrich the understanding and discussion in its respective areas but this has not been the case in design. Yet, design is everywhere and its ubiquity certainly calls for more awareness and discourse about the material world, its products and services. Sara Ilstedt, Professor in product and service design (Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, School of industrial technology and management) Dissertation: Making sense, design for wellbeing, 2004. Human-computer Interaction, KTH, and Interactive institute, Stockholm

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In the early days of my PhD, my design practice became research through collaborations across different disciplines (anthropology or sociology, for example). Through these collaborations I learned to practice more traditional qualitative research methods. Another research dimension was added through my published papers being presented as outcomes rather than objects – a method of contextualisation intended to demonstrate the ways in which artefacts push the boundaries for how we think and do design. What qualifies my work to become interesting design research practice, however, has to do with the specific nature of its internal development over time. The further I got into the PhD, the more the practice and theories would and could inform each other. For instance, my PhD draws on later writings in science and technology studies as well as explorative and experimental designs. At the outset, they were a lot more disjointed – something rather noticeable in my thesis where the early design work appears more as ‘just’ design (a set of well-designed computational artefacts, say) than the result of theoretically informed critical experiments. This first project was essentially a classic three-stage ‘research through design’ project in which we designed something, placed it in a context, and conducted a qualitative study of its use. To unfold the outcome of this study and to help me understand the thing about this project, I turned to scholars like Latour and Haraway who are all about breaking down the boundaries between these stages and helping us see the complexities at hand in the otherwise easily biased, yet normative, practice of design and design research. Hence, in the final design project in my thesis, Urban Animals and Us (UA&Us) the design practice, the artefacts in context, and the theory are inseparable. UA&Us could not have been conceived without the theoretical backbone of what had become years of reading and discussing in my local ­research community. At the same time, UA&Us became interesting as a design ­research project, because I treated my theoretical and design skills as equally important for knowledge production. Li Jönsson, Researcher (The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and ­Conservation, School of Design) Dissertation: Design Events – On explorations of a non-anthropocentric framework in design, 2014. The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Copenhagen

In the thesis I argued that the idea that speculative design engages the public and enables debate is not grounded in the analysis of actual events. These claims are rhetorical and anticipatory, and are not supported by analysis of the circumstances of making, installing, exhibiting, and promoting designs. I therefore treat sceptically claims made for the effects of speculative and critical design by its practitioners, which often suggest that the creation of a network for exhibitions and other public events, enable the critical discourses that inform their design work, to be-

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come more widely available as a form of public debate.4 In making a case for empirical accounts of speculative design, I have demonstrated an analytical mode of writing tied to encounters with these designs, as they are made and circulated in various ways, amongst a diverse yet specific constituency, in order to make the features of those encounters accountable. In the thesis I demonstrated that an empirical analysis of speculative practice deals with the process of design as well as the outcomes. In the case presented there, outcomes included the exhibition of designs and their documentation in catalogues and project publications. While these forms of circulation are taken for granted, their features have not been described robustly elsewhere. Additionally a range of activities took place during the trajectory of the project, including proposal writing, interviews, workshops and the making of prototypes. Treating these various processes as episodes for reflection and analysis requires an account of speculative design that includes positions other than the designers. In taking focus away from the intent of the designer, and considering the role of others, a richer picture of the design setting has been captured, and the claims made for the effect of a design have become challenged and show to be multiple and at times contrary. Tobie Kerridge, Researcher (Goldsmiths University of London) Dissertation: Designing Debate: The Entanglement of Speculative Design and Upstream Engagement, 2015. Goldsmiths University of London

Within the artistic research community, there still seems to be a debate regarding who research should be produced for; the artistic field specifically, or society in general. The latter perspective is often related to a view which considers and reflects upon the purpose of art in more general terms. Accordingly, there is also a division of opinion as relates to how artistic research should be carried out – in a certain researcherly way, or in the manner of a professional artist. In the case of the latter, one argument is that the practice of the art profession is already concerned wholly with research. Perhaps this debate will continue, perhaps a slow change in perspective is occurring at present, towards research being of use for the artistic field specifically. This could create the space necessary for investigative work that unfortunately might be less and less possible to perform within the practice of the profession. The design work of my PhD project was far from the design practice, in the sense that the first projects were early explorations, used to create understanding at the same time as they articulated and expanded the area of research (interaction aesthetics). In the thesis this was described such that the initial projects partly framed the research topic. The following work was carried out with the explicit purpose of exploring interaction aesthetics, and the more recent explorations have been carried out so as to arrive at a more profound understanding of aesthetics from a more specific perspective. In the thesis I also plotted the different projects

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on a simple diagram, showing how the level of what was termed ‘theoretical foundation’ increased over time, as the PhD work continued. Several of the projects also consisted of collaborations with other doctoral students and therefore involved ­investigating multiple themes or concepts simultaneously and from different design perspectives. Accordingly, even if the latter projects were more focused on particular aspects than the earlier projects, I believe that they undoubtedly could have been more specialised and carried out more systematically in order to probe even further. Hanna Landin, Senior Lecturer (The Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås) Dissertation: Anxiety and trust and other expressions of interaction, 2009. Department of Computer Science, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg

My research questions focus on design decision-making activities in the commercial new product development (NPD) process. Action research was adopted as the methodology for this study, because the researcher can actually be involved in the NPD teams and make detailed observations about the interactions among the stakeholders. Six case studies were established through this practice-based approach in which I acted as an industrial designer, cooperating with six British small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This allowed me to capture detailed design practices and design decision-making activities in real world situations, which may just be impossible to acquire with other approaches, such as interviews and surveys. Design practices were thus included for the primary purpose of gathering documentary evidence of the design decisions that influence the outcomes of the design process. I was both participant and observer during the action research case studies, doing the design work and researching my design activities at the same time. A research diary was used to record related experiences, actions, important events and my reflections on design practices during the design process. Moreover, as an action researcher, I not only looked at my own design practices but also at other participants’ activities. This thus led me to look into how and what actually influenced important design decisions from different perspectives, including those of the designer, business owner and researcher. Design practices were therefore at the core of my PhD project, and an integral part of the research process. In summary, the design practice in my PhD project was different from the design practice of a designer. The nature of action research approach, i.e. the method of action-reflection, and the research topic qualified it as research practice rather than design practice. Yi-Chang Lee, Researcher (ImaginationLancaster, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University) Dissertation: Investigation of Design Decision Making in New Product Development in SME, 2015. Lancaster University

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Commissioning: The first and most significant difference is that when doing my PhD I am my own employer. In my professional life as a designer with my own design atelier, the work tasks were more or less clearly formulated by the customer. I was approaching them with a treasure of experience of craftswomanship, imaginative and artistic knowhow, a certain abandon and the trust in my creativity. I offered my clients approaches to solutions and in a joint decision-making process a conclusive design product was realised. My focal PhD research question was derived from my practice as a design and drawing professor in Egypt. The question was driven not by a specific design requirement, such as the design of a logo, but rather the need to find a method for teaching figurative drawing without the aid of a nude model. Image representation of nudity is forbidden in Egypt for cultural reasons. Choice of Media: The choice of media is directly linked to the commission. Unfortunately, when a customer, a company or an institution needs a design task done, a free choice of media is not always guaranteed. Too often one hears ‘Make a poster, a website or a flyer for this and that event’ and less often, ‘You can decide what media is needed to give this event more attention’. With every design task, even if it is small, the means and strategies should be developed according to the question. Often the medium that is required becomes apparent only after the process of researching had already begun. During my PhD research, I had that opportunity, thanks to the intensive study of theory, and also the courage and the self-confidence to try out new artistic formats. As an example, I produced a film, something I never would have dared as part of a traditional design commission. On another occasion, I put together a podium discussion with a moderator and with experts and combined it with an artistic performance. The understanding of Design: The continuous exchange between theory and practice that is needed to advance the work has changed my understanding of design profoundly. As a communication designer, I now feel empowered to understand design as an open system that is needed to answer multiple questions and can benefit interdisciplinary research constellations. Fred Meier-Menzel, Senior Researcher (German University in Cairo) Dissertation: From the life model through to the activist – the double colonization of the female body in Egypt, 2014. Bauhaus University in Weimar

I leveraged design practice in my PhD across several projects. These included ­prototyping a teen’s ‘bedroom of the future’ using various lightweight techniques to create a setting that was real enough feeling to give study participants several ­visceral glimpses into how technology could shape (and potentially disrupt) their everyday lives in the future. In another case, I ran field deployments of design artefacts that, in different ways, embodied design strategies for living with a person’s or

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family’s cherished archive of digital content over long periods of time, potentially across generations. While these design research projects varied, they all aimed to leverage design as a form of inquiry to critical explore and investigate potential opportunities and pitfalls within emerging, largely unknown design spaces. Beyond doing ‘just design’, the design research artefacts at the centre of each investigation operated in multiple ways to pursue my higher-level research questions. First, they were resources for engaging people in real and embodied ways to experience and critically consider how technology could potential intersect with their everyday lives and practices in the future. Second, the design artefacts could be seen as concrete forms of theoretical articulation and intellectual argumentation in-and-of-themselves. They represented critical responses to the research questions and provided generative and reflective sites to articulate a more refined stance on what might (and might not) be a more preferable future and why. In this way, they did not aim to create a final product to introduce into the world to address a very specific need. Rather, they aimed to generate new knowledge about emerging design spaces that the Design Research community knew very little about; they sought to articulate radically new strategies and opportunities for pursuing nascent design spaces as well as uncover potential paradoxes and unintended consequences that could also emerge. Will Odom, Banting Fellow (School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver) Dissertation: Critically Exploring the Virtual Possession Design Space through Fieldwork and Constructive Design Research, 2014. Carnegie Mellon University

In 2009, I had an interview with a Slovenian journalist about doing a PhD in Textile Design. One of her questions was, ‘What does that mean, doing a PhD in Textile Design? Will you produce 30 garments instead of 15?’ The same questions with an undertone of mockery came from other fashion designers, as they did not see the value in doing a PhD in Textile Design with the argument that fashion designers do not need research articles, rather they have to sell their collections every season. Before I started my PhD, doing research in fashion design meant for me collecting pictures and words that would reflect the idea or a mood that I wanted to express with my collection. It was enough that I was able to describe the connections between my ‘research’ and my designed objects to my mentors and later to my clients. The results (garments), with an extraordinary story as inspiration, were enough to sell and validate my designs. The transformation from a designer into a researcher, and then from a researcher into a writer, was the hardest thing for me. I had to learn that using knowledge from other researchers or designers was not something that should be hidden or cloaked in a design question, but it should be accurately researched and used as a reference to define and open an area under research. This

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understanding presented a significant change in my design process. Suddenly, it was not enough to find beautiful pictures or words that would describe a magical environment. I had to find sources that would show missing links, opportunities and possibilities that could be solved through a design project. Furthermore, I had to establish a design protocol to ensure that the developed methods could be used, repeated and developed further by other researchers. All these challenges and new paths changed the way I design, research and think. Jure Purgaj, Lecturer (Pädagogische Hochschule Wien) Dissertation: Design and Visualization of Garments Worn by Slovenian Mythological Creatures, 2013. Faculty for Natural and Technical Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

As my PhD thesis was done 15 years ago, this is going to be more of a retrospective reflection than a accurate description – which is rather unfair to the questions asked, as it is the very act of attuning oneself to the turmoil of actually being ‘inside’ a thesis that is the real challenge of doing practice-based design research. What in retrospect emerged as the most important outcome for me was the idea of a programmatic design research practice. In short, this is a way of methodologically structuring design experimentation around a design (research) programme, working with the dialectics between general programmatic propositions, suggesting a trajectory or orientation, and series of design experiments unfolding, manifesting and challenging these more general ideas. In the thesis, there was, for instance, one design programme called ‘Slow Technology’ and a series of design experiments investigating what the aesthetics of slow computational things could resemble, as counter-examples to designs that aim for ease of use and efficiency. Following this idea of a programme-experiment dialectic, the overall results of the thesis were also presented in the form of a new design programme, a kind of design philosophy for everyday computational things, as an attempt to further articulate the character of the approach in contrast to research processes which aim for closure by solving a problem or answering a question. Indeed, I explicitly wanted avoid both notions of design as problem-solving and simplified notions of research as a matter of answering questions, since a key concern was how to avoid ending up in a conventional framings of ‘research’ defined in analytical terms. Rather, I was curious about conceptions of research as another kind of design practice in a family of practices across professional and art­istic orientations. That said, this research was also meant to be different from professional design in terms of a general orientation towards new perspectives and knowledge rather than development. Indeed, the kind of design research practice I proposed is highly ineffective when it comes to creating ‘solutions’, and many of the design results are ‘bad’ designs seen from, say, a professional product development point of view. By now, the work in the thesis appears a bit like of

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a prototype for a kind of research practice, a prototype much improved in later i­ terations. Johan Redström, Rector, Professor (Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University) Dissertation: Designing Everyday Computational Things, 2001. Department of Informatics, University of ­Gothenburg

In my PhD, I researched as a designer does: through reflective practice. I had a question: how to design for ethics. And I eviscerated it as a designer. Trying to design for it, asking others to design, observing, tuning and visualising, I eventually attempted to build a sound narrative about the meta-level of the designerly practice that I curated. Since I addressed a research question that touched on methodological issues, it was natural to connect it to a reflective activity: I had to understand what I was doing differently, how it was different from what I had seen before and what consequences this ‘difference’ might produce. Ambra Trotto, Studio Director, Senior Lecturer (Interactive Institute Swedish ICT, School of Architecture at Umeå University) Dissertation: Rights through Making – Skills for pervasive ethics, 2011. Eindhoven University of Technology

What qualifies my practice as a research practice is most prominent at the start and the end of the design research process. Everything in-between is far more opaque and a more of an integrated balance between research and design decisions. At the start of the design practice of my PhD project, the design challenges were framed in relation to provide knowledge to answer the research question. They were of a general research nature beyond the specifics of a design challenge. Specific requirements regarding functionality, use, material and production were specifically left open at that stage. In-between, the balance between research and design decisions was more natural and in the moment. On the one hand I wanted to listen to users and address their skills, needs and desires. This in order to keep the design and research grounded in reality and … ‘avoid it from becoming irrelevant or even arrogant’5. On the other hand the design problem shouldn’t lure me away from the original research focus. Sometimes decisions are being made on the basis of designers’ intuition, grounded in years of training and experience, and subjective criteria. This is in­ herent to a research through design approach where research decisions are being made from a designer’s perspective and design decisions are being made with a ­research perspective. Still, intuition and subjectivity need to be confronted with scientific measurements as well. And the generated knowledge should provide benefit for design as well as further scientific research.

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At the end of the process, the design outcome, an alarm clock was assessed in an experiment to make a contribution to research, and not to end-users, producers or design in general. The final reflections, and knowledge outcome came in the form of design notions, i.e. ‘freedom of interaction’, ‘inherent feedback’ and ‘feedforward’, and a more theoretical framework, called the ‘Interaction Frogger Framework’. Stephan A. G. Wensveen, Associate Professor (Eindhoven University of Technology) Dissertation: A tangibility approach to affective interaction, 2005. Delft University of Technology

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Schön, D. A.: The Reflective Practitioner. How Professionals Think in Action, Basic Books, 1984. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 68. Dunne and Raby; Kerridge, 2003, Custead, et al., 2006; Debatty, 2007. Gaver, W., Dunne, A. and Pacenti, E.: Design: ‘Cultural probes.’, Interactions, Vol. 6, Issue 1, Jan./Feb. 1999, p. 22.

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Text / Object

INTRODUCTION Andreas Unteidig

Design research projects often move in-between textual and thingly forms in the processes of generating, discussing and conveying knowledge. As design research moves from being a professional practice predominantly concerned with the materiality of our life-worlds towards a distinct field of academic research, questions about possible relationships between textual (written) and non-textual (objects, processes, etc.) artefacts arise. In regards to communicating design research findings, we are confronted with our field’s very own character as an in-between: Just as presenting research findings solely in the shape of a designed object will, in many cases, not satisfy broader academic standards, it is often challenging, abridging and at times impossible to adequately communicate design knowledge in a traditional paper or book format. Hence questions of how to merge the written word as the standard form of academic communication with the potentiality and epistemic qualities of material or processual entities and constellations arise. The creation and reflective handling of artefacts are defining competencies of designers. The significance of the particular relationship between designers and the artificial is thus at the core of the discussions revolving around practice-based design research as a knowledge-generating discipline: It is inherently concerned with the understanding, making and remaking of the artificial, be it material or immaterial; it interacts with the designed and designable aspects of our life-worlds. This dialogue with the artificial assumes epistemological qualities beyond the spoken or written word, of material forms, processes and systems that are or can be ‘made’. Notions such as research-through-design furthermore illustrate the central claim that there is knowledge to be generated from the very act of creating, doing, from externalising mental conceptualisations, giving them substance and shape, and from observing how these externalisations interact with the world. Against this backdrop, this chapter focuses on questions about epistemic qualities of non-textual artefacts and their relationship to written text as the predominant medium for generating, reflecting on and conveying knowledge in the ­academic landscape in general and delivering PhD-research in particular: Which text-object relationships are accepted, practiced, possible and desirable in producing and communicating design research results, and which are not? How do these relationships differ in regards to communication within or beyond the community? Is written text the inevitable ending point of design research processes in order to adhere to scientific standards of describing, explaining, contextualising, validating or falsifying knowledge within a wider scientific community? Should design research aim for situations in which text is of equal significance to objects or processes, and

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how should the two then be weighted in the communication of findings and claims to knowledge? Can we think of scenarios in which material forms, crafted experiences or curated social processes play the leading role, utilising their epistemic properties to create new modes of interacting with knowledge? And what, in comparison to other academic fields, is so special about design knowledge; what makes us ask these questions? The collected texts in this part of the book quite consensually suggest, albeit by showcasing profoundly different argumentations, that both textual and non-textual artefacts indeed need to be taken into consideration in distinctive roles and in different dimensions of a research process: While the properties of written text provide obvious and well-established values, the ambiguity of prototypes, experiments, interventions or design situations are often seen to offer an original quality that is inherently and particularly attributed to design research, often attached to ideas about the field’s unique ability to manoeuvre within spaces of vagueness and between different modes of gathering, generating and conveying knowledge. The following texts feature a diverse range of positions that contribute to the qualification, critique and differentiation of these and other claims regarding design research’s specific qualities of knowledge. In her essay, Brigitte Wolf applies a design management perspective for looking at the status quo of how text and artefacts are being used in different instances of design research. In doing so, she underlines that any possible answer to the questions posed will present itself differently, depending on the parameters (e.g., modes, audiences) considered. Consequently, her essay delivers reflections that she delineates both for different relationships of design and research (about, for, with) as well as for various contextual settings in which design research outcomes are being communicated. For this, her text looks at various framings of text-object relationships as means of communicating design research knowledge: within academia, towards the market and ultimately for conveying new knowledge to users of designed artefacts and experiences, especially in regards to the initiation of behavioural change. While describing design’s unique propositions as inherently material and pointing out many facets of design research that would be unthinkable without the involvement of objects, her text underlines the importance of written text for the conveyance of knowledge to others. Wolfgang Jonas, on the other hand, argues against a hard dichotomy of textual and non-textual expressions. He points out the value of grey-zones in which the decision about media and formats of designerly ways to generate and conduct knowledge moves between the extremes of written text and the material artefact. According to Jonas, it is the role of design to imagine futures, to understand itself as a science that transforms rather than describes, and to further develop its own, at times non-conventional, paths. He pinpoints the dangers of submitting too willingly to the constraints of the established academic landscape, which undermines design’s particular ability to productively work with uncertainty and to unfold this

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capability in a transdisciplinary manner, as it is incumbent upon design researchers to push the boundaries of the ways in which we undertake design research. In his text, he consequently argues against the establishment of fixed ideas, rules or conventions in how to confront this issue, as he regards them to be counterproductive boundaries and dangers to the development of design research as a particular form of inquiry. Similarly, Uta Brandes advocates for understanding design research as a field with its very own and specific ways of creating both artefacts and knowledge. She looks at the field through the notion of fluidity and, not unlike Wolfgang Jonas, underlines the importance of uncertainty. In her prismatic essay, she showcases the highly contradictory character of design research as an in-between that tries to find its way of being ‘scientific’. In this quest, she argues, designers lack the confidence to appropriate their own ways and instead desperately try to get taken seriously by the broader academic community. To her, this lack of confidence hinders design researchers in coming up with their very own, experimental and possibly interventionist modes of action and introducing them to the established set of media of the more traditional research disciplines. The danger hereby, as described by Brandes, is in design research depriving itself of the perks of being a relatively young – or rather, as she argues, modern – field, which would allow for providing outcomes, formats and media that are new, daring and surprising. Through shifting the focus from design research being merely based in practice towards aiming at introducing change to practices, Cameron Tonkinwise then unfolds his perspective on the fundamental constituent of design, which for him lies in its focus on material things of the everyday. In design being inherently concerned about artefacts that are material, useful and ordinary (as in being deeply embedded in everyday usage), he sees the reason for design to become an academic research field as well as the cause for its difficult stance among the wider academic scope. Tonkinwise states that the modern, western university only slowly shifts its focus from metaphysical, ideational and large-scale phenomenon to the fundamental but hard-to-discern significance of their very manifestations in the everyday. Because of this, he suggests that design must add its expertise not solely in traditional formats of academia but also through material things that testify for the changeability of everyday practices. He argues for a perspective that sees the outcome of any successful design not in the thing itself but rather in the disclosure, alteration and facilitation of social practices that emerge around and through the thing as part of a complex ecosystem. Practice-based design research as a means of transformation thus has to manifest its findings through experienceable situations, which embody the generated knowledge and in which the redesigned social practices can be actually practiced – instead of merely read about. With this collection of texts we aim to set the stage with different models of how to navigate the text-object relationship in design research, of possible and desirable relationships that researchers envision but that are not yet implemented,

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well-described or acknowledged by the wider research community. And while the four stances in and of themselves open vast spaces for different positions towards the questions posed, the subsequent statements – written by well-known as well as emerging actors reflecting their very own practice-based PhD research – complement this collection for a pluralistic and productive discussion, further illustrating the wide variety of approaches, issues and perspectives while touching on points virtually anywhere between the poles of conceptual thinking and the practical, political and institutional realities of having to ‘get it done’.

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COMMUNICATION IN DESIGN RESEARCH Brigitte Wolf

Design Research Design research has different approaches: research about design, research for design and research with design. Text and artefacts are the media with which one acts in design research and with which one communicates the results, the newly generated knowledge and thoughts. Depending on the research context and the research objectives the relation of text and artefacts differs. Research about design is mostly text based. Research with design is mostly based on artefacts. And to a certain extent, research for design needs both, depending on the research subject. All three approaches are equally important for strengthening the discipline. For communication purposes, text is vital in the research process: it is needed when applying for research funds, communicating internally while carrying out research, for the external communication of research results to the research community and the broader public. Text is needed for presentations, documentations and public relations. Design researchers’ strength, as opposed to other scientists, is their ability to visualise. Messages combining text and visuals address more than one sense and communicate in a more significant way. This is true for written communication (text + visuals) as well as for verbal communication (words, gestures, facial expressions in face to face communication + visuals). Communication with artefacts reaches a ­recipient’s many senses. Depending on the character of the artefact, it is possible to see, to touch, to smell and to hear the ‘message’. In general artefacts need additional text-based descriptions to fully understand not only the visible and touch­able functionalities but also the invisible functionalities.

Communication The task of design research, like other disciplines, is to generate new knowledge by building up on existing knowledge. Therefore research results need to be shared and discussed. New findings, new insights and thoughts need to be communicated to make them accessible to other researchers, to those who wish to develop further and to practitioners, designers and users. Communication signifies that a sender sends a message to a recipient. The sender has an intention, creates the message (code) and choses a medium (channel) to send the message. Text is the linguistic

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mode of communication and the written version of communicative actions. Text is used to document, to archive and to communicate knowledge. Sending a message and receiving a message are two sides of a coin. The sender is coding the message – text or artefact – and expects that the recipient is familiar with the ‘code’ used and therefore is able to decode and understand the message according to the intention of the sender. Recipients with different cultural backgrounds and dissimilar individual dispositions may understand messages in their own way and cause confusion. Text messages are more likely to provoke misinterpretation than artefacts. The interpretation (decoding) of a sent message completed by an artefact is generally more significant. Nevertheless, the communication of research results requires descriptive text – in either written or verbal form. In science in general as well as in design research the researcher is the ‘sender’ of a message. The ‘channels’ used to transport the text messages are publications, like books and magazines as well as presentations in congresses, workshops and exhibitions. Text is necessary for describing and explaining research results, arguing and evaluating new findings and reflecting on consequences and new chances for future developments. Depending on the research subject, artefacts may support the understanding of research results. Artefacts are ‘handmade’ items, resulting from different methods of production, like for example model building, rapid prototyping, 3D printing and different materials, like cardboard, foam, wood, plastic and others more. ‘Handmade’ is to be seen in this case as a synonym for an experimental object. Artefacts are used to materialise new ideas and new thought processes. They are also used to experiment and to test functionality and usability; they are subjects for discussion, evaluation and improvement either in laboratory tests or in real-life situations. Experiments are an important research method and depend on artefacts – not only in the practice of design research. Experiments operate usually by trial and error and demand constant modification for improvement, until they provide the expected result. Artefacts are important in all cases dealing with the application of new technological developments to be used in everyday life. They are a necessity for figuring out the usability and sustainable efficiency. Nowadays products seem to disappear; they are often replaced by services or smaller objects. New and smart technologies facilitate the development of immaterial products like software, apps, smart solutions and connectivity, which are supposed to provide new and better experiences for the users. Immaterial artefacts need to be developed and tested in co-creation with the users to evaluate functionality, practicability and serviceableness. Testing artefacts is a common procedure to eliminate failures that occur in the process of use. The design process itself transfers into a research method.

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Market Issues Industry knows: Design sells! Design-minded companies, which use design as an integrated part of their business strategy, do much better economically. Research about design has figured out that the turnover of design-conscious companies has increased in ten years by more than 200% compared to S & P companies (Standard & Poor).1 Main research actors – besides universities – are independent national design institutes. Their task is to promote and to strengthen the design business. One aim of research about design is to verify the impact of design on economic success and to figure out the critical factors. Design institutions encourage companies to contract designers and to make proper use of design to strengthen their competiveness. They want to sensitise the design awareness of companies, but also the design awareness of cultural institutions, non-profit organisations, e.g. to increase the business of the creative industries and at the same time the success of the entities. Consequently they want to verify their research hypothesis: Investment in design pays off! Fact is that investment in design increases the value of the company and especially the value of the brand. Apple is the perfect example – because of its design policy, Apple became the most valuable global brand.2 For industry, the value of design needs to be measurable. Investments in design must give a good return. Research about design inside companies monitors the success of design activities in relation to economic and reputational factors and the brand values. Also the efficiency of design strategies and processes are monitored for constant improvement. Internal research results are in general confidential and are communicated only internally. This is done with text in the various forms of documentation and reporting. Today user experience is a subject of growing importance for the business ­sector, because customers and users are the key element in every business model. Without customers there is no business at all. In Western affluent societies people are not suffering from a lack of products and services. On the contrary, more and more people realise that they are plentiful supplied with products, but the quantity of products does not increase the quality of life. A value shift in society towards a more sustainable lifestyle is notable. The young generation is not so much interested in the possession of products but very interested in the access to the use of products. Therefore research for design is gaining in importance and helps in understanding user interests and wishes, but also the obstacles they are dealing with in their lives. Research for design explores user behaviour in everyday life to understand people’s real pains and gains. Knowing what people dream about, what they really want and need, and which of their problems need to be solved is a good starting point for products and services that find user acceptance. Research results show that all components of experience like sensorial components, pragmatic components, lifestyle components, emotional components, cognitive components and relational com-

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ponents need to be considered in the investigation process. A pleasing user experience addresses all components of human perception.3 Individual user desires are becoming more specific, and demand to involve users in the design process as co-creators is growing. In the area of b2b co-creation, this is a common procedure. The customers – business partners – are asking for unique solutions and integrate their expertise into the design and development process to achieve the best possible result. In the b2c business, co-creation is gaining ever greater importance as IT-technology provides the platform for participation. Depending on the research subject, messages as text or artefacts are exchanged in interactive processes.

User Issues In saturated markets, it is important to understand the users’ desires and dreams very well in order to provide them with pleasing experiences. The objective is to design access to services and / or products that match exactly what users are looking for. The objective is to provide solutions that cannot be rejected, because they fit perfectly into the users lifestyle. Understanding the user and the user behaviour requires a thorough and accurate empiric approach. Deep insight into the pains and gains of prospective clients helps to satisfy the spoiled customers in industrial countries as well as to understand prospective users in new markets with different cultures and economies. The global acceptance of products and services requires understanding of intercultural differences to adapt products and services to the local cultures. The ethical attitude of designers is to improve the everyday life of people and to contribute to their wellbeing. The intentions of designers are socially responsible towards human beings and their environment. Profound research for design has to be done in order to understand how people act and how to facilitate their ­performance in daily activities. For the exploration of user behaviour, appropriate methods are needed. Along with the widening and the deepening of the design activities, the methods and tools for design research are expanding. Methods, processes, tools and strategies constantly have to be updated to cope with the growing complexity. The research activities in the design process require rigorous thoroughness and must put the user in focus. Therefore the methodological toolbox is expanded with methods from social sciences. Narrative methods like story telling and qualitative methods like depth interviews, as well as observation techniques, self-experiences and the like are integrated in the research process. Visualisation techniques are used for illustration, data processing, communication and decision-making. As mentioned before, the value of design for the user is in the focus of research for design. Knowledge on user experience is crucial for designers to follow their ­social

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engagement. For companies it is important, because satisfied and happy users are the best guaranty for ongoing business success. The great diversity of lifestyles ­requires deep customer insights and appropriate communication tools. The research outcome needs description, explanation and visualisation. Due to fast technological development, limited access to resources, growing ecological footprints and changes in individual user behaviour, the factors that determine design are manifold, complex and often conflicting. To handle the complexity of the wicked problems, research becomes a necessity for design researchers as well as in practice for designers and companies.

Future Perspectives Human wellbeing depends on the disposability of resources. The availability of ­resources is limited – as everybody knows. In industrialised countries people consume far more resources than planet Earth can regenerate. Therefore people must change their consumption patterns and consume fewer material products. The big challenge for design research and design practice is to reduce the ecological footprint of the industrialised countries. It is a demanding task to minimise resource consumption and to guarantee a comfortable lifestyle at the same time, because it can be taken for granted that nobody wants to suffer abstinence. Design research on user experience in real life scenarios is of great importance for the development of sustainable products and services; it is also important for changes in consumption: access to use instead of possession of products. The meaning of wellbeing is subject to change. People are looking for good experiences provided by useful services and benefits. The change of consumption patterns towards a more sustainable lifestyle is a subject of design research. To foster sustainable production and consumption, the communication of the research results is basically text based and accessible for other experts in academia, for companies as well as for users. New and better technical opportunities are permanently accessible and are longing for application and commercialisation. Changes in production and consumption are inevitable. Smart solutions that make use of new technologies have to be created and to put to use. Technological development is happening with an enormous speed, which changes the values and patterns of use. The great challenge of design research is to keep up with the investigation of changes and most of all to support changes in user behaviour towards a sustainable lifestyle. Design experiments play a mayor role in this development and consequently produce numerous artefacts. Although the material products themselves seem to be disappearing, the functionality and the service provided by immaterial products need to be designed and communicated.

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Conclusion We can consider that the growing complexity of design needs research to explore all the challenges, opportunities and changes taking place in a world with limited resources. The excess use of resources has to be stopped by changes in consumption patterns from possession to accessibility of use. It is the task for design to act as mediator in this wicked situation between economic growth and sustainability and to find solutions for qualitative growth instead of quantitative growth: economic growth and sustainability need not be a contradiction. Research about design is dedicated to the investigation of figures and facts on the effect of design and is economic impact. Research for design is directed to user insights and to the understanding of their pains and gains. The research depends on the spoken words. Narration and interview techniques are the main research methods. Observation of user behaviour is another method frequently used in design research to investigate the relationship between people and their material environment. Therefore artefacts are possibly involved. The objective of research through design is to substitute material products by services and smart software solutions. The fast development of technology constantly delivers new options, which can be transferred into practice. Smart technologies make material products superfluous and require changes in user behaviour and consumption patterns and the generation of new user experiences. The development of smart technologies is fast. Hence experimenting and testing happen very often at the same time. Artefacts are main actors in these co-creation and co-development processes, but nevertheless communication will always need text.

1 2 3

Westcott, M., Steve Sato, Deb Mrazek, Rob Wallace, Surya Vanka, Carole Bilson, Dianne Harding: ‘The DMI Design Value Scorcard’, dmi:review 24/4, page 10–17. interbrand: best global brands, http://interbrand.com/best-brands/best-global-brands/2014/ranking/ Mitra Khazaei: Playful Customer Experience – Examining the Integration of Playful Aspects into the ­Experience of Waiting at Family Physicians’ Offices, 2014 (Dissertation), Deutsche Nationalbibliothek http://d-nb.info/1063048338.

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TEXT VS. ARTEFACT IN DESIGN RESEARCH? A STRANGE QUESTION! Wolfgang Jonas

The following stance deals with two interrelated issues approached by this book. To begin with, the editors raise these questions about text – artefact relationships in design research: Should text be predominant in communicating scientific results because scientific writing can better describe, explain, contextualise, validate and convey knowledge to a wider scientific community? Or is text only as necessary as artefacts are, and should the two then be somehow handled equally when communicating findings? Or should artefacts play the leading role, utilising their epistemological properties to create novel, thingly modes of communication?

Why do I call this a strange question? Because I am convinced that there is no – or rather that there should be no – dualism or mutually exclusive categorisation of this kind. Any attempt to impose solid and binding rules here is counterproductive and obstructs the development of design research as an own form of inquiry. And I hope to collect and construct some evidence for supporting this position. Considerations regarding the relation text – artefact in design are akin to the question about the relation design practice – design research, which has also been raised in this volume. Therefore, before turning to the text – artefact issue, I will try to clarify my position regarding the practice – research relation: Design is a ­human practice. And research is a human practice. Therefore, design research is a practice, too. And practice-based design research – the term being almost tau­ tological  –  is even more so, a practice. Practices of all kinds require skills and ­competences and tools and instruments and media, such as thinking, writing, sketching, computing, modelling, etc. in order to produce and communicate their outcomes. The composition and the proportions of the respective media are project-specific. Figure 1 on page 115 reveals a personal sketch (an artefact! drawn in 2011) that maps a classical text from Ranulph Glanville,1 which deals with the relation ­design – research. This demonstrates my bias towards conceiving research as a sub-category of design. This is opposite to the rather timid claim in the call for contributions, which asks for ‘a series of perspectives on how to incorporate design practice as part of the research process’. To put it clearly, in my view, which builds on Glanville, research practice is a specific form of a design process. That means research practice has been modelled as a component of the design process.

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Text vs. Artefact? Back to the topic: I have long mused about the question of how to bring this fuzzily defined topic of text vs. artefact into a reasonably consistent and manageable form. A mental obstacle from the beginning is that written texts in their various forms are artefacts. And especially scientific text formats are carefully crafted artefacts. We are facing – and this is true with most questions about forms and their possible changes – a design / research problem. Here it is the question: How to design design research? A subset thereof is the question regarding the media involved in this process and the presentation of results. I am referring to a heuristic, or rather a methodical tool, which has been introduced by the design thinking community.2 On closer inspection, I find it quite useful in order to reflect some relevant aspects of the problem. It is the What? / How? / Why? scheme, which is intended to open up the deeper levels of a phenomenon: Observing – Understanding – Interpreting. In the design thinking context, the scheme involves the observation of persons; I extend the inquiry to the observation of the design research community.

What? Observing Design Research The method asks: ‘What is the person you’re observing doing in a particular situation or photograph? Notice and write down the details. Try to be objective and don’t make assumptions in this first part’. So what are we observing in the design research community? Which are the subject matters design researchers are dealing with? Simply put, the answer is: their inquiry is just about everything. Common definitions confirm this first impression. Bruce Archer3 took a Wittgensteinian stance, when he said ‘that my own approach to finding an answer to the question What is Design Research? is to try to discover what design researchers actually do’. He gives the following definition: Design research … is systematic enquiry whose goal is knowledge of, or in, the embodiment of configuration, composition, structure, purpose, value and meaning in man-made things and systems.

Alain Findeli4 remains very close to Archer’s definition, emphasising the scope and the stance of the designerly approach: Design research is a systematic search for and acquisition of knowledge related to general human ecology considered from a ‘designerly way of thinking’ (i.e. project-oriented) perspective.

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Dirk Baecker5 (my translation) gives a systems-theoretical definition, which stresses design’s core competence of bridging knowledge gaps and thus makes it relevant for a wide variety of subject matters: Design as a practice of not-knowing may be read in reference to diverse interfaces, but the interfaces between technology, body, psyche and communication are probably dominant. If these ‘worlds’, each described by a more or less elaborate knowledge, are brought into a relationship of difference, this knowledge disappears and makes room for experiments, which are the experiments of design. … Not to take anything for granted here any­ more, but to see potential for dissolution and recombination everywhere, becomes the playground of a design that eventually reaches into pedagogy, therapy and medicine.

My own tentative definition of design and design research (given in a seminar 2013), builds on this: Design creates life-world situations in future contexts. In doing so it is confronted with the fundamental problems of control (irreducible complexity), of prediction (ignorance of evolutionary emerging futures) and of incompatible systems and domains of knowing. The problems show up as causality gaps between physical, psychological and communicative systems and between the stages of the evolutionary development. Design research examines the possibilities of bridging these gaps in the medium of design projects (research through design), and thereby creates new knowledge.

This supposed chaos of ‘everything will sort a bit’, if one looks at the triads of subject areas that have been suggested for design through history. It mainly boils down to the beautiful / the true / the good (Plato). Authors

Subject matters / areas of interest

Plato

The beautiful (τὸ καλὸν)

The true (τὸ ἀληθές)

The good (τὸ ἀγαθόν)

Vitruvius

The beautiful (Venustas)

The solid (Firmitas)

The useful (Utilitas)

Immanuel Kant

Judgement

Reason

Moral

David Pye (1978)

The beautiful

The efficient

The useful

Bruce Archer (1979)

Products

Process

People

Nigel Cross (2001)

Phenomenology study of the form and ­configuration of artefacts, the 1920s

Praxiology study of the practices and processes of design, the 1960s

Epistemology study of designerly ways of knowing, the 2000s

Alain Findeli (2008)

Aesthetics

Logic

Ethics

Wolfgang Jonas

Forms

Processes

Knowledges

Table: Triads of subject matters.6 The questions of what – how – why seem to relate to the 3 phases.

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So: What? Design research focuses – legitimately and without contradiction – on virtually everything. Which raises some problems. Regarding the question of text vs. artefact in design research there is no definite answer yet.

How? Understanding Design Research How is the person you’re observing doing what they are doing? Does it require ­effort? Do they appear rushed? Pained? Does the activity or situation appear to be impacting the user’s state of being either positively or negatively? Use descriptive phrases packed with adjectives.7

So how do design researchers do what they do? Which rules and patters can be identified? A spontaneous answer, very simple again, is that they proceed in extremely different ways. Examples cover the range from the strictly scientific experiment to artistic production / action / intervention. A closer look will reveal common patterns here as well. To become more explicit, here are some examples of how design research projects are conducted: a) • Philosophers deal with the essence of design and the cognitive processes when designing. • Cultural scientists explore the conceptual and discourse history of design and develop interpretations about the self-concept of the community. • Social scientists analyse communicative dynamics in design teams by means of interviews or observation or protocol studies. • Neuro-scientists try to analyse the brain processes in creative situations by means of imaging techniques. b) • Material scientists try in laboratory tests to develop a particularly recycling-friendly material for mass-produced everyday disposable products. • Software developers and HCI specialists optimise a safety-­ relevant user interface by means of cognitive psychological tests. • Marketing specialists design a campaign for a new consumer product based on statistics from survey data and findings of neuro-marketing.

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c) • Design researchers organise and run a ‘real laboratory’ in the form of a living room on the market square in order to gain insights in terms of needs and consequent design strategies for the urban area. • Social designers develop a participatory research program in an urban problem area to generate information possible and desirable transformation processes in the neighbourhood. • Design researchers construct useless objects and observe the users’ processes of appropriation to gain new insights into the logic of user interfaces.

d) • A group of artists intervenes provocatively at the general meeting of a bank and tries in this way to encourage rethinking processes. The list could go on endlessly. It is probably clear that a, b, c and d represent the four categories of research ABOUT / FOR / THROUGH / AS design, which distinguish ­design approaches not regarding subject matters (what) but regarding the researcher’s / observer’s stance towards the subject matter (how). For details see Grand and ­Jonas:8 

ABOUT: Insights about the nature and the functioning of design.



FOR: Knowledge for the improvement of design products and ­design processes.



THROUGH: Knowledge gained through the medium of designing. AS: Design practice as a gain in knowledge.

The last and most basic category leads back to the above-mentioned process pattern, which is the common basis of all processes. It is the cybernetic cycle of ex­ periential learning (See Figure 2 on page 115), grounded in Deweyan pragmatism, as described by David Kolb.9 It divides easily into an inductive and deductive semicircle, or – and this is interesting in our context – into an inductive / abductive / deductive three-part cycle. Further methodological studies, process models and concrete designerly tools, building on this basis, can be found in Jonas and Chow 2010.10 I have deliberately used the abstract, somewhat old-fashioned notion of cybernetics11 in order to distinguish the scientific modes ABOUT and FOR (C1) from the designerly modes THROUGH and AS (C2). In the scientific mode, the researcher

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pretends to be not involved, to act as disembodied Cartesian observer. In the designerly mode one reflects on the physical, intentional, emotional involvement of the observer / designer in the process. And exactly at this point, it becomes obvious that the simple dualist distinction makes no sense: Science has to become aware of and reflect upon its involvement (mode 2, mode 3, transdisciplinarity, …), whereas design research must integrate other knowledge cultures and mirror their standards. So the similarities are more connective and productive than the differences. The question of priority (scientific or designerly research) as answered quite explicitly by Glanville, seems irrelevant. So: How? Text vs. artefact in design research? The basic pragmatist cycle of experiential learning, which is the common pattern of design and research processes, suggests an important role of artefacts in design research.

Why? Interpreting Design Research Why is the person you’re observing doing what they are doing, and in the particular way that they are doing it? This step usually requires that you make informed guesses regarding motivation and emotions. Step out on a limb in order to project meaning into the situation that you have been observing. This step will reveal assumptions that you should test with users, and often uncovers unexpected realisations about a particular situation.12

So why is the design community doing research like crazy? What are the driving forces? What are the motives behind it? What are the possible prospects? My quick and simple response: the motives are sometimes trivial, the prospects are exciting. There are external constraints (like in the UK or, later, in Switzerland) to doing research; there is the growing competition in the higher education system; there are requirements in professional collaborations, which cannot be met by traditional skills but require research competence. More important are the intrinsic motivations: the growing personal desire to do research and the growing insight that ­design has the potential to contribute to the solution of relevant transdisciplinary problems to a far greater extent than before. One consequence of these external and internal constraints are tendencies of adaptation to the academic cultures, the dressing and disciplining of design. The above-mentioned special quality that Dirk Baecker has emphasised, the expertise in dealing with ‘not knowing’ at the intersection of established disciplines, will be seriously endangered. And this is happening at a time when exactly these integrative, projective and transformative competences with regard to societal transformation13 are in demand as never before.14 We should not dismiss the sometimes naive missionary character of the profession (‘we are the world saviours’, ‘we are the holistic thinkers’, …) in favour of the sup-

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posed benefits of the discipline, but we should carefully cultivate this attitude. The concept of ‘transformative science’, which explicitly includes ethical questions as to the social responsibility of research, is gaining considerable thrust in Germany.15 So why? We proceeded from What (aesthetics) via How (logic) to Why (ethics). I advocate strongly to take ethics – based on aesthetics and logic – more into the focus: to conceive and further develop design / research as a non-conventional actor within a transdisciplinary transformative science community.

So What? Against this backdrop, the question of text vs. artefact in design research looses significance. What emerges is the ‘beauty of grey’, of various hybrid forms of text and artefact and other media, between the pure extremes of the written (scientific) text and the non-textual (artistic) artefact. Which does not imply that the two extremes should not be included in the spectrum mentioned above.

  1 Glanville, R. (1980). ‘Why Design Research?’, in Jacques, R. and Powell, J. (Eds.). Design:Science:Method. Guildford: Westbury House.   2 d.school (no year). Available at: https://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/themes/dschool/method-cards/what-why-how.pdf   3 Archer, B. (1981). ‘A View of the Nature of Design Research’, in Jacques, R. and Powell, J. (Eds.). Design:­ Science:Method. Guildford: Westbury House, p. 30.   4 Findeli, A. (2008). ‘Searching for Design Research Questions’. Keynote at Questions & Hypotheses, Berlin, 24–26 October 2008.   5 Baecker, D. (2000). ‘Wie steht es mit dem Willen Allahs?’, in Zeitschrift für Rechtssoziologie 21 (2000), Heft 1, p. 145–176 (163).   6 Jonas, W. (2011). ‘A Sense of Vertigo – Design Thinking as General Problem Solver?’, in Proceedings of EAD09, 9th Conference of the European Academy of Design, May 2011, Porto, Portugal.   7 see footnote 2.   8 Grand, S. and Jonas, W. (Eds.): Mapping Design Research, Basel, Birkhäuser Verlag, 2012.   9 Kolb, D. A.: Experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development, New York, ­Prentice-Hall, 1984. 10 Jonas, W. and Chow, R. (2010). ‘Far Beyond Dualisms in Methodology – An Integrative Design Research ­Medium MAPS’, in Proceedings of DRS conference Design&Complexity, Montréal, Canada, 07/2010. 11 Jonas, W. (2014). ‘A cybernetic model of design research. Towards a trans-domain of knowing’, in (Paul A. Rodgers and Joyce Yee, Eds.) The Routledge Companion to Design Research. London New York: Taylor&Francis Group. 12 see footnote 2. 13 Jonas, W. et al. (Eds.): Transformation Design, Basel, Birkhäuser Verlag, 2015. 14 Jonas, W. (2015) ‘Social Transformation Design as Research Through Design (RTD) – some historical, theoretical and methodological remarks’, in Wolfgang Jonas et al. (Eds.) Transformation Design. Basel, Birkhäuser Verlag. 15 Schneidewind, U. and Singer-Brodowski, M.: Transformative Wissenschaft: Klimawandel im deutschen Wissenschafts- und Hochschulsystem, Weimar b. Marburg, Metropolis, 2014.

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NOTHING FIXED: AN ESSAY ON FLUIDITY IN ­DESIGN RESEARCH Uta Brandes

Ex ante: It took me quite some time to find out how to tackle the given topic. Finally, I decided to follow neither academic rituals nor rules or derivation logic. Instead, I am going to allow myself to write in a rather associative, even fragmentary style. I am smart enough to protect myself by referring to Walter Benjamin’s ‘prismatic’ writing and thinking.

Borrowed and Written When it comes to conducting design research, we predominantly think of research methods borrowed from sociology, sometimes from psychology, less frequently from economics, and very rarely still other methodologies or actions are taken into consideration. When the results of design research are presented we first and foremost ­expect something written, quite often accompanied by diagrams, graphs, tables, charts, and less frequently by still or moving images (be they photos, pictures, illustrations, videos …). But hardly ever do we think of introducing other things such as actions, interventions, notations, imaging or visualisations. Design research normally comes as an invasion of text: words splash, splutter, pour and pelt down on our brains and minds. Astonishingly, we are not surprised; on the contrary, we already anticipated that the conclusion of the research would come in the form of text. Why aren’t we astound by the fact that design research is presented in the same way as the research results from other disciplines? When, on the other hand, we rightly consider design as an area of special and specific competences in both making and researching?

Text Although text may also describe a style or a written work, the term must be understood within a larger framework. Text literally means ‘things woven’, and stems from the Latin verb ‘texere’: ‘to weave’, ‘to join’, ‘fit together’, ‘braid’, ‘interweave’, ‘construct’, ‘fabricate’, ‘build’. The unfolding metaphors match with an interesting,

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nonetheless conventional, idea: ‘[T]hought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns – but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact’.1 Bringhurst’s interpretation is a triple retrospective when he traces back the writers (scribes) to the poets and the poets back to the oral storytellers. The comparison between the storytellers and the weavers or spinners of yarn may be appealing, although a bit old-fashioned, because the metaphor of the ‘weaver’ does not include contemporary societies and their substantially new invention of new media.

Texture Bringhurst then continues by introducing the closely related term ‘textus’: ‘After long practice, their (the scribes’ [author’s note]) work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth’.2 Again, the typographer and poet cling to history and miss out on broadening the view towards a contemporary analysis. Taking modern societies into consideration, and specifically linking the notions of text and ‘texere’ to design, opens up a much wider horizon of meanings. Firstly, text becomes an activity, nothing stable and finished but something constantly moving. Secondly, text involves the making and creating of an artefact – regardless of the material used. Thirdly, constructing and building is a genuine design task, where balancing the thing, making it fit, joining elements (or forces) are inevitable steps of the design process. When we finally embrace texture, the old traditional craft interweaves and intertwines with the very recent ‘network’ and ‘web’ which are obvious elements of design in terms of interaction and interface design, as well as of the overall ‘structure’.

Tapestry This is a multilayered and confusing term because it bridges the old-fashioned craft of making wall hangings and the figurative meaning of ‘tapestry’: the term not only signifies ‘depiction’, which works towards everything visual (such as image, picture, drawing), but also ‘complexity’ and even ‘perplexity’ and ‘intricacy’, which imply such diverse concepts as multifacetedness, knottiness, difficulty and confusion. Thus tapestry suggests an intrinsic affinity between the visual and the theoretical artefact. Tentatively, we could interpret the term as two versatile sides of the same coin, i.e. practice and theory.

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Things Made by Skill As a preliminary result-in-progress, we can note that the term ‘artefact’ embraces any object and material that is artificially made (from Lat.:‘arte’ and ‘factum’: ‘by skill’ and ‘thing made’). Therefore, text, letters and grammar are materials just like paint, plastic, steel etc.; to put it more precisely: both types are symbolic systems. Defaults and standards oppose our activities anyway when designing objects or processes. At the beginning the artefacts seem to live a life of their own, they resist us, objects literally ‘throw against’ something or somebody. And this is equally true for any object. Different systematics emerge, resulting from the mode, approach and knowledge interest of design and research.

Artistic Processes vs. Academic Eagerness to Please The use of text in so-called creative scopes depends a lot on the context in which it is applied. Introducing text as a means or medium of the fine arts can be regarded as an unconventional, non-traditional concept. Fine art is often associated with paint and painting or drawing, whereas text is linked to either theoretical or artistic writing. When the media in the fine arts are changed, such a change can create innovation, even provocation. Certainly it is not a new art form to work with text as if it were an image: it was Dadaism that already started to confuse the traditional definition of art by blending words, typography, text and collage with drawing and painting. Ever since then, there have at times been movements that dedicate, and purposely limit, their art to working with writing and typeface. I refer here to the excellent book by Katrin Ströbel who persuasively describes the many contemporary works of artists who form words rather than other visuals. To name but a few examples: art and comic (Roy Lichtenstein, Jean-Michels Basquiat), archived time and documents (On Kawara, Hanne Darboven), paranomasia within a painting (Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince), writings in public space (Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer), or writings as a means of self-reflection (Tracy Emins, Sophie Calle).3 In these cases, art becomes more puristic, radical or provocative because it undermines the audience’s expectations. If, however, we think of methods and strategies in design with a particular focus on research, I would argue exactly the other way round. While, in the fine arts, the use of words and text is an unusual practice that does not conform to standards, text in the field of (design) research signifies just the opposite: these are contributions that deal with expected (mainstream) methods and forms, adapted from other disciplines. Design research that assimilates with long-established systems of research, deprives itself of the possibility to take advantage of design’s quite short, i.e. ‘modern’, history. Precisely because of its modernity, design is capable of providing innovative, experimental and surprising outcomes. As design includes so many

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more approaches toward materials other than text, its research findings should also draw on complex, even eclectic, investigation methods and representation options. This should be applied to processes of both researching and representing. Sometimes design research is courageous enough to conduct research using methods and means other than speaking, listening and writing. However, when it comes to the presentation of the findings, we almost always have to content ourselves with a more or less coherent massive body of text. It is a mystery to me why designers are still anxious to consider themselves as truly ‘scientific’ (and the understanding of ‘scientific’ inevitably seems to be solely linked to text, at best accompanied by formulas). A popular expression one often comes across is the hastily articulated, almost servile, reference to some ominous ‘eye-level’ with other sciences that design has not yet reached! I state that design researchers collectively still lack confidence. They would bring many more keen insights to the world by trying out their own ways of appropriating design and making use of the specific capabilities of design as an ‘in-between’ scope and domain.

‘A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words’ Most certainly, my emphasis on media other than words does not mean that I agree with the above stupid saying. On the contrary, this is an anti-intellectual, petty bourgeois misunderstanding, fed by fear of in-depth reflection, analysis and theory. It is similar to the ironic (aggressive) slogan ‘why make things simple when one can make them complicated’. Admittedly, there are still quite a few designers who would prefer to communicate through images rather than words. Of course, I will now be accused of arguing inconsistently: first, I seem to defend other representation forms of design research against those that use text, and then I consider pictures or images inappropriate when it comes to research. Nevertheless, I purposely argue in this way. Clearly, an image cannot replace a written reflection, but there are more complex ways to carry out and present design research.

Exploration Through Action (Research) and Observational Research Action research and observational studies are forms of investigation that perfectly match with design. Action research is home to interventions, and it involves both the people being researched and the researchers. The aim is to transform the research results into practical changes, such as improving things, circumstances or behaviour. Ideally, the latently lurking hierarchy of ‘experts’ (research subjects) and ‘non-experts’

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(research objects) has been allowed to dissolve. We can think of a model of successful co-creation during the design process. Both parties are active and integral creators of change for improvement or for the discovery of new things. Especially ex­citing is the possibility of performing spontaneous or targeted interventions and inter­ actions. Thus, action research becomes a kind of qualitative experiment: it is both ­exploratory and heuristic. Qualitative observational research in design research is another excellent method that can be applied to unconventional contexts. It allows the designers to better understand the emotional and practical relationship between people and things, to identify usage patterns and desires, and thus to develop a better understanding of people’s motives. It is a good means to challenge conventions and create genuinely sensitive, innovative designs. Both methods require empathy, sensitivity and in-depth reflection by constantly being critical and self-reflective. Here the ‘result’ of the design research is (social or designerly) change, a fluid, open movement that may implement new things or attitudes but not something fixed. The (design) process itself is the implication.

Strategy and Tactic Everything that Michel de Certeau analyses in relation to (urban) space can easily be adapted to design research. For de Certeau, space is neither fixed nor stable as long as tactic is applied. He identifies tactic with resistance against strategies as the mechanism of power. Tactic is determined by the absence of power while strategy is organised by existing power relations: Tactic ‘must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is at least expected. In short, a tactic is an art of the weak’.4 Elastic or fluid design research, as I call it, operates at the fringes of given and adapted suchness; it is versatile, it dares to ‘poach’, and it sometimes acts from the ambush. In this sense, design research implies much more than a written script; it is emancipatory and it makes use of whatever material is appropriate for improvement – of objects, visuals, communication, interfaces between subjects and objects, social critique.

Unsettling Conclusions Probably, the reader has already noticed a most bizarre phenomenon: the contradiction and inconsistency within my writing. While I have tried to argue that words

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or text are just another artefact and are not the exclusive approach for researching design, I precisely do so by using words and text! This indissoluble contradiction stays with me and the artefact presented here is a kind of antithesis. I state that this is a refined tactic, and it resembles the contradictory social processes we have to cope with. The concept of fluidity in design opposes the common strategy of ‘uncertainty absorption’ that to me seems like being afraid of living with uncertainty. ‘Uncertainty absorption takes place when inferences are drawn from a body of evidence and the inferences, instead of the evidence itself, are then communicated’.5 Dirk Baecker interprets Simon’s and March’s ‘uncertainty absorptions’ as follows: ‘Jede einzelne Entscheidung verlässt sich bis auf Widerruf darauf, dass vorherige Entscheidungen ihre eigene Ungewissheit hinreichend bewältigt haben, um als Prämissen weiterer Entscheidungen behandelt werden zu können’.6 (‘Each individual decision is uncertain, but every decision, until recalled, relies on the fact that prior decisions have sufficiently overcome their own uncertainty so that they can be used as premises for further decisions’. – Author’s translation) If we would be able to overthrow this attitude, we would also be free of restrictions in design research. Unfortunately, that is easier said than done.

1 Robert Bringhurst, R.: The Elements of Typographic Style, Vancouver / Dublin, Hartley & Marks, 2013. 2 Ibid. 3 cf. Ströbel, K.: Wortreiche Bilder. Zum Verhältnis von Text und Bild in der zeitgenössischen Kunst. Bielefeld: transcript, 2013. 4 Certeau de, M.: The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984, p. 37. 5 March, James G., and Herbert A. Simon: Organizations, 2nd ed., Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993, p. 186. 6 Baecker, D. (2015): Designvertrauen: Design als Mechanismus der Ungewissheitsabsorption in der nächsten Gesellschaft. Thesenpapier zum Symposium ‘System: Design zwischen Chaos und Alltag’, Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln, 15. Mai 2015, p. 1f.

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EVERYDAY HOMEOPATHY IN PRACTICE-­ CHANGING DESIGN RESEARCH Cameron Tonkinwise

Boredom is the everyday become manifest: consequently, the everyday after it has lost its essential – constitutive – trait of being unperceived.

Maurice Blanchot ‘Everyday Speech’1 The following argues that the reason design is significant is the same reason why design’s significance is still not widely enough registered, by research universities for instance, that is, that it focuses on everyday material usefulness. This is also why design research into the transformation of everyday practices must remain committed to producing research in and communicating research through everyday materiality – what could be called researching homeopathically.

Design is concerned with things. Some of the assumptions this claim entails are: 1) Designers are materialists. Compared to other professions and disciplines, which may focus more on ideas, systems or people, designers centre their know-how and efforts on material products. Certainly, design has in the last few decades tried to grow beyond the mechanical art of manufacturing. In a postindustrial age, design aspires instead to value-creating activities, experiences, services and digital platforms. Nevertheless, in every case, the difference the designer makes is that material things – products, apparel, devices, environments, or communications on or via any of the previous – are the media for that value-creating. Service designers for instance are always also product-, interior-, fashion-, and communication-designers. To the extent that they can be considered to have been ‘designed’, service experiences are sculpted by these material agencies. Designers help people by developing the things those people make use of and come to depend upon. (Note: Other disciplines, such as anthropology, philosophy and sociology, have only recently had ‘material / thing turns’.2 By this I mean, they have begun to add ‘the missing masses’ of ‘mundane artefacts’ to their explanatory frameworks.3 These more ‘flat ontologies’, acknowledging that immaterial phenomena have effects (and affects) through their material manifestations, can, and should, strike designers as obvious. Or to put it the other way around: design is now at last in a position to be accorded recognition as a discipline amongst others in the university precisely because of its expertise with respect to materiality.)

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2) Designers take responsibility for meso-scale things. That phrase, ‘meso-scale things’, is redundant, as the term ‘things’ is usually reserved for objects that are neither too large nor too small (nor too alive). Nearly all of these mid-sized, more-orless portable pieces of equipment have materials and micro-components, and / or are connected to macro-infrastructures, either of which have been engineered. But the aspects of these things that are particular to their being sized to be handle-able by humans, fall to designers. Conversely, large-scale and miniaturised systems are only ever experienced by non-specialist people on a day-to-day basis through ­designed interfaces. A breakthrough technoscientific invention depends on the ­designers who can realise its usable meso-level form to diffuse into society. (Note: Engineers, Architects and Planners do Design at moments in their processes, when they a) produce a model of what they are working on that is of human-­ scale – whether physical or digital – and b) take responsibility for designing the ­meso-level components of any larger scale of structure – such as when architects ­intrude on interior design to specify the nature of railings, window mechanisms, bathroom fittings, etc. I make this point to insist that negotiating human-scale, handlable things is particular to the expertise of designing.) 3) Designers are focused on everyday things. Essential to the outcomes of design is regular engagement. Designed artefacts are not rarefied works of art but more quotidian pieces of equipment that people carry with or on them, or live amongst or work with. In a sense, designers are the creators of ‘everythings’ – not every single thing, but almost any of the things we are in contact with most hours of the day. There are two ways to access this point. Firstly, consider that you are, hopefully, only rarely in contact with legal and health professionals. Governments and their agencies rule your life, but more by specifying what you cannot do rather than what you do do most days. As mentioned in 2), you are in constant contact with the infrastructural systems engineers and planners establish, but always only through the mediation of designed devices: cars, phones, toilets, thermostats, light switches. Therefore, the professionals whose products touch you – quite literally: are against your skin, in your hands, supporting your weight – almost every minute of every day are designers. Even when other professionals touch you, they do so through designed equipment. Secondly, consider how rarely you are completely naked – and even then you tend to be ‘clothed’ in a shower stall or bed linen. The bare species form of the human that underwrites human rights, the figure illustrated by Da Vinci and sent into deep space etched on a gold plaque,4 is a creature we almost never are on a day-to-day basis. In fact, that kind of nudity is something that we mostly try to avoid; if not animalistically impassioned, we feel vulnerable without our designed accoutrements. It is inhumane to humiliate humans by stripping them of their designed artefacts. From these perspectives, the most important discipline, the one with the greatest responsibility for what humans are almost all of the time, is ­design.

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(Note: The artefacts that are iconic of design, the ones that win awards or are collected by museums, but also the ones in expensive ‘designer’ stores in the high streets of consumer cities around the world, are clearly not everyday. These exemplars draw attention to the fact the task of design to enhance the quality of everyday life, to bring special qualities to everyday tasks. The discourses of Experience Design and Design and Emotion, aiming at moments of ‘elegance’ and ‘delight’, make this explicit. But the objects of design, as opposed to its objectives, are ordinarily ‘gear’, products that will be used regularly and maintained in the stock of everyday things that make up a household or workplace or public space precisely because they are effective and enjoyable to use.) 4) Designers are concerned with useful things. While there are other qualities to the outputs of designing, the sine qua non is use. As noted in the previous sections, design’s focus on use is unique. Other disciplines and professions are not concerned with the nature of what forms of things humans find useful – or if what they are ­developing (e.g., engineering, architecting) requires an interface that humans can make use of, then those professionals must get access to some designing. Use is a strange phenomenon.5 On the one hand, use appears to be thoroughly constructivist: humans appear to have a creative capacity to (re)make things useful for actions those things were never designed for. On the other hand, when something proves especially useful for a task, that usefulness seems to be inherent to the very nature of that thing, defining of its form and purpose. To hold these two aspects of use ­together, James Gibson famously proposed the idea of affordances, action-possibilities that lie between perceiving subjects in certain contexts and the formal qualities of objects. This constructivist ‘between-ness’ of use makes usefulness and even usability difficult to attain when making new things. It has long been acknowledged that usefulness and usability are perhaps impossible to discern directly, but rather only exist via negativa – as the absence of obstacles to use.6 Yet, when attained, use is immediately intuitive in ways that make it appear insubstantial. (Note: It is not just that usefulness is a quality that is transparent when it exists, but also that use causes what is used to withdraw behind the action of using it. Designs are paradoxical in this way: whilst their form can be initially striking, those material aspects are backgrounded when using them – ready-to-hand as Martin Heidegger famously called it. Again, this seems challenged by UX’s focus on creating engaging products. However, it is perhaps more accurate to see these emotional responses to things as momentary, often only at the start or end of use, rather than affects present throughout use. Or to appropriate the terminology of Michael Polanyi, it is always possible and perhaps desirable to attend-to a well-designed artefact, but skilled use will always involve attending-away from it, or at least, from certain aspects of its function toward other aspects of what it enables.7)

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So designers are concerned with creating things, material things of human-scale in order to be of everyday use. As was noted throughout what has been said so far, these aspects of designing make it much more significant than is generally acknowledged. These points also explain why this is so: the focus of Western thinking has, up until very recently, been on the metaphysical and ideational rather than material, on larger systems rather than their mundanely everyday manifestations, on extra-ordinary artefacts that produce affects and meanings rather than usefully withdrawing mundane things. To date, design has argued that its awkwardness in relation to the modern university derives primarily from it being a creative practice of making. Its materiality and futurity, it has been argued, demand distinct epistemologies from discursive positivist research.8 Practice-based design research has been one of the main responses. This term, taken broadly, tends to refer to research that is one or more of: • problem-based, i.e., is situated in applied contexts of need and motivated by a desire to help rather than remaining disinterested • interventionist, i.e., makes changes to the research context rather than remaining unobtrusive • artefactual, i.e., comprises products of design that demonstrate the validity of interventions into problem-contexts rather than translating those outcomes into text • practice-oriented, i.e., documents design processes in ways that share advances in practice to other practitioners rather only communicating research according to academic publication conventions I want to argue that, with respect to what is missing from the modern university in relation to social change, more significant than design’s creative practice of making is its focus on everyday usefulness. To account for why designing is difficult, and necessarily innovative in its forms of research, and for why designing has for so long been missed by the academy, despite the centrality of its outputs – everythings – design’s quotidian instrumentalism be foregrounded. Revealing the changeability of everyday practices is in fact, I would insist, the value of practice-based design research. To make this argument, I would like to discuss what has been called ‘The Practice Turn’.9 Social Practice Theory emerges from Martin Heidegger’s referential analysis of equipmental worlds. Heidegger argues (to put it crudely) that the essence of (everyday) things lies in their existence, their ways of being; that a hammer is for hammering and, to some extent, only fully is what it is when hammering. This processual way of being only occur in appropriate times and places: a hammer is for

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hammering, on a construction site, for building a home, that affords certain forms of human dwelling. In other words, the nature of a thing depends on the ecosystem of other things and activities in which it is situated. Social Practice Theory calls these ecosystems of things and activities ‘practices’. The term is more or less taken from Pierre Bourdieu’s political modulations of Heidegger’s equipmental worlds – central to Bourdieu’s notions of field and habitus is his claim that there is a ‘logic to practice which is not a logic’. In this way, Bourdieu foregrounds the skills involved in these fields and practices, that there is a know-how involved in practicing adeptly – something that is also used to exclude classes of people who are not familiar with certain practices. Practice Theory is then the argument that the core unit of social analysis should be ‘practices’. Practices are regularised activities. Everyday life, including work, comprises a series of mostly discrete practices, ordinarily captured by gerunds like ‘dining’, ‘exercising’, ‘getting up in the morning’, ‘having a meeting’, ‘invoicing’, etc. In each of these cases, there is an appropriate place and timing, what Theodore Schatzki calls a ‘timespace’, and a necessary set of devices.10 To use those devices to accomplish that kind of practice requires skills, capabilities that partakers in the practice can deploy mostly without deliberation. These practices are not merely functional tasks; there is always an aesthetic dimension to them, a style involved in doing the tasks well, what Schatzki calls ‘teleoaffectivity’. These constellations of devices, skills and meanings – Schatzki calls them bundles11 – are very resilient, reproducing themselves remarkably consistently over time and even across cultures when conditions are right. Infrastructures that service them keep practices in place, but perhaps stronger is the fact that they are performed by people without much consideration. They are the habits that come along with our designed habitats, the useful material things that afford our daily activities. The crucial point here is that everyday practices are routinised in ways that make them difficult to discern. They are not mechanistically automatic, since there is always a sensitivity to doing them well, but they nevertheless are ever-repeated (re)enactments; they have an each-and-every-day-ness – which is why they can be done ‘absent-mindedly’. They are lived, in ways that are captured well by Maurice Blanchot’s richly poetic conceptions: Whatever its other aspects, the everyday has this essential trait: it allows no hold. It escapes. It belongs to insignificance; the insignificant being what is without truth, without reality, and without secret, but also perhaps the site of all possible signification. The everyday escapes. In this consists its strangeness – the familiar showing itself (but already dispersing) in the guise of the astonishing. It is the unperceived, first in the sense that we have always looked past it; nor can we introduce it into a whole or ‘review’ it, that is to say, enclose it within a panoramic vision; for, by another trait, the everyday is what we never see for the first time but can only see again, having always already seen it by an illusion that is constitutive of the everyday …

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The everyday is the inaccessible to which we have always already had access; the everyday is inaccessible, but only insofar as every mode of acceding is foreign to it. To live in the way of the quotidian is to hold oneself at a level of life that excludes the possibility of a beginning, the very possibility of access. ‘Everyday Speech’, 239–40, 245

This is the stuff of designing, what designers try to deconstruct and reconstruct. The task of designing is to: a) disclose everyday practices, discerning the socio-materiality underlying the skilful usefulness at work in those practices b) innovate other ways in which those practices could take-place, or even wholly new practices (that will have to displace or coordinate with existing ones) c) facilitate the adoption of new socio-materialities so that they can be habituated over, into or alongside existing practices The first two demand that designers proceed disruptively – or what I would call allopathically. The backgrounded inertia of the everyday must be creatively alienated into view so that alternative ways of being become possible. With these, designers work exactly as Garfinkelian ethnomethodologists, undertaking breaching ex­per­ iments in order expose how normality is constructed and actively sustained.12 ­Design is after all the child of modernist detraditionalisation, making use of the critical project of art to recreate society. Design researchers now have a plethora of techniques available to them to engage in these kinds ‘distancing effects’ as Bertholt Brecht called them: cultural probes,13 critical design,14 serious play,15 appreciative inquiry,16 bodystorming-enactments,17 etc. These processes are crucial components of designing, and can be in rigorously innovative ways that generate new insights into the nature of existing everyday practices. However, these provocative processes comprise only half of any design project. As Elaine Scarry once beautifully noted, there is still the task of ‘making real’ what these disruptions have ‘made up’.18 Designers do not merely generate possibilities, they realise them, materializing them back into everyday existence. This third aspect of designing, which is perhaps more than half what it means to design some practicable thing, must happen homeopathically. Translating these innovations back into everydayness requires ‘speaking’ the material language of everydayness, demonstrating that they could be new habits and habitats, taken for granted ways of living for certain classes of people. At first, this would appear to be about usability. But just because something can be used does not mean that it will be used, that it will become a regular practice. What is being researched in this third stage of designing is more like usefulness.19 This is why studio or laboratory tests or simulations are inadequate. As homeo-

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pathic, research into integrating designs into social practices must be field trials, living labs.20 To research the capacity of a design to redesign everyday practices, that design must be regularly practised.21 Importantly, this last homeopathic form of design research very precisely blends design, research and communication of design research knowledge. The designing is not complete until the design has been taken up. To get it taken up ­requires on-going research. But at this point in the process, the research is about whether the design can communicate itself to a designated everyday audience; can it speak the language of habitual usefulness? What an adopted innovative design communicates is that it embodies the research that establishes how to transform material practices, knowledge of how to establish itself in everyday life. The merit of this kind of design research being homeopathic is that its outcome is knowledge of something indicative rather than merely subjunctive. It establishes that change can happen by it having happened. It demonstrates knowledge of what is the case (a diffused innovation, a redesigned social practice), rather than merely what may be (a design proposition). The problem with homeopathy is obviously that it becomes almost impossible to differentiate the regular practice from the new knowledge about practice changeability that that practice claims to be establishing. What is the difference between design and design research? It is a figure-ground relation. Designers exhibit the thing that they have designed. But what has really been designed, if the thing is a successful product, are the practices that that thing enables. Design research therefore stages this ground to the design’s figure, the transformations in how people live and work that happen as a result of the take-up of the design. These transformations should be sharable experiences rather than translations into non-everyday contexts (such as verbal accounts or data metrics) in order to not betray the everydayness that is the essential to designing. Design research is then a matter of re-presenting22 redesigned practices in particular ways that concentrate what is taking place into discernible forms. This may require contrasting the experience of the new habituated practices with some version of those practices before being redesigned. Communicating design research means creating situations in which we can practise the practices that have been changed by practice-based design research.

1 2 3 4

5

Blanchot, M.: The Infinite Conversation, University of Minnesota Press, 1993. See for instance Theodore Schatzki, Karin Knorr-Cetina and Eike Von Savigny The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory Psychology Press, 2001. There phrases come from Bruno Latour ‘Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts’ in Wiebe Bijker and John Law eds. Shaping Technology / Building Society MIT Press, 1992. I am referring to the plaque affixed to Pioneer spacecraft launched in 1972 which recently left our solar system, depicting a naked man and woman of clearly North Atlantic appearance: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque. See Johan Redström ‘RE: Definitions of Use’ Design Studies 29.4 (2008).

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  6 Tonkinwise, C. and Jacqueline Lorber-Kasunic ‘What Things Know: Exhibiting Animism as Artefact-based Design Research.’ Working Papers in Art and Design 4 (2006).   7 I am paraphrasing into a different context from Michael Polanyi The Tacit Dimension Kegan Paul, 1967. See also Don Ihde Technics & Praxis D. Reidel, 1979.   8 I am thinking here of the forums that have been used to debate and develop Practice-based Design Research such as Working Papers in Art and Design and the various conferences on Design PhDs at Ohio 1999, La Cruz, … I am making the wide claim that much of that discourse starts with the epistemological problems associated with design understood as what Herbert Simon called a Science of the Artificial.   9 An excellent overview of the literature is Davide Nicolini Practice Theory, Work, and Organization: An ­Introduction Oxford University Press, 2013. A good account is also Shove, Elizabeth, Mika Pantzar, and Matt Watson. The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and How it Changes Sage Publications, 2012. 10 Schatzki, T.: The Timespace of Human Activity: On Performance, Society, and History as Indeterminate Teleological Events, Lexington Books, 2010. 11 Schatzki, T: ‘A Primer on Practices’, in Joy Higgs et al. eds. Practice-based Education: Perspectives and Strategies Springer Science & Business Media, 2013. 12 Crabtree, A.: ‘Design in the Absence of Practice: Breaching Experiments.’ Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques ACM, 2004. 13 See Kirsten Boehner, William Gaver and Andy Boucher ‘Probes’, in Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford eds ­Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social Routledge, 2012. 14 Pierce, James, Phoebe Sengers, Tad Hirsch, Tom Jenkins, William Gaver, and Carl DiSalvo ‘Expanding and Refining Design and Criticality in HCI’, in Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems ACM, 2015. 15 Schrage, M.: Serious play: How the world’s best companies simulate to innovate. Harvard Business Press, 2013. 16 I am referring here to the particularly design-oriented approach to asking after the preferable, such as IDEO’s appropriation of the phrase ‘how might we …’ 17 See Arvola, Mattias and Henrik Artman ‘Enactments in Interaction Design: How Designers make Sketches Behave’ Artifact vol.1 no.2 (2007) though improvisational enactments are treated both as ­generative ­design processes, as I am talking about here, and as ways of evaluating the feasibility of ­designs, which I will come to shortly. 18 Scarry, E.: ‘The Made-up and the Made-real’, Yale Journal of Criticism vol.5 (1992). 19 See Phil Turner and colleagues’ work, influenced by Martin Heidegger, on Familiarity – e.g., Phil Turner ‘Being-with: A study of Familiarity’ Interacting with Computers vol.20 no.4 (2008) and Guy Van de Walle, Phil Turner, and Elisabeth Davenport ‘A Study of Familiarity’ Human-Computer Interaction-INTERACT vol.3 (2003). 20 With specific reference to Practice Theory informed Design, see Kakee Scott, Conny Bakker and Jaco Quist ‘Designing Change by Living Change’ Design Studies vol.33 no.3 (2012). Note that what I am trying to get at here is to some extent the opposite of Nortje Marres’ work on ‘experiments in living’ as for ­Marres these are more generatively about creating the possible than realizing those possibilities as new ­habits: see ‘Experiment: the Experiment in Living’ in Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford eds Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social Routledge, 2012. 21 I am deliberately using the now archaic spelling, ‘practise’ to signal the process of repetitively rehearsing a skill until it can be done automatically. 22 I am thinking here of the German term Darstellung, which though sometimes translated as representation, refers more – at least as it was conceived in German Romantic philosophy – to presencing, rendering a concept sensible. See for instance Martha B. Helfer The Retreat of Representation: The Concept of Darstellung in German Critical Discourse SUNY Press, 1996.

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PROJECT-GROUNDED RESPONSES: TEXT / OBJECT How did you use text and artefact in the process of generating knowledge in your PhD – what findings emerged from non-textual work and how did you choose to communicate them?

My primary area of research focus covered in my PhD investigated architectural and urban practices in the reconstruction of environments post-destruction. This focus embraced concepts such as: destroyed sites and forgetting; the city and burial; vagrancy and spatial occupation; architecture and the rebuilding of spaces. Engaging with concepts with the disciplines of architecture, urban design, archaeology and human geography to reformulate the city and histories of destruction within the current discourse operating in these areas. The ability to filter information and ­explore philosophical concepts expanded the thinking and writing and its transference into material outcomes. In my own understanding, to reproduce space does not necessarily translate to experimentation yet to rethink the programming of space for example, inhabitation and occupation, instils the pursuit of instigating transitions of change. If we are to believe that research paves the way for future practices then the disseminating of text and writing to emerging concepts formulates what the future practice becomes. Benedict Anderson, Professor of Spatial Design (University of Technology Sydney) Dissertation: The Architectural Flaw, 2005. Royal Melbourne University of Technology (RMIT)

The relation between text and artefacts has been a key focus of my practice situated in exhibition and curatorial practice. I am not a maker of artefacts; rather I make arrangements with other people’s artefacts. Both the role of text and artefacts and the relation between them is charged in exhibition environments. My practice in exhibition and curatorial practice questioned the role of the museum artefact as a container of meaning and the viewer as the knower; and the role of the text as an explanation of the work. In exhibitions, I brought these dynamics to the fore and experimented with different encounters and relations between text and artefacts, subjects and objects, viewers and readers. I also write papers as critical contributions to the discipline of interior. Prior to and throughout the PhD, writing for me was / still is approached as a spatial and temporal practice; where and when it is encountered, its physical and

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material expression is considered. Hence the dissertation was a negotiation in the relation between text and image that engaged writing as another form of curatorial practice; writing the practice as distinct from writing about the practice. A paragraph in my dissertation introduced this: ‘The writing is an arrangement of projects rather than a narrative organised around key themes which the projects then illustrate. Project titles are used to bring the project to the fore and make apparent the influence of the project on the research and thinking. I am ­resisting calling them chapters as each is like another arrangement within the ­arrangement of the PhD: an interiorisation composed of projects, references, precedents and quotes. Presented as projects, the singularity of each project as a production of time, internal and external forces, constraints and chance is valued as research’. There was a strong sense of the writing and text having to negotiate a temporal dimension: did one write retrospectively, in the present or a mixture of both? The duration of a PhD raises these issues and particularly in relation to practice as what happened and what is of value changes over the course of a PhD. It became a writing of the present (in a Foucauldian sense). My dissertation is also composed of different texts (catalogue essays and book chapters that I had published during the PhD as well as other people’s texts such as exhibition reviews and citations). A series of photographs of the projects accompanied the text but were separate from the bound text. They were single images in a photo album sleeve grouped in relation to each project. Examiners were invited to take the photographs out and arrange them while reading the accompanying text – activating the dynamics between text and artefact so that the projects / images were not reduced to illustrations of the text. Suzie Attiwill, Deputy Dean, Learning & Teaching; Associate Professor of Interior Design (School of ­ rchitecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne) A Dissertation: ?interior, practices of interiorization, interior designs, 2012. School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University

Design PhDs at the Royal College of Art are mostly practice based. The fundamental knowledge generated relates therefore to design methods and design practice. As I began the PhD, my approach to design was still biased towards the development and materialisation of the artefact rather than exploiting its function and existence post-production. The raison d’être of designed artefacts in everyday life is clear and obvious; as an approach to research, however, their function is far more complex, varied and still evolving. My focus on the practical aspect, since the completion of the MA, had led to a lack of understanding of the ‘why’ of this form of ­design as basic notions of ‘public engagement’ and ‘design for debate’ justified the research. The written aspect facilitated a more considered, refined and reflective approach that essentially formalised this practice and provided a more rigorous idea of its objectives.

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Drawing from a selection of existing projects (both my own (Auger-Loizeau) and student projects taught in Design Interactions), I began to examine the interaction between hypothetical products and their audience looking at how the fictional element could be managed to elicit a more meaningful reaction. The PhD projects then provided an opportunity to more consciously craft the design to meet the new criteria exposed in the examination. The findings were written up as a series of examples describing the finer details of how to design speculative design. James Auger, Associate Professor (M-ITI) Dissertation: Why Robot? Speculative design, the domestication of technology and the considered future, 2012. Royal College of Art

Artefacts play a crucial role in my PhD thesis, even though it consists solely of text. First of all, they are references for bad examples that exhibit the consequences of an unaware or stereotypical design practice. In this respect, they are regarded as materialised forms of prevailing gender relations and power structures that mirror how much designers and their practices are governed by gender norms, which then – more or less consciously – become embodied in their results. Rommes defines these results as gender scripts1. But ‘matter’ – as Barad defines it – ‘is … not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency’.2 That means they are neither passive objects nor static entities of the material world. Consequently, artefacts can manifest the status quo or add something new to the world by simultaneously modifying it. My ­design methodology explicitly encourages designers to use artefacts to confuse or change gender and power relations. Within the context of my theoretical reflections and analysis, artefacts are regarded as epistemological carriers or materialised pieces of knowledge. From this point of view, design ‘is seen as a valid form of knowledge enquiry and where communicable knowledge may be embodied in the artefact’ 3. That’s what differentiates design research from other forms of scientific research and also affects its argumentation: ‘Hence there are two lines of argument here: the discursive and the visual. Integral research reports, which comprise two parts, have become the standard in advanced design scientific communities’ .4 But since the actor network theory puts objects on the social scientific research agenda and, again following Barad’s notion of matter as a result of material-discursive practices, it seems to be a logical consequence that forms of knowledge representations and scientific argumentation other than text should be accepted as well. Sandra Buchmüller, Research Associate (University of Bremen) Dissertation: Gender powers Design – Design powers Gender. A draft of a power critical and gender informed design methodology (Original German Title: Geschlecht macht ­Gestaltung – Gestaltung macht Geschlecht. Der Entwurf einer machtkritischen und geschlechterinformierten Designmethodologie), 2015. Berlin University of the Arts (UdK)

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Combining practice and research, in my case, is founded upon the belief in knowledge exchange. In the past few years, through Ministry of Space, I have developed the methods for bottom-up participation in practice. This raises important questions for urban research: how can architects and city planners learn from these practices? Can the users become the co-producers of the urban environment? How can we integrate informal practices into planning process? What are the consequences of ‘instrumentalisation’ of informal practices? And how can we describe the characteristic tension between actual use value and potential commercial value of these practices? It’s not unusual that the small-scale citizens actions become instruments for further commercial development of certain areas and that the ‘field’ knowledge can be eventually used for market-driven aspirations. There is a delicate balancing by the urban-policy makers who are trying to get involved in the global competition for ‘creative’ city by targeting ‘alternative’ and ‘unique’ artistic and cultural sectors in their local economy development. In that sense, the informal temporary urban ­interventions and practices are more rapidly exploited for city marketing proposes. I’m trying to develop a system and mechanism of non-commercial values that will be recognised and adopted in creating new models of programming and spatial acting with the aim of redefining the urban structure at micro-scale, and furthermore on the macro-scale level. In 2011, I co-launched the collective Ministry of Space, which promotes ‘the right to the city’ and fosters citizen participation in urban development and urban resource management. When we started, we were exploring the possibilities that art and culture open up, as a medium to raise public awareness, to usher in solutions to important social issues. With this collective, we succeeded in converting an abandoned building into a space for work and cultural production, and into a representation venue for numerous groups and individuals, such as Inex Film. Also, we made the Street Gallery, a pioneer venture of reconstructing and reviving a neglected public space, turning it into a vibrant open art gallery. We manage and operate this new cultural space with the resources of the collective. That implies a significant ­effort, which is mainly voluntary and based on our commitment to provide an alternative and self-organised stage for cultural activities in Belgrade. The concept that was developed initially made the projects unique and therefore, more resistant to attempts of co-optation or falsification. The main difference (comparing with actors who promote creative industry models) is in the scale and sphere of action, and scope of implementation. The initial activity that tactically drove the process was exhibiting and cultural production, which started as leisure activity and become the complex activity that reinvent the new form of practice. Generating the interim use, little by little, the spaces were transformed into collective practice of getting the access to space involving numerous other activities and local networks. The model that was used in these cases, presents public space as a space of ­negotiation, the space where citizens negotiate the conditions for using the specific

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space and puts the fundamental equality between citizens, activist, decision makers, artist, architects and passers-by. Iva Cˇukic´, Researcher (Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade) Dissertation: The Role of Temporary Urban Practices in Activation of Spatial Resources, 2016. Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade

During my PhD, in a manner of feminist participatory action research, my practice was focused on opening up the research process to others, to invite others – in my case socially and politically engaged designers and people living in my neighbourhood – to explore and shape the research questions together with me. Specifically, this meant that through my practice I first created collaborative research spaces in response to the research questions where the questions could literally be inhabited as they became part of my and the participants’ everyday life. Following on from this first inhabitation and in response to the findings that were generated through it, I created a temporary politicised co-working space in Milan, which in its set up, layout and programming embodied the research findings and opened up a hypothesis of intervention. Also, this was a way to make the concerns of my research relevant to others, to not wait until the end of the research to come up with a couple of great proposals but to transform the research into much more of a collective process of inquiry, problematisation as well as ideation and inventiveness. In this process, communicating through text was also important to what I did. The communication ranged from writing e-mails that inspire people to join the research to writing that engages in more philosophical / political questions of core research issues, to writing for design magazines and other popular media in order to communicate the key findings of the research. A lot of the less academic writing was produced collaboratively, together with people involved in the different learning spaces. In hindsight, I regret that I did not find a way to also involve others in the production of the more academically orientated texts. But then that’s something to be kept open for the future, given that the question of what to communicate in and around a PhD thesis is also tied to the pragmatic need of aligning time constraints, personal finances and institutional requirements in order to get through it as a healthy, sane person. Bianca Elzenbaumer, Research Fellow (Leeds College of Art) Dissertation: Designing Economic Cultures – Cultivating Socially and Politically Engaged Design Practices Against Procedures of Precarisation, 2014. Goldsmiths, University of London

I chose to structure my work rather experimentally. I structured my text according to city walks in fashion high streets during the fashion seasonal sale in Paris, London, Vienna, Hamburg and New York. Each analysis starts with a shop window

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­description that calls up associations to relevant literature from ritual studies, image science and anthropology. This text form moves away from classical academic writing. It refers more to artistic thinking and artistic research. Visual thinking and the research practice of a designer here inform the academic thinking. The artistic gaze is a relevant contribution to academic thinking. Reading the images in an artistic manner and finding poetic interpretations of meaning is a relevant contribution in academic writing for design research. This artistic logic is not ­always compatible with the research strategies of established disciplines. In anthropology you cannot easily compare visual strategies between two different cultures, separated in time and space. I was doing exactly that. I compared the ancient Greek rituals with its elements of the procession and the sacrifice to the catwalk show and the sacrifice of fashion in the show window. There is evidence in the ritual studies that rituals transform over time. Worshipping the ancient corn god has changed to worship fashion in consumer culture. Societies always worship the most important god in their time. It was the corn god, now it is consumerism, represented here by the fashion system. Introducing a new collection by using the form of a procession is applying ritual power. There is truth and wisdom in artistic thinking. We now have to work on new forms to deal with that knowledge in academic context. Harald Gründl, Founder (IDRV Institute of Design Research Vienna) Dissertation: The Death of Fashion. The Passage Rite of Fashion in the Show Window, 2007. University of ­Applied Arts Vienna

In a design research project, text and artefact ideally benefit from each other. In practice, things are, unsurprisingly, more complicated: crossing the gap between text and artefact is difficult, both epistemologically and practically. Building a physical artefact can be helpful in advancing one’s thinking, writing about it provide one’s thoughts with depth and substance. Both are important, and both can be painful. Often, design researchers (especially when they are trained designers) are not very experienced writers, and this doesn’t make it any better. But it can be learned, and it should. Writing can also be a fulfilling process – it can even be fun. I suggest developing a rhythm of writing and building. For example, one could work on the artefact during the afternoons but write (which is often the greater struggle) one or two hours every morning, before doing anything else. No email, no social media. I also suggest to strictly separate writing and editing – it’s two modes of thinking, and I suggest to keep them separate. Writing is a creative process that needs space to unfold. Holding off interruptions, pressure and critique is a good starting condition. We should not forget: text is a human-made artefact, as well. It has advantages over other types of artefacts, too: text can be searched, sent, cited, and it nicely correlates with spoken word.

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For me, there is no way around a strong, written argument for a PhD thesis, that can stand for itself. At least, this applies to the communication of knowledge – for generating knowledge, in turn, artefacts have been very important during my thesis. It was very important that I had something I could put into users’ hands in order to ask them (via the RGT method as noted above, which nicely serves as a bridge between text and artefact) how they experienced them. Nonetheless, I wrote about the artefacts in the end, rather than submitting them to the committee. Having a text in the end was important for me, as it helps others to build my thoughts – be it for proving me wrong. Fabian Hemmert, Researcher (Design Research Lab, Berlin University of the Arts) Dissertation: Encountering the Digital: Representational and Experiential Embodiment in Tangible User ­Interfaces, 2014. Berlin University of the Arts

Design knowledge is situated, tacit and experiential. To come from a design practice to research is to enter another paradigm were the main communication is verbal, textual and explicit. As a PhD student, it took some time for me to understand the magnitude of this difference. I once attended a research course called ‘theories and methods in HCI’. The course consisted of reading a huge pile of texts on different theories and methods and then analysing them in a excel document comparing factors such as ontology, origin, influences, etc. I was amazed at the sheer size of readings that was handed out and of the intense discussions going on. I suddenly realised that the researchers analysed texts just as designers analyse objects. We turn them around, look at them carefully, touch them, use them, discuss pros and cons, kinships, form and function. The texts were their artefacts! It also dawned on me that writing texts were a craft just as designing was a craft. Something you learned over time, while reading other texts and above all – practicing writing. It takes years to master but once you acquired it is a tacit knowledge, seemingly natural and congenital – just like drawing or designing. One important reason for me to go into research was that I loved writing. I loved the flow of text and how it materialised ideas that I did not even knew I had. I loved the directness and that my voice could be so present in the text. I started to write for design magazines and got a lot of positive feedback on my articles, which inspired me to develop this track. As a designer, text is not just a way to communicate a content, it is a material in itself, like wood or textile, that is being shaped, transformed, owned and loved. This tradition completely clashed with the academic way of writing. To submit to CHI (the largest conference in Human- computer interaction) one had to conform to a form for papers that were rigorous. The content had to be structured and presented in ways that left very little freedom to the user. For example, a summary (with slight variations) had to be made three times, in the abstract, the introduction and finally in the discussion. Not only were

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the format extremely rigid. The actual graphic design (if one could call it that) was extremely ugly. It looked (and probably was) like it was designed by a design-illiterate computer scientist on a bad day. Times roman 10p, with tiny columns and no spacing. Arrgggh!!! As a designed object, and artefact, it was bad beyond words. I wrote a paper where I pointed to the incongruence that a conference on usability had a paper format that was user hostile. The paper was rejected and the reviewer did not think I had a point. After years of working with the format I began to understand that it had some qualities. Not the graphic design but how the content was structured, because it ­allowed for a quick reading and comparison of different research projects. It was ­efficient. Today I see the same agony in many PhD students in design. Texts as a ­medium and material is a tool for expression that they have felt at ease with. It expresses issues and ideas that are implicit in objects and it can often help to make the design process and result more precise and reflective. Texts allows for a critical understanding and bridges the abstract with the concrete. But texts in academia have been stiffened into a format that is alien to the plastic mind of designers. Design researchers need to develop their own format for texts that better corresponds to the nature of design without losing the sharpness of analyses. Is the text always needed to make design research? Brainball is a two-player game that measures your brain activity and where you compete in relaxation. A small ball rolling on a table is telekinetically controlled by the players’ brainwaves. I was in the team that created Brainball in 1999 and it is part of my PhD. Brainball is one of Interactive Institute’s earliest and most successful hybrid objects and has been ­exhibited worldwide. Brainball is a critical comment on information technology, stress and at the same time a fascinating experience of controlling one’s mind in a game setting. It has been used as an example on an object that materialises a research question without verbal explanation. Would it even be possible to submit Brainball to a research conference without a text? Sara Ilstedt, Professor in product and service design (Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, School of industrial technology and management) Dissertation: Making sense, design for wellbeing, 2004. Human-computer Interaction, KTH, and Interactive institute, Stockholm

In many ways, text versus artefact was one of the sub-themes running through my thesis. While STS research talks about studying performativity and materiality, it still tends to fall back on written texts for producing and disseminating research; design, meanwhile, is attentive to details in matters of skill and material but often presents difficulties as a means of describing and accounting for what we are busy doing – often resulting in less reflective findings.

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Karen Barad (another inspirational scholar throughout my PhD) questions how language has come to be more trustworthy than matter in shaping our understanding of the world. For Barad, material conditions matter not because they support language, but, rather, through playing an actual part in the formation of the world in its becoming. This is, to some extent, silent knowledge of designers. We know that material conditions play a role in the formation of the world. But how might we improve at communicating this? I strive to get better at appropriating things not as static ­objects but as moving projects constantly in the making, as messy socio-materialities – literally both in text and while making something in wood. Relative to words, which we easier seem to tame, artefacts are a lot messier when it comes to communication. So while text might be a more appropriate medium to describe the world, when it comes to the exploration of worlds, both the one we have and those we might imagine, and the construction of new types of collective life, arte­facts, with all their inherent entanglements, are much more appropriate and exciting. For example, in UA&Us we made a set of artefacts that were meant to allow the aged and wild urban animals to create new relationships with each other as a way to explore a kind of multi-species communication. This, clearly, would never have worked with text. Li Jönsson, Researcher (The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and ­Conservation, School of Design) Dissertation: Design Events – On explorations of a non-anthropocentric framework in design, 2014. The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Copenhagen

The case study for the thesis is Material Beliefs, a public engagement with science and technology project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council,5 in which I acted as project lead with a wide set of collaborators who are credited in the end of project publication.6 The project publication was treated as a companion to the thesis, where the publication is seen to extend and support the visual material included in the thesis. An aim of the thesis is to provide an analytical account of Material Beliefs, where I consider the contributions of project participants, including the roles I took. The thesis discusses a number of episodes from the period of delivering Material Beliefs, where project processes, public events and material outcomes are treated as objects of analysis. To support this enquiry, a range of material generated during the project, including design documentation, photography and notes from fieldwork, emails and interview transcripts, are regarded as data. Thus project episodes and supporting material provide the basis for a reflexive and critical account of a speculative design approach that has become entangled with public engagement with science and technology. I would like to emphasise the manner in which the material described above is being acted upon in different ways at different times, firstly as a resource for doing design work, and later as data for the analysis of activity. Of course these temporali-

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ties are not rigid. During the delivery of the project there were moments of data management that anticipated the later analysis and therefore not of immediate value to design activity, for example the archiving of material. Additionally, there is something to be said about the value of analytical housekeeping for the process of design, in particular I am mindful of the transcription of the interviews with scientists and engineers at the beginning of the project, which certainly acted as triggers for the conceptualisation of proposals, themes and issues that compelled design action. Tobie Kerridge, Researcher (Goldsmiths University of London) Dissertation: Designing Debate: The Entanglement of Speculative Design and Upstream Engagement, 2015. Goldsmiths University of London

What you can refer to as design artefacts were presented in the thesis as design experiments. They were not corporeal embodiments of the knowledge produced, nor were they examples which sought to prove any theory. Rather, they were experiments – means of obtaining knowledge – and therefore presented in the thesis as examples of work which explored the topic. However, although they are far from resembling any finished products, they are often interpreted as such by people outside of the design research community when presented outside of the context of the thesis, and from such a perspective they work poorly. The reason that some of the experiments could be misinterpreted as product proposals is most likely related to the fact that some of them, in particular the later ones, were designed to test certain aspects through design decisions and in the use of the design. In other words, the knowledge generated was related to the ability to see how the design process was connected to the design result. In the thesis, this was discussed with reference to aspects of knowledge which people might only be able to grasp if they are able to use the artefact in their own way for a longer period of time and as part of everyday life. However, it also requires that these people are aware of the design parameters that lead to that particular design. Such knowledge is hard to disseminate and transfer to people. In the case of my own thesis, it was obvious that the projects were dependent on the text with regard to communicating the knowledge generated, in spite of the fact that some parts went missing regardless. Hanna Landin, Senior Lecturer (The Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås) Dissertation: Anxiety and trust and other expressions of interaction, 2009. Department of Computer Science, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg

I collected data from all the participants’ activities that related to design decision-­ making during the NPD process, including emails, photos, components, images and documents from my own design practices and those of other NPD team members.

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Moreover, important information and my own reflections were also ­recorded in a research diary. One of the most interesting findings in this study pointed to the fact that design decision-making activities are very easily forgotten. When I was interviewing participants, almost every interviewee forgot some important design decisions that they had been involved in. Moreover, as an industrial ­designer, I also forgot some of my own decisions when I analysed my decision-making activities. The use of texts and artefacts was thus very important during my analysis, especially the research diary and the images that I produced for the six NPD projects. These were both the focus of the analysis, and helped explain why and how people make design decisions. However, the design practices related to my research project were closely related to aesthetics, i.e. the design of the appearance of the focal products. To me, artefacts are more useful than texts to show what has been made or changed by decision-making in the design process, and can also be used to help trigger the participants’ memories. Yi-Chang Lee, Researcher (ImaginationLancaster, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University) Dissertation: Investigation of Design Decision Making in New Product Development in SME, 2015. Lancaster University

Interaction: The interaction of text and artefact as well as in public performance is a specific focus of my PhD work. To work on a practice-based PhD at the Bauhaus University in Weimar meant creating a strong tie between the scientific theoretical and the artistic aspects. The written text of my thesis fulfils the traditional expectations for a dissertation in the humanities. The artistic usage and the editing of the audio and visual interview recordings led to new formats that proved to be very productive and were embraced by the audience. With designed booklets, the ‘Berliner Zeltlesungen’ and the ‘Weimarer Zeltpodium’, I reached a bigger target audience than just a narrow group of experts, i.e. not just other designers and artists. My work comprises of printed texts, audio texts, transcribed texts, translated texts, edited texts, illustrated texts and recited texts. Artefacts and the human body: For years, I have been very involved with the drawing of the human body and the teaching of artistic anatomy. I produce artefacts like drawings, wire models and other visual material to illustrate my thinking. The body is a communication tool that appears often connected to artefacts (clothes and accessories). It is a gendered three-dimensional object moving in space. Therefore, it produces social meanings that are reflected in images and signs. The human body, gender identities and body language play a large role in communication design, and I see it as my task to continue the research on it. Pictures become artefacts: In my research I selected nudity in pictorial representation. From an image archive in Cairo, I had obtained nude photography of artists’ models in Egypt in the seventies. In order not to violate personality rights I had

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to change the photos. Neither face nor body of the model should be recognisable to the observer. I glued several layers of masking tape on top of the printouts, and thereby the photos became strange objects with a new haptic quality, creating a new message. On another occasion images were projected on the wall of a tent in which I was seated, giving a reading. Tent and image merged temporarily into a new artefact. Fred Meier-Menzel, Senior Researcher (German University in Cairo) Dissertation: From the life model through to the activist – the double colonization of the female body in Egypt, 2014. Bauhaus University in Weimar

Striking the balance between text and artefact (and visual formats for representing the artefact) is an issue every design-oriented PhD project must face. I primarily operate within the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research community, which is comprised of researchers that have many different disciplinary backgrounds and perspectives (the majority of which come from outside of design). In this context, lever­ aging verbal articulation was an effective strategy to make clear to a broader audience how design research artefacts articulate particular theoretical or philosophical ideas and how they inquire into a specific set of research questions. In these ­instances, visual or artefact-oriented articulation was subordinate to verbal articulation. Yet, it is the very specific design choices in materials, form, and computational behaviour that cohesively create a design research artefact that makes them so compelling and enables us to generate new insights and knowledge through encountering their actual, lived-with existence. Verbal articulation can only go so far in communicating the processes and attention to detail that goes into crafting design research artefacts and the character of encounters with them over time. In my doctoral research, I leveraged images and other visual documentation to help speak to these issues, as well as engaging in a handful exhibitions to more broadly open up a sample of the ­design artefacts in my dissertation to a broader audience. The value of using visual ­articulations of design research projects as well as other forms of ­exhibiting design ­research artefacts cannot be understated. However, the ways in which they can be recognised as contributions to one’s doctoral research are not well formulated (at least within HCI). These tensions led to a wide range of conversations over the years with other design researchers about the need for a new, more visually-oriented kind of publication venue for design research work. I co-chaired the 2014 Designing Interactive Systems conference Pictorials track that aimed to provide an initial way of opening up new archival formats for visual articulation of design research projects. There is still a clear need for more mechanisms to support new forms of visual and artefact-oriented knowledge contributions as the design r­ esearch community moves forward. Will Odom, Banting Fellow (School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver) Dissertation: Critically Exploring the Virtual Possession Design Space through Fieldwork and Constructive Design Research, 2014. Carnegie Mellon University

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Using designed objects as results, not only as representations of a solved problem, opened for me new possibilities for reading. I used the designed objects to represent and generate findings that were later translated into a written form. Furthermore, I used artefacts as abstractions of tested ideas to get a different perspective on a problem or on a solution. In the introduction and in the theoretical part of my PhD, I used text to define the necessity of the research, the research and design questions, the theoretical background employed, and to describe the developed methods. In the experimental part, I used the designed artefacts to test my hypotheses and to inform my research question. Using artefacts as a form of a visualisation of a narrative form enabled the representation, interpretation and understanding of clothing variants and clothing types worn by Slovenian mythological creatures. Moreover, the designed objects opened new insights into the design processes and the design components used at the drawing stage. In the discussion part, I used text again to translate and discuss the visual results. The hybrid form of my thesis opened additional perspectives due to the format that allows reading, seeing and a physical experience. Jure Purgaj, Lecturer (Pädagogische Hochschule Wien) Dissertation: Design and Visualization of Garments Worn by Slovenian Mythological Creatures, 2013. Faculty for Natural and Technical Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

The question of text vs. artefact is in some ways trivial, but as design research often illustrates also inherently complex. There is nothing particularly radical about the notion that every ‘chair’ is a definition of what it is ‘to sit’, and that we to learn the meaning of that definition simply by sitting down in the chair and reflecting upon the experience of doing so. While the experience is our own, the definition as such can be shared: if someone asks us, ‘What is sitting?’, we can point to the chair, tell the person what to do and then say, ‘That is sitting’. We can even propose entirely new definitions of sitting in this way; just think about the different more or less experimental chairs produced to find more ergonomic ways of sitting at work, some resembling saddles, some where one sits partly on the knees, etc. You approach the chair in question, sit down and then experience ‘so this is what sitting could (also) be like’. In all these cases, the interaction between text / word and artefact / object is quite straightforward, and our ways of simultaneously relating to both quite mundane. Although research contexts dramatically complicate matters, I’ve tried to build on this basic understanding of the relation between word and object, and in particular the idea that a given design (and the acts of use it proposes) can be considered a ‘definition’ of what that something is. For instance, I wanted to ask questions about what living with emerging networked computational technologies might be like and to partly answer such questions by proposing alternatives in the form of ­design examples; ‘definitions’ in the form of concrete design examples that manifest an alternative understanding of the aesthetics and expressiveness of computa-

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tional things. Based on these experiments, I then went on to articulate a more general approach, a kind of design philosophy for everyday computational things. To me, this represents a basic link between concepts and designs that allows us to ­approach also conceptual matters, such as new definitions, through experimental practice. In an academic setting, however, this is far from trivial, not the least because of the formats used for communicating research and results. Johan Redström, Rector, Professor (Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University) Dissertation: Designing Everyday Computational Things, 2001. Department of Informatics, University of ­Gothenburg

The artefact is a necessary pretext for reflection. Necessary in the sense that, as ­designers, this is how we think: through stuff. This is what we do: we transform ­matter. We give shape to what is not yet there. And as design researchers, we learn how to articulate and motivate our actions. This is a theme that I faced in my thesis; I think that understanding through embodiment is not a specificity exclusive to designers. On the one hand, human beings are intentional beings: we do understand what we can act upon. So, if I want to reflect about something with a person that does not share the same background or disciplinary field, it might be more relevant and profitable to connect through an artefact, rather than discussing on an abstract level. A discussion might give the illusion of an understanding, but acting upon something that is material has more chances of success for creating a common ground of understanding. On the other hand, going back to the theory that inspires me, I do believe that perception is active: we perceive, and therefore conceive, if we act upon something. Sensing is limp, without action. On this line, I chose to realise my thesis as an iPad application, rather than a traditional book. I explored ways to add dimensions to the process of reading the dissertation that could go beyond the linear structure of a book. Readers would be elicited to engage actively, by swiping, clicking and zooming, in making sense of a richly visual and complex narrative. The same goes for design research. A design process is not something that can be described in a scientific way, it can’t be diced into components that can be singularly described in an objective manner and the designerly action is, sans doute, a subjective action, where the designer pours some of himself into the artefact that she produces. This means that describing design has to happen through the product of design: artefacts – particles that, once mapped into constellations of other ­artefacts, contribute to paint the ever-changing galaxy of what design is about. Ambra Trotto, Studio Director, Senior Lecturer (Interactive Institute Swedish ICT, School of Architecture at Umeå University) Dissertation: Rights through Making – Skills for pervasive ethics, 2011. Eindhoven University of Technology

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Artefacts and texts had these alternating roles of inspiring and informing each other in iterative cycles of action (artefacts) and reflection (texts). The first breakthrough in the PhD came while analysing a large collection of artefacts, which were the resulting designs from an educational exercise that served as input for my research. The initial inspiration found in some of the designs and the analysis of the larger collection that followed, led to an article which became the foundation for the tangibility approach to affective interaction. Here the activity of prototyping became a driver for the inquiry into a design research space. The text followed the artefact. The second breakthrough came when the research vehicle, the alarm clock, was designed in line with the foundational tangibility approach. The final prototype became the physical and specific example of the abstract theories that had the form of textual design notions and a theoretical framework. Next to that, the actual working prototype offered a larger visibility of the research to the world outside science, e.g. the design community, design education and industry. In the case of this research it should not only generate new knowledge for designing and researching intelligent products but also the actual product itself. These designs should offer glimpses into the future, demonstrate what is possible and stimulate imagination and inspiration. Here the alarm clock prototype is positioned as a research archetype, i.e. the physical embodiment of the research concepts of ‘freedom of interaction’, and the theoretical framework of my thesis. Stephan A. G. Wensveen, Associate Professor (Eindhoven University of Technology) Dissertation: A tangibility approach to affective interaction, 2005. Delft University of Technology

1 2 3

4 5 6

Rommes, E.: Gender Scripts and the Internet. The Design and Use of Amsterdam’s Digital City, Enschede, Twente University, 2002, p. 17. Barad, K. (2003). ‘Posthumanist Performativity. Towards an understanding of how matter comes to ­matter’, in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28, p. 822. Archer cited in Mareis, C. (2010): ‘Entwerfen – Wissen – Produzieren. Designforschung im Anwendungs­ kontext’, in C. Mareis, G. Joost, and C. Kimpel (Eds.), Entwerfen – Wissen – Produzieren, Bielefeld: ­ transcript, p.  16. Schneider, B. (2007): ‘Design as Practice, Science and Research’, in Michel, R. (Ed.), Design Research Now. Essays and selected Projects, Basel, Birkhäuser Verlag, p. 217. Kerridge, T, Custead, S. et al., 2006. Beaver, J., Kerridge, T., and Pennington, S.: Material Beliefs. London: Goldsmiths, University of London, 2009.

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Visual Stances

Gesche Joost

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Elizabeth ­Sanders

Figure 1: The landscape of design practice and design research as it looked in 2006. This map helps to show the relationships between the design research approaches that were being used in practice. From Sanders, 2006. Figure 2: The evolving landscape of design practice and design research in 2008. Note the proliferation of new methods in the design-led portion of the map. From Sanders, 2008.

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Elizabeth ­Sanders

Figure 3: The 2012 map shows where design practice and research might be heading in the future. The rings ­radiate outward from the current core of designing toward the edges of time. From Sanders and Stappers, 2014. Figure 4: The new hybrid map shows where we might be heading in the future relative to where we were in 2006. This map was made to provoke dreaming about what could be.

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Mike Press

VISUAL STANCES  111

Alain Findeli

The most innovative feature of this contribution may well be the visual thinking exercise that resulted in the proposed model. The 3D dynamic analogy of the water fountain stemmed from a previous 2D static model first presented at the Lisbon DRS conference: the bagel as an image of the lack of theoretical core in design, the hole in the bagel being surrounded by the tasty dough of the related disciplines: engineering, management, human and social sciences. But things have changed ever since, sometimes rapidly: not only has the bagel long been eaten, its hole has started to be filled with remarkable substance thanks to the rather active epistemological groundwork of the design research community. Playing around with this metaphor and its suggestive potential, I tilted the bagel horizontally and transformed it into a public water fountain. It sparked my search for an adequate descriptive model of the theory vs. practice interaction. Here is how it reads. Springing up from the blind spot of human initiative and quality of attention, the water jet traverses the experiential world before becoming visible and active in the conceptual world. Instead of pursuing its way up to the paradise of abstract entities, it drops back down to fecundate the world. Design as a discipline practices intellectual hospitability and therefore welcomes contributions from adjacent disciplines (see day and night views). The two poles of our central dialectics, the field of sensing / thinking (vertical) and the field of making / acting (horizontal), cross each other in the model. Now turn on the water and let the model inspire you. If it doesn’t, try again later!

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Claudia Mareis

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Brigitte Wolf

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Wolfgang Jonas

Figure 1: Research as a sub-category of design, concept map (Jonas) of a text from Ranulph Glanville (1980). Figure 2: David Kolb’s cycle of experiential learning (1984).

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Uta Brandes

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Cameron Tonkinwise

VISUAL STANCES  117

Rachel Cooper

The Evolution/Revolution in Design Research: a Summary

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Arne Scheuermann

VISUAL STANCES  119

Clive Dilnot

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Ranulph Glanville

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Matthias Held

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William Gaver

Bill Gaver in collaboration with his daughter Charlie, aged 8.

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Klaus Krippendorff

This illustration locates Designers as reflective participants in networks of stakeholders without which a ­design could not succeed. Realistic designs create differences for others to live with, whether they suggest small aesthetic improvements of something already known or propose innovations that transform society and culture. As designs (differences) move through this network, they face supporters, critics, beneficiaries, users, and others intent to redefine them. A successful design is always on the move. It cooperates with some artifacts and competes with others until it retires, is consumed, or disintegrates into the ecology. Among the aims of design research are to map the potential stakeholders in a design, explore what is possible, examine which innovations could enroll stakeholders onto the designers’ projects, and systemati­ cally improve available design methods by testing their results through post design research (what hap­ pened to similar designs). All of these aims implicate the effective use of language: conversations, presenta­ tions of compelling proposals, and publications of findings. In sum, design research needs to continually update the design discourse by which designers edu­ cate each other, distinguish themselves from other professionals, work in teams, and collaborate as equals on interdisciplinary projects.

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Michael Erlhoff

Draw the Lines for the Universe of Design Research.

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Borrowing / Stealing

INTRODUCTION Florian Conradi

Certainly, seeing as everything is designed, from that which is there to that which is designed to not be there, it hardly makes sense to isolate design from the world that it inhabits. It is in the most basic sense the making of the world – im / material, un / social, un / political, un / stable and everything in between. Consequently, design cannot quite get around the practice of collecting and informing itself on the basis of knowledge and information from other fields. It is in its nature a creature that inhabits borderlands, an instance of fragments, hybridity and convergence. It informs itself by whatever it needs, whenever it needs it, in order to act contexualised on real world problems. Sometimes even to produce new ones, for the ‘greater good’, of course. Nevertheless, the questions linger: How does the transfer of knowledge, theories and methods from other disciplines inform and get transferred in to design research, and how are these influences utilised and translated? Where is an import of knowledge and heuristics possible and constructive, and where does the translation stop and the difference begin? Are there boundaries to where design research can adopt and amend external approaches, or should this process rather be viewed as an open-ended, borderless research practice? Should it oppose that which is taken for granted, aiming to extend any boundaries of the ideological, dogmatic, conservative or traditional within existing perceptions of scientific validity or rigour? As design research utilises work done by other disciplines, other disciplines are simultaneously utilising design research to further their own work. If it is to collaborate and exchange knowledge with other fields, to what extent must it then respect or share the same rules or scientific understanding – does design research have the confidence to maintain its methodological anarchy? Should it? These considerations lead to contemplations regarding the extent to which the rules of the various other fields should be ‘respected’ – whether we should stay within their proposed parameters of validity and use, or whether we should transform them, appropriate them, take them apart and rearrange them in momentary ad-hoc assemblages that happen to make sense to us. To the design project. It raises the wrangle – when do we ‘borrow’, and when do we ‘steal’? In her text ‘Design research – No boundaries’, Rachel Cooper argues that while design research must be grounded in previous relevant knowledge, that knowledge can come from anywhere. She draws a picture of the emergence of the design research field in Britain as an unfolding process indivisible from other disciplines, almost as a process of defining something specific through and with everything else. Always having operated in context, she demonstrates, design methods have been highly influenced by the existing studies that design converged with to exist. Often

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developing as a consequence of policy change and the emergence of formal criteria, design research had to appropriate methods from other fields, or at least join forces with them in order to get projects funded. Cooper argues that the school of design research to which she belongs has no boundaries – not on the topic, the challenge or the research question, nor on the research methods used. Research methods, she asserts, do not belong to a discipline nor a domain. It is exactly this multi-dimensional perspective that appropriates and facilitates different types of knowledge and methods – the ability to construct artefacts representing rigorous enquiry and thought, which is novel and valuable in the design approach to research. It is this value that can make design central to rethinking and addressing the challenges of the 21st century, not least by being part of removing the existing boundaries between disciplines. Arne Scheuermann then proceeds to raise the question of whether the broad use of theories and methods from other fields is in fact not distinct to design research at all, but rather something that every research field must confront due to the intrinsic thematic overlaps with other fields of knowledge. Every field of research, he proposes, depending on their research subject, will experience the necessity to utilise theories and methods from other disciplines. If so, that which makes design research different is the quantity of influences adopted and the fact that it proceeds in an interdisciplinary fashion through its mixing of methods and methodologies, insisting on the relevance of complex research questions and pursuing topics that remain closed off to other fields. What is vital, Scheuermann advocates, is that in order to even discuss the criteria that the research field uses when transferring knowledge from other disciplines and to understand how this surfaces new knowledge and results, we must engage more pointedly with concrete design projects, a ­discussion which happens too rarely. This discussion must move from speaking self-obsessively at an ideological level, he argues, to utilising concrete projects as a basis for understanding and self-critically reflecting on the field. Clive Dilnot, then, delves straight into the void at the heart of design research, the lack of adequate understanding and vocabulary as to what it in fact is. Design and design research, he contends, are incapable of generating knowing concerning design because there are insufficient intellectual resources within design to generate genuine knowing concerning it. Existing in a categorical no man’s land, it becomes defined more by what it is similar to, but not, than by what it is. This act of borrowing – seeing design-as-like-something (like-art, like-technology, like-science), may not only acutely distort what is being undertaken in the poetic moment in design but can furthermore make this moment impossible to comprehend. ‘Borrowing’ therefore cannot suffice to fill the void; it is in itself an evasion of the void. ‘Theft’ however comes with different obligations and theft is transitive. The ‘academic thief’ steals the tools that will prise open the door to the chamber (the void), seizing concepts, categories and models – ripped from their context, and discards them once the door is open. Hence the value of these tools can be measured only in the insights

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that they offer in opening the impenetrability of design to understanding. Design is already a tool of understanding, and thus, Dilnot argues, it contains the means of its own comprehension. The adequacy of research therefore is ‘merely’ to become as intelligent as that which is addressed. Ranulph Glanville’s text then proceeds to take yet one step further in warning against the import of theories and methods from other disciplines. Research in design, he declares, should not be based on the import of theories from outside the subject, but should examine design activity to construct an appropriate theory built from design. Knowledge arising out of the activity of designing creates knowledge that helps designers act – what Glanville terms ‘knowledges for’ in contrast to the academically more traditional ‘knowledges of’ (what is). The history of design research, he writes, is liberally peppered with approaches imported from other fields, many of which have been of dubious value, some of which have been positively damaging. Approaches brought in to direct studies of designing might have little of nothing to do with designing, and hence they are inappropriate. This provides a rather invisible hazard, as there is always the danger that an imported approach might thoroughly distort the view and understanding of the subject to which it is applied. In treating design as a subject other than itself, he warns us, we risk distorting what design is, making what we examine barely recognisable. We risk forcing an approach on the research that will actually hide from us what is at the heart of design. We are putting the cart before the horse, as he puts it, when we import these approaches – because in order to show that they are appropriate, we may have already twisted our research. So the assumption of the approach itself may in fact have prevented us from seeing the import as inappropriate. His answer to this predicament is design itself: as a subject, a way of acting in its own right, and an undertaking that is worthy of respect and affection. This would mean, finally, that we research it in order to understand it on its own terms, rather than to force it into some other form. The subsequent responses demonstrate the decisions made by researchers during the process of carrying out a practice-based PhD and display a broad array of examples of contextualising, amending, freely remixing, using, reusing and ‘abusing’ influences from outside the field during this endeavour. What they generally advocate, though, is the importance of critically understanding the material one is working with before constructing. These reflections illustrate the value and vitality of using these outside influences, not just as essential contextualisation of the work being produced, but furthermore as a tool to shift design research discourses out of potentially stagnating tracks, and in finding ways of locating and exploring the compelling yet-unknowns. What becomes apparent from these four stances and the responses that follow is that design cannot avoid building on the world and all that is in it as matter. Nonetheless, as we mediate and manoeuvre these numerous knowledge bases of theories, methods, models and materials – we must be mindful of when we are bridging gaps, when we are distorting the view on the very subject and when we should dare to just do.

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DESIGN RESEARCH – NO BOUNDARIES Rachel Cooper

The Evolution of Design Research Today in the academic design community it would appear there is an explosion of design research, over the past ten years there have been numerous international conferences and the creation of a number of new design journals addressing many aspects of the design field. Yet this development of the field of design research has been slowly evolving over the past 50 years. It is impossible here to tell the full story but it is important to describe the trajectory, in order to illustrate why design research has no boundaries. When I began my PhD in the UK in 1978 as a practicing graphic designer, there was little design research in the UK that applied to me (or that’s how it appeared to a young designer embarking on a design PhD). When we studied for our undergraduate programmes in design, we studied techniques, developed our visual skills and problem solving abilities. We turned to text books like Techniques of Typography1 or Basic Design: the dynamics of visual form2 in no way were these publications seen as the outcomes of design research, indeed de Sausmarez in the latter states ‘it does not pretend to be more than an introduction to the field’ however he also says ‘this is a clarification of certain fundamental areas of enquiry’ and indeed it is a well referenced and practice evidenced introduction to colour and form. My argument here is that many of these authors of text books in design were design researchers, drawing on a rich history of their topic, informed by their own experience and practice. Their insights were used by successive generations of designers to develop the field and the practice of design. A revelation occurred in 1967 in this discipline when Herbert Spencer working as a Senior Research Fellow at the RCA in the late 1960s published The Visible Word, Problems of Legibility.3 This volume was an analysis of research into readability and legibility of the printed word and drew on 460 references, these included sources such as the British Journal of Ophthalmology, the Journal of Applied Psychology, School and Society, the US Navel Air Material Centre, the British Journal of Statistical Psychology, Science, Traffic Engineering, Ergonomics and the first issue of the Journal of Typographic research (1967) and so on. The findings provided the designer with evidence-based guidance on typographic design; the book itself was produced in a very ‘designerly’ fashion. As a design researcher Spencer drew on the tried and tested method of a literature review drawing knowledge from any discipline that was relevant to the question in hand, i.e. solving the problem of readability in print. This emphasises my point that design research must be grounded in previous relevant knowledge, that can come from anywhere.

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At the same time in the sixties Bruce Archer was pioneering design research at the Royal College of Art and with his colleagues with whom he formed the Design Research Society in 1967. This school of design research was focused ‘methods’ research, i.e. research that was systematic, evidenced and evaluation based, closely allied to science approaches to research. Which was not unexpected as many of the members of the design research society came to industrial design from engineering and architecture. This school of thought generated publications on design methods, such as J. Christopher Jones seminal book Design Methods 4 that presented a ­review of ‘ancient and modern design methods from craft evolution and design by drawing to the logical scientific and creative techniques that have been developed to assist designers and planners in recent years’. Over the next ten years design methods and design studies grew but still design as a research discipline was questioned. The launch issue of Design Studies in 1979, stated aim was to ‘establish the theoretical bases for treating Design as a coherent discipline of study in its own right’.5 At the same time there was the emergence of the discipline of Design History, (referencing of course the early work of Pevsner and Banham). The Design History Society was founded in Britain in 1977. Many art historians had been drawn into teaching design history to provide relevance the increasing number of design courses in Britiain, this resulted initially in the study of mainly objects and their creators, however it moved quickly into research on design in context of the economic, social, environmental and political environments,6 drawing on methods and work of social scientists, anthropologists, sociologists and well as art historians etc. The sixties also saw the emergence of the design with a social conscience, design has mirrored the great activist movements (green, equality, peace). Indeed, it has been a recurring theme, with designers addressing a range of quality-of-life issues. In the 1960/70s, designers began to actively consider design’s wider implications for society.7 Several approaches emerged, including green design, eco-design, accessibility and inclusivity, all received a great deal of design research interest and activity. The journal Design Issues launched in 1984 recognised this wider context of design So by the late 1970s, early 1980s we have research into design methods and process, we have research into the history of design and designers within the wider context, and we have evidence of the importance of designing for society.

The Revolution in Design Research Around 1980 the design research landscape in Britain started to change quite rapidly. There were two main drivers, perhaps not unrelated to the onset of a long period of conservative government and Mrs Thatcher’s leadership. The first driver was

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from an economic perspective. It was she who held a seminar on design at 10 Downing Street on 25 January 1982 attended by 48 representatives from the design industry, education and government. The aim was to ‘tap into the thoughts of successful men and women who are committed to the idea that good design is the successful cornerstone of successful business’. 8 Thus began a programme of delivering design education to business and business education and delivering business to designers and in design education. A frequent request was voiced for better evidence on the value of design and its contribution to industry and the economy.9 This resulted in the growth of design management as a discipline, and research drawing on research in the field of management, organisational behaviour, marketing and new product development. Here again research methods adopted tended to draw on methods validated in the management studies domain, i.e. quantitate and qualitative data collection and analysis, primarily surveys and case studies. The second driver was the introduction of research assessment. The Thatcher government introduced the first research assessment of universities in 1986 this produced a ranked order table of excellence of research at each university and funding was related to the outcomes. At the same time the move began to take polytechnics (where much of the design education resided in Britain) into the mainstream university sector and to place on them the same criteria for assessment; the production of research output. So by 1992 I along with other colleagues in design in the UK were submitted to the Research Assessment Exercise. And thus began the debate on ‘what is design research’? How do we define it and how do we generate research grant income to support its activity? Many researchers identified with Frayling’s10 paper Research in Art and Design where he posited the simple notion of research into / through / for art and design. While this debate continued through the nineties, design researchers were ‘pitching their wares’. As designers we were only too aware of the value of design to the material world, and because of the design management initiative, to the corporate world in particular. Due to the earlier research on process and methods we ­understood the value of the way designers worked, and what it could bring to other disciplines; especially in industry where the application of holistic and multiple perspectives, of understanding the user, the production requirements and the marketing demands, this led to design research on teams and new product development. Due to the notion of design in context and the activist movements we could see a role for design research in addressing social and environmental challenges. Yet Design, as a category of research did not appear in the conventional sources of government research funding. Therefore much of the design research in Britain in the ’90s and early 2000s funded by government was under categories related to engineering and science (manufacturing and construction) social science (management, sociology) and the humanities (history, languages). Design research funding appeared by stealth, appropriating methods from other disciplines and / or joining forces with other disciplines through applying design practice as a novel method.

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The revelation that design research through practice could be considered as a bone fide part of the portfolio of research methods, was due to the emergence of rigorously explained examples such as one of the first practice led PhDs into prototyping and human-centred design practice,11 the inclusion and acceptance of portfolios of practice within the UK Research Assessment Exercise and the formation of a research council that specifically supported design research, the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Thus began a significant period of growth in design research in Britain, across all design disciplines, especially product, fashion, textiles and design management. ‘The Design Journal’ was founded in 1997 to provide on outlet for this broad portfolio of design research. Stating that it was a ‘refereed journal for all aspects of design … to publish thought provoking work which will have a direct impact on design knowledge and which challenges assumptions and methods … aims to be truly eclectic in its selection of source material and open minded about the evolving role of design in commercial and cultural contexts’. Indeed in its first editorial in 1997, I stated that ‘Design research has to date existed in niches, it has been disseminated under various guises: engineering, CAD, management and art & design. The very nature of design research has been debated for half a century. It is time design research ‘came of age’. The journal saw design as a global topic including in its first issue papers from Scandinavia, Netherland and Turkey. This period saw a turning point design research, first the notion of rigour in the use of double blind refereeing contributions, although not new was now being introduced more widely, not only in design journals but also in conferences. Second by embracing research on any topic related to design and using whatever methods appropriate to the research question. Third the internationalisation of the design research community.

Design Research Today The design researchers and design PhDs that have been working during the past 20 years have moved the scope and practice of design research considerably. Through work on design methods, on the design process, on how designers think has emerged the notion of ‘Design thinking’ and its value to organisations, governments and society. Research on design management has linked design to creativity and innovation in industry. Research on the design user, on the activist movement and design for society, has emerged inclusive design, sustainable design, service design and the application of design to global challenges such as health and wellbeing, climate change and security. Research into design facilitating knowledge generation / crossing disciplines, and applying creative thinking to many chal-

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lenges has resulted in its application in government to support policy.12 Indeed evidence has been generated through design research on the way in which designed outcomes have an effect on people, places and all aspects of the material world. The school of design research to which I belong has no boundaries. No boundaries on the topic, challenge or research question it applies itself to, nor the research methods used. Research methods do not belong to a discipline or domain. What is important is that the criteria by which methods are chosen and applied are transparent, relevant and appropriate to the research topic / challenge / question. Also that they are applied with a high degree of understanding and rigour, and that the insight generated is through critical analysis of the ‘data’ (quantitative, qualitative, practice), is described clearly and its relevance and importance to the wider context explained. In design it is appropriate to apply any research methods appropriate. But we must ensure we are well informed on the original and the relevance of the techniques, weak understanding of methods can result in poor research finding and external criticism. Similarly, with the topics, fields or domains we cross into, we must be clear upon which body of knowledge we are drawing, our understanding of the field must be suitably deep enough to ensure we are not re-inventing the wheel. Just as early work of Spencer13 on readability was rigorously based on a thorough review of literature from other domains so must future work in design draw on the extensive knowledge generated in other disciplines. Design research has established itself as a significant contributor to the academy and beyond. Research into design has been undertaken from other disciplinary perspectives, such as sociology, anthropology, engineering and management, this is no bad thing. But the design approach to research, the multi-dimensional perspective, the facilitation and appropriation of different types of knowledge and methods, the ability to construct artefacts representing rigorous enquiry and thought, is novel and valuable. Design Research has in a sense much of the characteristics attributed to design thinking 14 – an approach that combines empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality in analysing and fitting various solutions to the problem context. There is today a central role in academia for that approach. That is to use design and creativity as a driver for innovation and to pioneer creative ways of moving rapidly from leading edge fundamental research to delivering pragmatic outcomes for society, the economy and for long-term impact, using bridging frameworks that link fundamental research to ‘real world’ issues and contexts. Design can bring new disciplinary mixes to bear on selected societal challenge projects of global significance (from reducing obesity in an ageing urban population to securing the future of food). That said design research must not believe it is the world’s saviour rather it can help to remove the boundaries between disciplines. As Drew Faust, President of Harvard University said at the 2015 World Economic Forum,15 ‘Many research ­universities are organized as they were in the late nineteenth century, with fields and

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­disciplines providing the framework in which teaching and research occur. If we consider some of the most significant and consequential challenges humanity faces, however, the lines drawn between types of knowledge become flexible – or disappear entirely’. We need to shift universities from mainly repositories of knowledge to dynamic sharing platforms. Today researchers and scholars are sharing their discoveries more quickly and more effectively thanks to digital technologies, whilst industry and government look for increasingly rapid transfer from knowledge to impact.16 A further focus has been on creative practice and open innovation such as hacks, maker labs, etc. Design research embraces all of these approaches and can be central to how we rethink universities and address challenges of the 21st century.

       

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Swann, C.: Techniques of Typography, Lund Humphries, London, 1969. de Sausmarez, M.: Basic Design: the dynamics of visual form, Studio Vista, London, 1964. Spencer, H.: The Visible Word, Royal College of Art, Lund Humphries London, 1968. Jones, J. Christopher: Design Methods, seeds of human futures, John Wiley and Sons Ltd, Chichester, 1970.   5 Design Studies Volume 1, Issue 1, Pages 1–64 (July 1979).   6 Sparke P.: Design in context, Quarto Publishing Ltd, London, 1987.   7 Papanek, V.: Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, New York, Pantheon Books, 1971.   8 Cooper D. R.: ‘Managing Design: Directions in British Education’, Design Management Journal, Volume 4, Number 3, pp. 48–54, Summer, 1993.   9 Rothwell, R., Gardiner, P. and Schott, K.: Design and the Economy, London: The Design Council, 1983. 10 Frayling, C.: ‘Research in Art and Design.’ Royal College of Art Research Papers, 1993, 1(1), 1–5. 11 Rust, C. (2004) ‘Design Enquiry: Tacit Knowledge and Invention in Science’, in Design Issues Volume 20 ­Issue 4 pp. 76–85. 12 http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/uk-cabinet-office-launches-new-policy-design-lab 13 Spencer H.: The Visible Word, Royal College of Art, Lund Humphries London, 1968. 14 Kelley, T. and Kelley, D.: Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All, Crown ­Business, London, 2013, pp.19–20. 15 https://agenda.weforum.org/2015/01/three-forces-shaping-the-university-of-the-future/ 16 HM Treasury, Department for Business Innovation & Skills (2014) Our Plan for growth: science and ­innovation.

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THEORIES AND METHODS IN DESIGN RESEARCH – WHY WE SHOULD DISCUSS ­CONCRETE PROJECTS Arne Scheuermann

The Initial Question The topic of this chapter – ‘borrowing versus stealing’ in theories and methods of design research – really invokes a lopsided metaphor. In modern research in general, there exists a fundamental, basic right to borrow the theories and methods of others, incorporating them into one’s own research as long as one correctly states their provenance. ‘Stealing’ in this context means primarily plagiarism – a quite specific offence of which one could hardly accuse the whole field of design research. If we take a closer look at this contrast of ‘borrowing versus stealing’, we notice that it brings into play an external, implicit moral assessment of the subject. It requires us to take a stance, to decide which usages of theories and methods are correct, and which are wrong. This moral discussion, however, distracts us from the actual subject and towards an ideological approach to the discipline. Its spokesmen are clichés – those design researchers with an emphatic enthusiasm for an anarchical laissez-faire approach to a multiplicity of methods on the one hand, and the scholars doggedly battling for the true methodological purity of their established profession on the other. But this polarised thinking is not productive, nor does it correspond to the reality of design research. For this reason, I believe instead that the call to evaluate ‘borrowing versus stealing’ in fact distracts us from the real question. Instead of evaluating usage (i.e. whether or not one should be allowed to do something), what is more interesting is to ask what the user relationship looks like in design research, and how this makes design research different from other disciplines. I therefore recommend that we don’t question this research area in normative terms but instead engage in descriptive observation. I would like to demonstrate the relationships between design research and the paradigms, theories, concepts, methods and forms of the output that it utilises. To this end, I would like to pose a series of new questions that deviate from simply contrasting ‘borrowing versus stealing’.

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What Theories and Methods Are Used in Design Research? Contemporary design research is full of different approaches and paradigms, theories and methods. These may be categorised according to their practical discourse (graphic design, industrial design, service design etc.), the subjects of their research (design processes, design artefacts, designers etc.), their research areas (hospitals, public authorities, workshops, etc.), their empirical relationship between theory and practice (semiotics, psychoanalysis etc. versus rhetoric, pragmatism etc.) or their historical position (Arts & Crafts – Bauhaus – hfg ulm, etc.). To develop my proposal, I suggest ordering these according to their disciplinary origins. In the practice of design research, this would allow us to describe three groups of theories and methods (and mixtures of them): a) Theories and research methods derived from other disciplines in the humanities and sciences, such as qualitative social research, systems theory or ergonomics b) Everyday theories and design methods that are derived from design practice and can be made fruitful for design research, such as scenario, mapping and drawing techniques1 c) Design theories and design research methods that originally come from the history of design research (young though this history is), such as cultural probes or rhetorical design analysis These three areas, put together, form the theory and methodological knowledge of design research.2 (Figure 1 on page 119)

What Is the Relationship Between these Theories and Methods and the Research Topic? The projects unfolding under the umbrella of ‘design research’ are extremely varied, from doctoral theses on the design history of ‘Swiss style’ to the research-supported remodelling of waiting rooms in a hospital emergency ward and the visu­ alisation of pedestrian flows for a railway company. In general, however, we can observe that the research subject in design research comes from one of two different areas: either the research subject is derived from the design discourse itself or it lies outside. In both cases the theories and methods of other disciplines play a role. When the research subject originates from within the design discourse – such as if one wants to investigate the impact of colour on environmental information design – then we have to acknowledge that other disciplines, too, already offer ­concepts and methodologies that can be applied (in this case: art history, commu-

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nication sciences, cognitive psychology, rhetoric, etc.).3 But if the research subject stands outside the field of design – such as when investigating how to design a hospital bed – then it brings its own discourse of theories and methods from other disciplines that ought to be taken into consideration. In this case, these would be from the nursing sciences, medicine, materials sciences, etc. A proximity to other disciplines, or even a close collaboration with them, is in each case intrinsic to design research – precisely because design has a practical aspect that can draw on many things. (Figure 2 on page 119) The ‘borrowing’ relationship that arises in this manner is by no means a specific, qualitative characteristic of design research. Every research field overlaps thematically with other fields of knowledge and for this reason: depending on the research subject, it will experience the necessity of utilising the theories and methods of other disciplines. Even neuroscientists have to acknowledge that aspects of their research subject, the brain, have already been investigated by biologists, chemists, etc. And if a literary historian examines a text written at the time of the Thirty Years’ War, his own textual analysis will naturally have to incorporate results and methods from historiography. What makes design research different from other disciplines in this regard is not the fact that it makes use of other disciplines, but the quantity that it adopts, as others have already observed.4 A superficial glance might even suggest that design research has not even made any original contribution to the discipline at all.

How Is Design Research Different from Research in Other Disciplines? The established scholarly disciplines have a large field of paradigms, theories, concepts, methodologies and output forms that have grown over decades or even centuries. Their status is canonical; research in these disciplines can refer to this canon today, whether building on it or trying to refute it. Our own field of design research (see the bottom right in Figure 1 on page 119) – in other words, the field that belongs to design research alone and is a product of its own discourse – is still relatively small because design research is so young. No authoritative canon exists that has grown over the decades or the centuries with which one might work, and this has a whole series of reasons. Design only became a discipline in the 20th century; design research was only institutionalised in the 1960s; the quality criteria of the discourse are still being discussed, decades after that institutionalisation; and the connection between design practice and design research is still being questioned.5 Unlike medicine, for example, in which practice has to orient itself closely to the results of research, practice and research in design still largely enjoy a parallel existence, independent of one another. This disorderly state of affairs in a young discipline that is still growing is difficult for some contemporary design researchers to endure and thus leads to the

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above-mentioned ideological debates about the correct or incorrect use of thirdparty theories and methods. We can at least state the following without bias: the current canon in design research is derived in a large part from design without research and research without design, and is only derived from design research itself to a small degree. This is neither good nor bad in and of itself, but simply typical for a young discipline. If we cast a glance at other young disciplines – such as nursing sciences or environmental sciences – we see a similar picture. Furthermore, this relationship could actually be made beneficial if applied in a constructive fashion, also for the development of design research itself.

What Are the Possible Criteria for the Use of Theories and Methods in Design Research? If, as suggested, the current canon in design research is to a large extent design without research and research without design, both areas can offer us valuable criteria by which we might assess our theories and methods meaningfully. When we compare Figures 1 and 2, it becomes clear that the appropriateness, fitness and ­coherence of a theory or methodology can be discussed in each case in relation to the research subject and the research question. The research subject leads us to a specific methodology, necessitates a specific research status and enables specific output forms. And this interaction between research subject and methodology, and research status and output form, helps us to define the research question. Thus, valuable criteria for design research can be gained from both areas. In research without design (in the humanities and sciences) we are shown, for example, what role scholarly accuracy can play – in other words, an attitude characterised by transparent and self-reflective work.6 In my experience with a wide variety of design research projects, it has proven helpful to formulate a research question at the beginning of the research and to utilise precise concepts in doing so. Similarly, it can help us to clarify the research question if we know the current state of research in our field,7 and it has proven helpful to describe our methods and our procedures in order to make our research comprehensible to others. Design without research, namely design practice, can in turn allow us to develop research questions that are foreign to the sciences and that can lead to new research subjects within design. Methods of design practice can also be adapted to research purposes, and the practical field offers many new output forms for presenting research results that cover a whole range, from scholarly articles to design artefacts and advanced interactive knowledge visualisations. In these possibilities for interaction, design research can acquire criteria relevant to its own discussions – criteria derived both from established theories and

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research methods of other disciplines and from the often implicit theories and practical methods of design practice. But in my opinion, these discussions should be carried out using concrete examples – on the basis of a concrete research project with its own research question, its own research design and its own results. But it is my observation that such discussions are conducted too rarely in design research today. I detect a lack of engagement with concrete projects and thus also a lack of engagement with the use of theories and methods of design research. But what is the reason for this?

Where Is Our Engagement with Concrete Projects? Design research is always strong and unique when it links the two above-mentioned areas in a meaningful manner. By mixing methods and methodologies, by proceeding in an interdisciplinary fashion and by insisting on the relevance of complex research questions, design research can pursue topics that remain closed off to other disciplines. And as I have already described elsewhere, I would like to open up these thematic areas wide enough to cover the societal questions of our day, even down to issues of politics and social systems.8 At the same time, this breadth of research topics can make it more difficult for a disciplinary canon of design research to emerge that can be recognised both within and without as representing the current state of the discipline. The topics grouped under the concept of ‘design research’ are too broad, while the theories and methods applied are too varied. And there is a further reason for design to ­resist becoming a ‘discipline’: because we can with good reason question whether design as an activity and as a concept is not in fact an exceptional case among the disciplines and that design research should therefore proceed along its own, special path, withdrawing from the rules of disciplinarisation that were dominant in the 20th century, and consciously rejecting the notion of a canon. The breadth of the research field, the exceptionalism of design and design research, the heterogeneity of its theories and methods all lead to a literature of design research that is full of contributions, similar to this text, in which the discipline engages with itself. However, truly project-based core texts are thin on the ground – texts that do not hover around our own discipline but that open up strong, research-based positions, that generate knowledge for design by means of concrete examples, and that are read beyond a small circle of initiates. In the fascinating volume Design Research Now: Essays and Selected Projects that was published in the present series in 2007,9 the relationship of essays to projects is nine to four – a proportion that can be found repeatedly, I believe, in the whole discourse since the 1980s, also at conferences such as those of the Design Research Society or in journals such as Design Studies. Just imagine if two out of three articles in the field of history studies were devoted

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to discussing the disciplinarisation of historiography, or if two out of three articles in particle physics were dedicated to investigating what physics is actually meant to be researching. Or, to put it another way: in design research, we still lack articles that demonstrate the same attention to precise detail in their research questions, the same rigour in their methods and the same precision in their results that we find, for example, in a discourse analysis of the minutes of the negotiations for the 1918 Armistice of Compiègne in the field of history studies, or empirical research into the polarisation of nuclear spins in particle physics. Such articles do exist in design research, but there are too few of them. Design research lacks both project reports and the discussions that these can prompt. Only when this lack is addressed can we begin to discuss theories and methods that need the context of a project for us to judge their appropriateness, fitness and competence, just as they also need the interaction between research subject and research question. It is high time that design research engages in greater discussions about its own quality, divorced of all ideological bias, using concrete examples to lead a ­debate about the criteria by which specific theories and methods might be used to answer specific research questions. In the process, as we have shown, it can profit from the criteria to be found in design practice and in other discourses in the humanities and sciences. A design research that is open to this degree, that is aware of itself and that dedicates itself to a critical discussion of its own projects would no longer have to answer the question as to whether it should ‘borrow or steal’, but could subtly contribute to the process of disciplinarisation and to the consolidation of design research. It’s time for us to begin talking about projects in design research.

1

2

3

4 5

6 7 8 9

We can find collections of research methods for design practice in Visocky O’Grady, Jennifer, Kenneth ­Visocky O’Grady: A Designer’s Research Manual, Beverly / MA: Rockport, 2006, and in Martin, Bella, Bruce Hanington: Universal Methods of Design, Beverly / MA: Rockport, 2012. Further contributions to the categorisation of theories and methods of design research can be found, e.g. in Laurel, Brenda, Design Research. Methods and Perspectives, Cambridge / MA: MIT Press 2003; for a selection of several theoretical areas and methods of design research, see Brandes, Uta, Michael Erlhoff, Nadine Schemmann: Designtheorie und Designforschung, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink 2009; for t­ heories of design in general, see Mareis, Claudia: Theorien des Designs zur Einführung, Hamburg: J ­ unius, 2014. In this regard see, for example: Scheuermann, Arne: ‘Graphic Design as Rhetoric – Toward a New Framework for Theory and Practice in Graphic Design’, in: Triggs, Teal, Leslie Atzmon (Eds.): The Graphic Design Reader, London: Bloomsbury, 2016 (in press). See Bürdek, B. E.: Design – auf dem Weg zu einer Disziplin, Hamburg, Verlag Dr. Kovaç, 2012, 10f. For the establishment of design as a discipline, see especially Schultheis, Franz: ‘Die Disziplinierung des Designs’, in: Swiss Design Network (Ed.): Forschungslandschaften im Umfeld des Designs (= Zweites Design Forschungssymposium), Zurich 2005, 65–83. Regarding this relationship, see also: Glanville, Ranulph: ‘Re-searching Design and Designing Research’, in: Design Issues 15:2 (1999), 80–91. This is why I am using footnotes in this text. See www.arnescheuermann.de, 2002; accessed on 04.06.2015. Michel, R. (Ed.): Design Research Now. Essays and Selected Projects, Basel / Boston / Berlin: Birkhäuser ­Verlag, 2007.

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IN PRAISE OF THEFT: ‘THE PLAY WITH BORROWING VS. STEALING FROM OTHER FIELDS’ … OR, THE PROBLEM OF DESIGN RESEARCH Clive Dilnot

1. … following the maxim that only exaggeration per se today can be the medium of truth

Theodor Adorno, ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’1 As I received it in the letter of invitation to participate in this project, the title of the section of this book that I was invited to contribute to – ‘The Play with Borrowing vs. Stealing from Other Fields’ – reproduced here also as the partial title of this paper, has a curious ring to it. Nonetheless, even if inadvertently, the question touches on a real problem. We might even say that it cuts to the heart of the problem in design research. For there is a curiosity in design research and that is whether in fact there is design ­research at all. Now since in fact we can see that in various places there is something called ‘design research’ ( – there is funded activity; there are doctoral students; there are publications) we have to pose the question slightly differently. The question today is not if or whether design research (though given the global scale of design activity research into design is miniscule in comparison) but whether what we call ‘design research’ amounts to anything like a mode of knowing. Put crudely this is the question whether ‘design research’ is anything other than, in the vernacular, a ‘hill of beans’ – in other words, whether, in terms of knowledge or, much more significantly as a mode of understanding (the latter of course infinitely me difficult that the former) it amounts to anything at all. By ‘mode of knowing’ and ‘mode of understanding’ I mean design research as an adequate mode of knowing / understanding at once concerning design (that it offers what I would call the depth understanding of design) and as a mode of knowing per se, a means of knowing the world as we encounter it today, a world that is, to remind you, for us, now, essentially the world of artifice. We live, to emphasise the point, in a world whose horizon, medium and prime condition of existence is artificial. The artificial, in an essentially and not merely ­superficially sense, is the effective totality of what we encounter. We do not get to ­nature today except through artifice. The idea of an unmediated relation is an illusion. The artificial is in turn the mediation of all that we do. Even subjective rela-

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tions now pass through the artificial. No date occurs without the mediation of the i-phone. It if were argued that this has always been the case, that to be human is to be so only through artifice this merely re-doubles the emphasis. The onset of the world as artificial makes the latter the historical as well as the anthropological condition of our being. This means that essential subject matter of design, that which it addresses, is two-fold: the practices of designing (using this term ‘practices’ in the widest possible sense, which includes also the knowledge that design contains, embodies and is capable of producing) and the ‘condition’ of artificial and of artifice as a whole (which means its possibilities, that which defines the artificial). Herbert Simon knew this many years ago. In the preface of the second edition of The Science of the Artificial he says this (he is discussing the evolution of his own thought which began with sociological and psychological studies into administrative behaviour): ‘… finally, I thought I began to see in the problem of artificiality an explanation of the difficulty that has been experienced in filling engineering and other professions with empirical and theoretical substance distinct from the substance of their supporting sciences. Engineering, medicine, business, architecture, and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent not with how things are but with how they might be in short, with design. The possibility of creating a science or sciences of design is exactly as great as the possibility of creating any science of the artificial. The two possibilities stand or fall together’ (p. xiii). From his own perspective – Simon is examining the artificial / design though the lens, simultaneously, of technology, cognitive science and quantitative social science – he has no hesitation in spelling out the two methodological issues that then arise: • ‘The contingency of artificial phenomena has always created doubts as to whether they fall properly within the compass of science. Sometimes these doubts refer to the goal-directed character of artificial systems and the consequent difficulty of disentangling prescription from description. This seems to me not to be the real difficulty. The genuine problem is to show how empirical propositions can be made at all about systems that, given different circumstances, might be quite other than they are’ (p. xi). • ‘If science is to encompass these objects and phenomena in which human purpose as well as natural law are embodied, it must have means for relating these two disparate components’ (p. 3). The first of these problems relates at once to the nature of design and of the artificial – both are ‘sciences’, practices, conditions, of the possible. In a deep sense it is the possibility of the knowledge of possibility that each, cognitively, offers.

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The second problem echoes design itself. If design is always the negotiation of incommensurable demands then knowledge of design (and the artificial) is always also, in a non-trivial sense, the ‘relating of disparate components’. One translation of these two problems, let us call it the strong thesis of design understanding, is to see that this second methodological point throws attention not only on the negotiation of ‘purpose’ and ‘law’ (the latter of which is severely tested in the artificial in any case) but on the means through which this negotiation occurs namely the configuration of things. It is through the configuration of things that we grasp how negotiation of incommensurability occurs and thus, in potential, grasp something of the nature and character of the possible not just in or of the artificial but today as the artificial. To grasp how possibility can be configured (design is its experimental laboratory) is today to grasp something of the possibility of our times; times whose future depends entirely on how we understand how to negotiate the ‘disparate components’ of possibility. One should keep in mind here Simon’s later comment in The Sciences of the Artificial that we ‘can envisage a future … in which our main interest in both science and design will lie in what they teach us about the world and not in what they allow us to do to the world. Design like science is a tool for understanding as well as for acting’ (p. 164). If we now take Simon’s overarching thesis seriously – as I would insist we must – then if design research wishes to be taken as ‘like-science’ (an unreasonable ambition for many reasons but one that haunts what passes for design research today) or if we do no more than want to make a serious inquiry into this phenomenon, then the entire point of investigation into design, of seeking for understanding of what design ‘is’ – what it does, what its capabilities are, how it is, how it might be – is at the same time to explore and investigate the artificial. Conversely, and within the same process, to think the artificial is to think design. Or, to put it slightly differently, it may be that there is no way of thinking what the artificial ‘is’ – what it does, what its capabilities are; how it is, how it might be – without thinking, i.e., comprehending, design. In other words, if we, collectively, as humans, do not understand design, then we cannot understand the artificial, that which we both made and that which is now the (not necessarily hospi­table) ambience within which, through which, in relation to which, we exist. But equally, without thinking the artificial, without comprehending it, without grasping what, as world, it opens to, we will not comprehend design.

2. This seems to be the point we have now reached – except that, in the majority, all of this remains below thought. It may be felt as the kind of background ambience against which design research and design thinking takes place. But it does not

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come to scientific consciousness. Much less, as we see daily in the extraordinary mis-management of the artificial that distinguishes economic and political life, does it enter the social world, save again as felt experience, sometimes vivid (especially as the felt sense of catastrophe) but intellectually all but incoherent to thought. This is no different even in areas of digital practice and thought. It is possible indeed that here the levels of objective and subjective stupidity are even higher. Bedazzlement – and the profit motive – does not make for clear thought. How does this bear on design research? The simple answer is that design research exists within the world. It is not immune to the generalised conditions of mind. Indeed, the condition is, if possible, worse. Design has never freed itself from naivety – commercial, obviously, but also in terms of mind. Apprehensive perceptual intelligence is naturally impatient of analysis. Systemic inquiry does not come easy. Felt perception alights on commonplace metaphors – or in research on the given models (after all, they save the trouble of thinking for oneself). For a time, in design, this did seem to matter. Design was little concerned with thought. Neither designers nor non-designers thought it should be. There was especially no idea that design might itself be a subject for thought: that, for example, as a ‘socially significant activity’ it might itself reward social or economic inquiry. Even less was the idea, and not only outside design, that the design activity (‘design thinking’) could itself be a mode of apprehension and even of intellectual inquiry and understanding – at extreme could itself be a mode of knowing. If some intelligent designers have certainly felt the possibility of this, if one can sense it, time and again, lying behind sometimes casual comments on design (and more recently one gets brief but strong expressions of this – for example, Gui Bonsiepe’s little essay ‘The Virtues of Design’ whose second and sixth virtues extol the virtues, respectively, of intellectuality and knowledge or theoretical interests2) – still, in the main, this idea has historically stayed outside of design and it still essentially remains outside both practice and research. Where this question matters today, after nearly fifty years of design research in its modern forms, is that as design research seeks for justification (i.e. for funding) it has so far failed to answer the question as to what it is, within the current conception, methodology and approach of ‘design research’ that has prevented it from so far making any genuine contribution to understanding? That this is the case is not really in doubt. When not trite, the results and achievements of the vast majority of design research – especially that undertaken by wholly under-prepared and under-educated doctoral students working in intellectually timid and fearful and increasingly operationally focused universities – are at best ‘modest’. More seriously, the hopes and arguments that someone like Ranulph Glanville put forward that design is research and is therefore in itself a mode of knowing that can give rise to distinct modes of articulable knowledge, remain still-born.

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Even less has design research so far shown, intellectually, and even practically, that it is capable of opening to a distinct mode of understanding concerning the world. What is the overall problem here, and what is the issue within the wider problem of design research and design knowing that this title puts its finger on? We can name one aspect of this problem in this way. On one side, as currently construed, design research is incapable of generating knowing concerning design because there are insufficient intellectual resources within design to generate genuine knowing – understanding – concerning it. On the other hand it is impossible to understand design adequately, to model it well, by ‘borrowing’ from other disciplines. For the first, and more or less at the beginning of the modern period of design research we have the lament offered by the veteran industrial designer Jay Doblin: ‘Although I designed hundreds of successful products for major corporations, it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t understand what I had been doing …’ (‘What Designers Do’, 1980). Thirty-five years later the complexity of the tacit knowing and the levels of implicit understanding involved in the design act (let alone how the act is imbricated in the complexities of an economy that is (by necessity) perpetually ­invoking and limiting both, ‘design’) remain essentially unarticulated. Design research has scarcely penetrated the act. The reasons for this are multiple. But a not insignificant element, and one that should be taken more regard of in research, is that design is almost completely without intellectual resources for thinking itself – beginning, of course, with the word ‘design’ which does not explicate anything and is really only a portmanteau term to designate something (an act, a process, a thing, a value) that is like but not quite like, ‘x’ or ‘y’ or ‘z’. In this equation x or y or z are all that are like but still not design – as art is like, but in the end not-like, design; or technology is like, but is still not in the end, like design; or that design is like, but is still not identical with, planning. But there is an even deeper paradox (and weakness) about the term ‘design’ when considered from the side of thought. Although design stands, indisputably, for an affirmative act (it is always and indispensably an affirmation of the possibility of making interventions into a situation – Simon’s famous and still best-of-all definition’s applies) and although we think of design as a replete, even over-full, ‘over-determined’, concept, in fact we ­experience it in thought closer to the way in which Rosalind Krauss argues, in a seminal essay, that sculpture was experienced from the early 1960s onwards ‘more and more as pure negativity … a kind of black hole in the space of consciousness, something whose positive content was increasingly difficult to define, something that was possible to locate only in terms of what it was not’. At extreme, she says, (she illustrates some work by Robert Morris from 1962) sculpture at this point had become ‘pure negativity: the combination of exclusions’.

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It was what was in a room that was not architecture, it was on a building that was not the building, it what was in the landscape that was not the landscape. In short, she says, it had ceased being a positivity and had at this point ‘entered a categorical no-mans land’,3 [my emphasis]. Krauss’s point comes in the middle of a complex argument and it cannot for us be taken too literally. But while it will be immediately said that in regard to design this exaggerates the case, if we think of the question of design conceptually and not empirically (as in regard to research we must) the point of the observation becomes apparent. That design exists, very largely, within a categorical no-mans land is the case. This becomes apparent the moment that one looks at the banality of ‘design thinking’, at the lack of depth intellectual core within fields like design history and design studies, at the lack of sophisticated models of design. But it becomes apparent most of all in relation to the second problem listed above as seen across the last fifty years or so, and this is the history, the tradition even, of ‘borrowing’ models for design thinking especially, if somewhat ironically, in design research. The problem is that the use of metaphor (borrowing) in design thinking meaning to see design-as-like … as ‘like’ art for example (the old art-school standby) or as ‘like’ technology (the white hope of the 1970s and 1980s and continuing its baleful influence across the last few decades) or (especially in research) as (methodologically) ‘like’ science, has proved vastly less effective for thought than its various proponents have hoped. Softer alternatives have scarcely fared better. Surprisingly few insights are gained for design understanding from the digital realm – which in practice shows on almost every occasion that it does not understand design. The legendary incomprehension of design by the humanities is shown merely by looking at discipline of design history. Worst of all today is the kind of pseudo technical- or pseudo management- or social- ‘science’ that is seemingly the first and last refuge, and the perpetual fallback, of the design PhD. (Almost none of which qualify, significantly, either as science or as understanding.) Of course design is, in part, ‘like’. The old label, ‘applied art’ is not as stupid or as embarrassing as many now think. Because, for objective reasons design makes consistent use of poetics, and at times makes use of the spaces generated by what we call ‘art’, then this notion can be both historically true (let us say, posters of the period between the wars) and in limited applications, revealing. But that a component of design can be construed as, say, ‘applied art’, and that the analogy can at times appear persuasive in a limited purview, does not make ‘art’ a model for design understanding nor does it permit the metaphor to be essentially revealing of the nature and character of design action or of designed things. To put this at its strongest, Art as metaphor for design does not reveal what is other than art in design. Conversely, the truth of design cannot be discovered in Art.

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The same applies to the other models from which design enjoys borrowing. Thus even construed as action research, technical, operational models provide little more than methodologies of testing. But there is also a second level of problem with these metaphors. Even where it most appears to apply the analogy can be misleading – and seriously so. Thus, for example, stick for a moment with aesthetics, to assume that what we can call the ‘poetic’ moment in much design configuration can only be understood through a concept of ‘art’ conceived on the model and experience of post-Kantian (modern) art may be (almost certainly will be) not only to distort, even acutely, what is being undertaken in the poetic moment in design, but to make the latter impossible to comprehend. Thus what is most essential, in this case the nature of particular quality that the poetic takes and what it (subtly) opens to in designed things, may be made, through analogy and metaphor, through the ‘borrowing’ of models, all the more impossible to comprehend. Here the analogy creates a blind-spot: what is in fact occurring in the configuration of that which we are seeking to understanding cannot be comprehended because even as we gaze at or handle or participate in the results of that activity it passes out of understanding. If the role of understanding is revelation, the discovery and articulation of that which is hitherto unforeseen or ­insufficiently brought to consciousness, then this aspiration is, through analogy, thwarted. Neither ‘science’ nor genuine understanding can on this basis be erected. There is a final set of problems with analogies and metaphors. Both are borrowed. Hence, a debt is owed. This debt is paid for by fidelity to the model. But this only means that analogy (‘art’, ‘science’, ‘technology’, ‘method’, ‘research’ …) is held to all the more firmly that evidence shows its limits. As with scientists who hold all the more rigidly to a paradigm as experimental results begin to run counter to it – and who seek to devise ever more complex ways of (artificially) integrating that which cannot be integrated – so the obligation that the analogy offers is twisted out of shape to ‘fit’ the new reality. This accounts, for example, in design research, for the stretching of the ‘scientific’ notion of research to the point where the latter can scarcely be said to exist, except in a kind of travesty, in which form is obeyed while the substance (all that is the actuality of scientific inquiry, including the form and manner of the questions that science asks) is not. To summarise these points: The objective issue, which the problem of the metaphor never gets around, is that while, in certain circumstances, one may analogise, the analogy is never more than that. It may point towards significant factors in the practice, but because, by definition, it never touches on what is essential, it provides no basis (it offers no ‘mechanism’) for explanation and thus does not reach the level of a true science. Hence models based on metaphor cannot, under any circumstances, provide a sufficient base for knowledge, let alone for adequate understanding. Truth is not reached.

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The proof of this in practice is not only the paucity of the knowledge that emerges from such models, it is that in every case the conceptual framework of ­design remains intact as lack. The very problem of design research is this lack, this void at the heart of design. For all its apparent confidence (which only hides the knowledge that something conceptually is amiss) design today is closer to Krauss’ ‘black hole in the space of consciousness, something whose positive content [is] … difficult to define’ than to a positivity. Like sculpture in the 1960s, design lives in a categorical no-man’s land, ambiguous in location, in a fog (still) concerning, conceptually and even practically, what it achieves. And this in the end of course is what matters. To say this is not to valorise design, it is to do the exact opposite. It is to ask, without assumption, what design achieves, which means to comprehend how design ‘works’: in what manner is the act of design transformative? What are the agencies of transformation within the act? What indeed is the content of design – where the answer is not ‘design’? One thing is certain though. ‘Borrowing’ cannot suffice to fill the void. Borrowing indeed is an evasion of the void.

3. What then of the other moment of the title, ‘stealing from other fields’? Let us remind ourselves of the problem. To re-state, in slightly different form, what was just asserted. At the heart of design is a void. This void enters into it every attempt to think it. The void is the absence of adequate understanding; the absence of an adequate vocabulary as to what design ‘is’, what it consists of, what work it achieves. We are aware, I think increasingly so, that the word ‘design’ is itself a problem, that it is a portmanteau word that covers much, and defines nothing. It is a subaltern word, it is always ‘less than’. To say ‘design’ is to say less than ‘technology’. To say ‘design’ in an academic context is to invite derision or incomprehension – and the assumption of the taint of commerce. Against art, as we know, ‘design’ has no standing. The word has thus no purchase. This is precisely why design has been such an avid borrower of more respectable models of thought. The collapse of these analogies – and today we must accept that ‘borrowing’ is at an end (there can be no more) – means that design must face, perhaps, for the first time the void at its heart. Yet if it is impossible to understand design adequately, to model it well, by borrowing from other disciplines, we are equally incapable of generating knowing concerning design because there are insufficient intellectual resources within design to generate genuine knowing – that is genuine understanding – concerning it. What then, in relation to this void, of theft? Does ‘theft’ involve the same set of obligations as ‘borrowing’? Clearly, not: the thief is as without conscience as he (or she) is without brotherhood.

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Yet as we see from the actions of the major banks across the last decade, theft and evasion, carried out at sufficient scale, is respectable. Since universities, as we have noted, are today encouraged daily to be more business like, then academics must learn from the banks. If private interest, under the legitimating umbrella of profit, gives confidence for illegal activity, academics must draw on their legitimating umbrella (‘knowledge’) to find the confidence for ‘theft’. And after all we should remember, at the back of all this, that it was excessive borrowing that induced the financial crisis. By the scale of this what is academic ‘stealing’? But what, for design research, is stolen? Of what point is the theft? What is stolen, or what should be stolen, are tools: tools to prise open design. Here the design researcher is directly in the position of the thief (or the archaeologist). Both seek to find ways to unlock the vault in order to discover the riches (?) that may be contained there. The difference (it is crucial) is that the researcher steals first and foremost the tools that will prise open the door to the chamber. The metaphor is hopelessly inexact of course, but that is the point. Yet the idea of seeking to opening the vault contains a truth in another sense. The borrower is not a thief. But that is only because the borrower wishes to put contents into the vault without going through the bother of unlocking it and examining what is then revealed within. The academic thief, by contrast, wants the tools to open the chamber (and will do anything to get them) but he or she discards them once the door is open. All attention is then on wondering concerning the contents within. The contrasts continue: the academic borrower does not wish to be surprised. The thief only bothers with stealing the keys in order to be surprised. The borrower has already lost curiosity (hence we know their research dies). The thief lives only for curiosity (which is why their research is perpetually incomplete). The borrower is afraid of disorder, and wants the map of the territory complete as soon as possible (no matter if it misses much of what is truly essential). The thief would be disappointed if things were not in disorder, if at first it cannot be decided what, in the attic, is treasure. The thief will be disappointed when the map is complete. In fact, will insist that it never can be; that there are (still) regions to explore. The first wants foreclosure (and certainty). The second can live the Open. The first is inimical to design. The second operates in direct imitation of design. Doubtless, like all contrasts, this one is romanticised. Yet it still tells us things. We come back to the Ur problem: We are incapable of generating knowing concerning design because there are insufficient intellectual resources within design to generate genuine knowing – that is genuine understanding – concerning it. Borrowing does not solve this problem. The metaphors, not so ultimately, curtail. ‘Theory’, thought in the same way, has the identical consequence. The only stance that can be practiced in such circumstances is the seizure of concepts, categories, models, ripped from their context. Their value is measured only in the insights they offer in

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opening the impenetrability of design to understanding. The design thinker / researcher is a ‘thief’ because he or she has no choice: the keys are not obvious; they do not announce themselves in advance. No compilation holds them in neat order. They are found, usually, in part by accident. One stumbles across them in a flash of insight. One mis-interprets, deliberately. All disciplines are equal in their potential capacity to yield surprising perspectives. Surprising, because the discovery of design is precisely that. One is stalking a territory. Discovery is the ethic here, because discovery is the bringing to light, or better to articulacy, of hitherto unforeseen or un-conceptualised moments. This justifies the work. But for this reason there is no method, no bibliography, for theft. Theft happens in the process of curiosity. It is the latter that provides the essential drive. One wishes to understand; to make a language. So theft is transitive. One seeks to speak design. The impossibility of so doing is merely the task never to be overcome. The clue however lies in Simon’s line: ‘Design, like science, is a tool for understanding as well as for acting’. This means: ­design is already a tool of understanding. It thus contains, as understanding, the means of its own comprehension. The adequacy of research is ‘merely’ to become as intelligent as that which is addressed. This task is translation. It requires its own exegesis. In the end of course both ‘borrowing’ and ‘stealing’ are radically inexact metaphors. Neither gets at what is required. The only value of this short paper is if it has cast doubt (once again) on the objective inadequacy of ‘borrowing’. ‘Stealing’ is even less adequate as a metaphor, yet, oddly, it reveals certain necessities about the intellectual process of becoming adequate to design.

1 2

3

Adorno, T., ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’, in Henry Pickford, trans. Critical Models (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) p. 99. Originally given by Bonsiepe as a contribution to the symposium ‘design beyond Design … ‘ in honor of Jan van Toorn, held at the Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, November 1997. The full text is available at http://www.guibonsiepe.com/pdffiles/virtues.pdf. Krauss, R.: ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, in Hal Foster (Ed.) The Anti-Aesthetic (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983) p. 36.

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1

Ranulph Glanville Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.

Samuel Johnson, quoted in a Hewlett Packard advertisement. Abstract: Architecture is positioned as a type of design, and design is characterised as a verb (rather than a noun), a way of acting carried out by a designer / actor, which is circular and conversational in form. The relationship between design and research is explored, particularly with an eye to doctoral study: research is seen as designed and even as a design activity, and the activity of researching is indicated as re-searching. It is argued that research in design should not be based on the import of theory from outside the subject, but should examine the design activity to construct an appropriate theory built from design: imported theories should only be used where the import can be shown to be sensitive and relevant. Although research in architecture has a long tradition, it uses, in the main, imported approaches that do not help architects do architecture. What is needed is a form of research coming out of architecture itself, producing knowledge that will help architects act. This is distinguished as ‘knowledge for’ (action) in contrast to the academically more traditional ‘knowledge of’ (what is). An example (from the doctoral programme at RMIT University) is recounted of a doctoral study that was turned round by the move from studying to make knowledge of to knowledge for. A brief survey locates knowledge for in an epistemological framework that reflects other research into design. The notion of unthinkability is considered in relation to doctoral research in architecture, in the light of the proposal that design research is concerned with knowledge for. The paper concludes with a refrain in which the relationship between design and research is posed as a series of questions awaiting serious examination. Keywords: circle (circularity), design(er), knowledge of, knowledge for, noun/ verb, practice, reflection, research, understanding, unthinkable, wandering

Introduction: Architecture and Design The theme of this conference2 concerns architecture: but almost all of the research that has been done which is in any sense relevant to the conference theme has been done under the name of design. For me, the difference between architecture and design is not significant in terms of the conference theme, and I shall use both words. This usage is further necessitated by the lack of a verb based on the word

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­architecture for the activity architects carry out (there is no verb, to architect): the word we use is design. Where I use the word design, therefore, I use it to refer to the central activity architects undertake – unless the context or my explicit statement indicates otherwise. However, the word design in English can be both a noun and a verb. Design, as used in this paper, is generally intended as a verb. It is the creative act at the centre of the activities, including architecture, of design professionals. It is a circular process by which the new is brought into being, the outcome of which (a design object: design as noun) evades logical description until after the event.3 The circularity of process typically involves making proposals, examining them (often being surprised at what is found) and then returning to remake the proposal. This process is perhaps most typically found in the act of sketching. The process is circular insofar as it rotates, complementarily, between making and criticising phases such as drawing and viewing, saying and listening; the path followed is thus a circle, but, given that there is change in what is made and what is criticised, some prefer to think of what is produced as following a spiral. The trace of its history is indeed a spiral: but the form remains a circle. The circular activity in which we talk and listen is a ‘conversation’. Conversation as a means of communication was studied by the great cybernetician Gordon Pask, who remarked already in 1969 that architecture is a conversational activity. Pask’s studies of conversation remove us from the tyranny of coded and determined meanings, and linear causality. They allow exchanges based on the uniqueness of each participant’s understanding (thus making novelty a given). Based on Pask’s (1969) work, I have explained more fully on a number of occasions how the process of designing may be understood as a conversation and how this allows the creation of novelty, which can then be post-rationalised into some sort of narrative, linear, logical causality (e.g. Glanville, 2003). The conversational partners may be other people or me / us alternating between figuratively talking and listening. Most of us are familiar with how we draw something and, coming back later (which may be no more than the next instant), see in it something quite other than we intended. This is conversation at work. I will not extend the argument here, other than to point out that it allows for error, rejecting work and restarting – important features of design as actually done. There is a metaphor I have used to communicate the experience this view of design leads to. It is wandering. Design is like wandering in the countryside with some vague idea of going somewhere while not really knowing exactly where you are going, making repeated decisions over which path to follow (or cutting across the countryside, to make your own path) (Glanville, 1978, 1988). This repeating action is at the heart of the circular process. After some time, you find yourself in a sunny glade, or perhaps sitting on a tree stump, and know not only that you have arrived (and, therefore, that you have achieved an end hitherto unknown), but also that you have found something that makes sense of your wanderings and from where your

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path begins to make sense to you even though most of the time you were rather lost – scarcely knowing where you were going. The trust involved in the wandering (believing that you will arrive), the sense of arrival (recognition), and the ability to, after arrival, make sense of the path you took all contribute to a successful wander. The experience of designing is, I believe, like this. This view of design does not exclude purpose. In almost all design there are functional requirements that have to be satisfied. Very often, in architecture, these functional requirements can be accommodated, at a simple level, without much difficulty. Room sequences can be assembled and services provided in a sensible manner. These requirements are important to design, but are not what is central. The simple assembly of such elements is not generally what gives a project its architectural quality. Architects (and other designers) need to deal with functional requirements, of course, but need to do more: and it is in the more that the extra quality that is architecture can be found, and which quality we create through design process. Purpose is assumed. There is one final important feature of design that I must mention. Design-asverb indicates an action which must be carried out by an actor. The actor element has the two roles described above (using several alternative terms) to communicate the sense of these roles: proposing and examining, marking and viewing, saying and listening. These words are all active: the actor is doing something. The quality of the role of this actor is quite different from the role of the traditional scientific observer, who touches so lightly on what (s)he observes that his / her actions are thought to make no difference. The actor in design, in both roles, is actively involved, creating change. This involved action is one reason design has not been seen as a properly academic subject, in an age where academic has come to be synonymous with scientific. Design as used in this paper, then, is a verb indicating a circular conversational process that leads to the creation of the new. Design is used for this activity in architecture. I take design to be the essential area of architectural activity.

Design and Research There has long been a confusion concerning design and research. At one level, the confusion can be seen in practitioners’ claims that their practice is research. I do not believe that practice, by itself, constitutes research: the words are not synonyms. That is not to say that practice cannot become research: the programme I am particularly associated with at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, is firmly and foundationally based in practice (Glanville and van Schaik, 2003).4 Note, however, it is based in and not solely constituted of practice. What makes the difference is the other essential component, reflection – the element that turns search into research.5

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At another level, the confusion is seen in how research has, itself, become e­ ntwined in the scarcely questioned convention that science and research are synonymous, which is accurate neither as a depiction of science as an approach and ­activity nor in the proposed synonymity. Only scientific research need be scientific. In other fields, a scientific approach may sometimes help, but different approaches will also be appropriate. Science represents one way of researching: there were ways of researching in the academic world before the modern concept of science was ­developed, and other scholarly approaches continue to generate good research. It is therefore important to consider what relationship design and research might have. Research itself is not a neutral activity. It is an activity that is undertaken by human beings with the aid of various tools (here I consider methods as tools). (Scientific) Research may have developed the approach that admits treating the observer of the behaviour observed to occur in an experiment in such a way that the observer touches what is going on so lightly that this touch can be ignored, but this is only one possibility. And the point remains that this approach did not just happen, but was created by humans. No matter how impersonal the method, it did not fall out of the skies. It was made by people. And it was refined by people: the activity of ­research was (and still is) designed. Equally importantly, what is done in research is designed. Not only are (for instance) experiments, even the most straightforward experiments of classical physics, designed. Whoever just observed, rather than composing a situation in which there could be an outcome of the sort they were looking for; whoever just placed ­elements in this situation without adjusting them to get some desired result; and whoever did not modify and change the set up of their experiment, occasionally capitalising on an accident or unexpected outcome to explore something quite different than they had intended initially? What is done in research (e.g. experiments) is designed. The resulting knowledge is composed to become integral with other knowledge both at the level of public knowledge and theory, and within the mind of each of us, as we compose together our understandings. Our new understandings cannot just be bolted onto what we currently think and know: each new understanding, and each instance of understanding, changes us and changes the body of what we know, albeit usually by miniscule amounts. This is why I use the word compose (put together).6 In this manner we make our world picture, a picture that is composed (or designed) by us. The iterative nature of this activity was recognised nearly forty years ago by Karl Popper in his grand attempt to explain how science works (Popper, 1969): a means of progressing that is circular and designerly. Thus, the activity of research itself is the outcome of a design process, it is modified by design, the experiments that it often uses are designed and the users using them work as designers do. It uses methods, also designed in a vast social act. Finally the outcomes are designed to form public knowledge and theory and, by

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each of us individually, to compose the understandings that constitute our individual worlds. Research is, in this analysis, thoroughly designed; it is at all levels the outcome of designing. The reciprocal question is whether design is research. I have answered this in relation to practice, above. More generally, researching is not the same as searching. Much so called research carried out by designers is searching: re-searching indicates the activity implies more than just searching – a searching that delves deep and revisits the original searching. It is this re-consideration, the reflective element that, for instance, Schön (1983) has brought to our attention as a central aspect of designing, where searching is converted into re-searching. Thus, not all design is researched (although perhaps it should be): but all research is designed. I have argued this point at greater length and using further arguments in Glanville (1999).

How (and What) to Research The history of design research has been liberally peppered with approaches imported from other fields, many of which have been of dubious value and some of which have been positively damaging. An important question concerns the appropriateness of approach (Glanville, 2004): an approach brought in to direct our studies of designing may have little or no connection with designing as an activity: thus it will be inappropriate. While it is possible to learn from other approaches and thus enrich a subject, there is always the danger that an imported approach may totally distort the subject to which it is applied. For instance, the hard science approach of early design methods totally rejected (and hid from our attention) the activity that designers perform. We were in danger of losing a significant way 7 of solving problems and creating the new as what designers did was forced into another (and essentially unsympathetic) mould. This realisation is perhaps best expressed in the radical and brave volte face performed by one of the early gurus of the design methods approach, J. Christopher Jones, whose work is now based extensively in the random and the poetic. One example may suffice. The populist architectural theorist, Charles Jencks, has brought a number of different approaches to architecture. Amongst the bestknown are semiology, deconstruction, post-modernism, and, recently, chaos theory. These approaches have been enthusiastically taken on board by architects, and have strongly influenced8 the appearance of current, avant garde designs. Jencks has used his own recent enthusiasm for chaos theory as a sort of (substitute for a) design method in creating his own garden. The result is a garden made of objects that are hardly designed at all. Rather, they constitute an assemblage of totemic

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icons formed by the most literal of projections of theoretical understandings that essentially fail to take into account any significant aspect of designing. They are literal translations of forms deduced by scientists, crude representations of a theoretical position that (to the best of my understanding) has little to do with what (landscape) architecture might be, occupying a very particular place in explaining the world we live in, as we currently understand it. Jencks’ garden of objects is scarcely designed. Instead, it consists of a collection of literal transported (and translated) objects placed within a garden. My point here is not to attack Jencks, or indeed anyone else. It is to indicate dangers. In treating design as a subject other than itself, in investigating it through means of investigation that are less than entirely appropriate to the subject itself, we risk so distorting what design is that what we examine is barely recognisable, and we risk forcing an approach that will actually hide from us what is at the heart of design. So what should be researched in design research? My answer is design itself, as a subject (a way of acting) in its own right, as an undertaking that is worthy of our respect and affection, meaning that we research it in order to understand it in its own terms, not to force it into some other form. And how should we research design? We should not import approaches (and theories) unless we can show they are appropriate to design, that they will not badly distort, that the insights from outside that they give us are both sympathetic and appropriate. But, in order to do this, we need, already, a refined notion of what design is and might be – and to understand that is the purpose of design research. We are putting the cart before the horse when we import these approaches, for in order to try to show they are appropriate we may have already twisted our research so that the assumption of the approach, itself, prevents us from seeing the import as inappropriate. We need to find out how to carry out research into design: and to do that, we need to recognise what it is that designers do and to find an approach and method of investigation that sustains this: in other words, that is appropriate.9 We need to find ways of looking, either deriving from within the subject itself, or demonstrably reflecting the act of designing: that is, passing an appropriateness test. Remembering the point that research is an expression of and framed by design, I return to the point already made. Research is a product of design. Borrowing a concept from mathematics: except in very particular circumstances, it is inappropriate to ask a set to be a subset of what is already its own subset.

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Why Architecture (Design) Research The title of this section refers to what we might hope to gain by carrying out research into architecture. It might appear that I believe we have only recently begun to carry out research in architecture (design). But we have carried out academic research in architecture for some time. This research has taken two main forms: historical research and research into the physics of buildings which has formed several branches of engineering as well as what has now become known as design science.10 I have already argued why we need a form of research into architecture (design) that makes it less subject to other, imported or externally applied approaches. The research in history and engineering / design science have both been applied to architecture, bringing with them approaches that seem to have little connection with either the medium of architecture (space) or helping architect / designers to design. With little or no respect for the subject itself, historians take architecture and, by fragmenting it into projections, details and styles, use it as fodder for history, completely missing the substance architects play with: space. In principle, by exploiting architecture they throw much light on history but, I would assert, little if any on ­architecture. Engineering / design science may be more helpful, but there are two shortcomings: firstly it tells us little about working with space (though civil engineers may produce structures of supreme architectural quality); and secondly, what they tell us does not help us as designers in our attempt to (improve) design.11 This is the crux of the matter. By doing research we hope to design better. The aim of our research is to improve our performance, to act better: not (just) to understand more. It is a postulate (even a tenet) of Western society that understanding is a prerequisite for better performance. The extreme statement of this is that it is necessary to understand what is, in order to be able to make changes for the better. I am unaware of any evidence to demonstrate this. It is, to my knowledge, an article of faith, a creed – although we don’t, of course, admit this. But for designers, the critical concern is not so much to understand as to act. I take it that, in spite of this caveat, research into design is intended to produce (and is generally successful at producing) knowledge.12 Yet the knowledge produced by the majority of current design research practice does not significantly help designers. To give an example, carrying out a heat loss calculation for a small building by hand takes about half a day, and generally merely tells the designer (s)he is wrong (the heat loss is too great: we rarely get it right at first). What it does not tell him / her, except in the vaguest way, is what to do about this. The knowledge is knowledge of what will be, not knowledge for how to change it. But that knowledge for (action) is what designers need.13 Design science and history, the approaches that have dominated design research until relatively recently, are based in an approach that generates knowledge

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of. This is the sort of knowledge science is interested in, seemingly – and very good at generating. I propose that research in design (architecture) should forge a new type of knowledge, knowledge for, intended to help us act (better), to (more successfully) perform our activity as designers. This is one way of shaping our research so that it is based in design, sensitive to design, and designerly.14 Some will argue that there is a third kind of knowledge that converts knowledge of into knowledge for. I agree. It is commonly called technology, and I refer to it as transfer knowledge (or translation knowledge). But transfer knowledge is a secondary knowledge: helpful in making the unusable usable, but does not itself generate usable knowledge. As we live more and more in a time where the question ‘How?’ rivals the question ‘What?’ it is appropriate to look beyond transfer / translation, treating knowledge for as a distinct type of knowledge worthy of construction and valuing in its own right. While transfer knowledge may convert knowledge of into knowledge for, allowing us to move from understanding to controlling (in the cybernetic sense) the ­environments we design / construct, it would be better not to need an extra step. ­Researching to produce knowledge for enables this. The crucial question for designers and for design researchers is itself a knowledge for question: how to do this. In my view, this is perhaps the central and most critical question that design research has to answer if it is to prosper and help designers.

An Example Involving knowledge for15 In order to make my point less abstractly, let me cite (with agreement) a case. Dominique Hes, a doctoral student I worked with, had been awarded a scholarship in the Centre for Design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (RMIT). Dr. Hes’s knowledge when she started her PhD was constructed as what I now call knowledge of, whereas what she needed was knowledge for. Arriving with privileged access to a life cycle assessment software package, she believed her project was to encourage architects to design with this package. Finding major barriers in accessing designers even to discuss the project, she determined that it was her lack of understanding of design that was the major problem. We proposed she attend a one week introductory landscape architecture course run by RMIT for ­potential undergraduates considering applying for a place to study, to get at least a beginner’s feel for design. She reported it was the best week she had ever had, and began to understand that you couldn’t just force architects to use assessment software because not only was the whole style of the package alien to the way that designers think and work, but also it was unhelpful in that the resulting assessment gave scarcely a hint of how to improve the life cycle performance of the architectural design project. Recognising this shortcoming, we decided to lease Dr. Hes to architects’

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offices that had shown a concern for environmental considerations in a current design. Over a period of time she began to speak the language of architects and architecture, even adding to drawings. The result was that she was able to re-form what has previously been her knowledge of into knowledge for. This was not, I argue, a (technological) translation using transform knowledge from knowledge of to knowledge for: it was far too fluent and unitary for that. What Dr. Hes did was to make knowledge for in place of knowledge of. And the proprietary software package was not mentioned again, for, being knowledge of, it was unusable. An eventual outcome of this tactic was a building that was both decent architecture and energetically effective: using 73 kwh/m2 rather than the (Australian) norm of 250 kwh/m2, while also saving 72% of water used by standard buildings in the same organisation. (Hes, 2004)

Precedents and Relatives What has been called knowledge for is not without precedent. When I first named it I was aware of subjects that are solidly based in approaches which are at least close, including (as well as design) Andragology and Praxiology. But there are also ways of trying to deal with a division in knowledge that somehow reflects this division, including (from design) Donald Schön’s reflective practice (1983) and Michael Polanyi’s tacit knowledge (1967). It is clearly the sort of the knowledge that is at the heart of what the Masters students my colleagues Leon van Schaik, Sand Helsel and I have been working with at RMIT University, recently given a more general account in van Schaik (2005), and Glanville and van Schaik (2003). There are developments in other fields: Gibbons et al. (1994), mode 1 and mode 2 knowledge from management, for instance. See, also, Cross, Naughton and Walker’s reference to Ryle’s knowing how and knowing that. What I am proposing in distinguishing these two types of knowledge is a considerable research programme that would establish a research more relevant to areas such as design, which would examine strategies for creating knowledge for. At the moment the distinction between these two (complementary) types of knowledge is not properly explored. Such exploration will include considerations of the inevitable Greek contribution (e.g. Aristotle’s Episteme, Techne and Phronesis); those cybernetic staples, Piaget’s learning principles, von Glasersfeld’s construc­ tivist learning, Maturana and Varela’s views on knowledge, and, of course, Pask’s learning systems; as well as some relative recent philosophical considerations such as Dewey’s and Heidegger’s. Rescher’s Command Logic also involves a similar distinction, which he distinguishes from deontic logic – itself another candidate for consideration.

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The Unthinkable Doctorate In her keynote to this conference, Halina Dunin-Woyseth (2005) told us the history of the doctorate as we understand it nowadays, particularly the doctorate as PhD (in the English speaking world). Within her paper, we can find some of the reasons that we might consider a doctorate in architecture (that is, design) unthinkable. There are at least four senses in which we can understand the word unthinkable that may have a bearing on doctoral study in architecture.

Unthinkability as Beyond that Which Can Be Thought This is encapsulated in one of the aphorisms for which Wittgenstein is best known, proposition 7 of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein, 1971) Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen. (What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence).

We cannot assert that there is anything beyond that which can be thought (taking thought in the most general sense), for to do so requires thought. But, equally, we cannot deny it. And, while logically this leaves us with an undecidable, common experience – or at least our explanations of it – it tells us that there is something beyond the conscious world of thinking and that new ideas are born which we often assume come from somewhere.

Unthinkability as Excluded From Thought (Blindness) It is generally taken that our senses are the senses we have.16 Anything outside these senses would be hidden from us and thus beyond thought. If they exist they are unthinkable: they are inconceivable, and so they exist – if they do exist – outside our conception, excluded from thought. They are beyond our knowing. We often refer to this as thought blindness: our inability to conceive, credit or enact a thought – so it becomes unthinkable. We rule out certain thoughts, often by insisting ‘it is inconceivable that …’ The way we have categorised our senses into the Five Senses for hundreds of years has also added to the inconceivable. A familiar example from the biological world is the blind spot in the eye: an area near the centre of our field of vision where we see nothing because this is the nexus at which the optic nerve joins the retina and there are thus no light receptors. In normal everyday life we are not even aware of this spot because we are so good at the interpolation which (so our explanations go) hides from us that which we do not see. Both these forms of exclusion lead to denial.

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Unthinkability as Improper Another way of making the unthinkable, similar to exclusion, is the notion of ­impropriety: there are those thoughts that we chose to exclude from our worlds ­because we consider them unacceptable. This is the realm of censorship and the politically incorrect, which rule out certain ways of thinking or certain (types of) thoughts – a way of acting much loved by those in power who wish to confirm and extend that power, although by no means exclusive to them. It might be argued that many pre-feminist views of what women can or should do belong to this category. Equally, early feminist views that there is no difference in what women and men can (or wish) to do also belong to the category. Who knows what, of what we think nowadays, belongs here.

Unthinkability as Inarticulate Finally, there is that which cannot be articulated within the chosen medium or means of expression. Most would agree that there are appropriate media for particular concepts and actions: it is difficult to say in words what is said in music, for instance. Certain thoughts belong in certain media. The moment there is a criterion concerning media, concerning means of expression, there is also an exclusion. This exclusion makes the saying of certain things impossible (or at best very difficult and clumsy), rendering us inarticulate. In the extreme, some of us simply are inarticulate, anyhow. An example is the question of what is called visual logic. Logic is essentially verbal (the root word is the Greek, logos, meaning word). There is now a long history of argument claiming logics that are not verbal, particularly visual logic. In a tradition dominated by the verbal, it can be difficult for visual logic to gain credence, and its proponents may be required to present their visual logic in verbal translation which both profoundly distorts what they wish to say and, ultimately, destroys the point of their logic. In the past, we have been willing to accept that architecture as a subject often falls into one or more of these categories, and therefore that it belongs with the unthinkable. I hope that my keynote has shown that at least some of these ways of being unthinkable can be overcome, by showing that architecture (designing) is not beyond what can be thought; need not be excluded; is not improper; and can be articulated. If I have succeeded, I have managed to show that, given appropriate conditions and interpretations, architecture is indeed a proper subject for a doctorate: and that that doctorate is no longer unthinkable.

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In Conclusion In 1980 I wrote a paper, ‘Why Design Research’ (Glanville, 1981). It included an ­expansive play on the title. Here is an abbreviated version: why design research? why design design research? why design design research research? why not design research? why research design?

The time has come, I believe, for us to begin to consider these questions seriously. And to understand that the recursive forms they fall into are, themselves, reflections of design, designing, research and researching.

  1 This article is reprinted from Ranulph Glanville’s last book The Black Boox Vol. II: Living in Cybernetic Circles, Vienna: Edition Echoraum 2014. An earlier version was published in: The Unthinkable Doctorate, ed. by Marc Belderbos and Johan Verbeke, Brussels, Gent, Hogeschool voor Wetenschap & Kunst Sint-Lucas   2 An international conference on the theme of ‘The Unthinkable Doctorate’ was organised at Sint Lucas ­Architecture, Brussels, in 2005.   3 If something is truly new (to its creator) it cannot be, in his experience, emergent (in Hobbes’ original sense of the Leviathan emerging from the depths, where it already existed). Emergence, in this original sense, concerns the revelation of the existing, previously hidden. The emergent is, thus, not new: rather, it exists obscured, but becomes revealed. The new is not of this sort, although it may be explained in this manner after it has been created. In this case, emergence is not a mechanism for making the new, but for explaining after the event (post-rationalising). The truly new is without precedent in the mind of the creator when being made. Finding precedent comes as explanation after it has been made.   4 RMIT’s School of Architecture + Design has other masters and doctoral programmes, some project based, others theoretical (and historical), others still crossing fields and approaches. A wide range is covered in many different areas of design. In this paper, I refer to the invitational programmes by practice van Schaik and I teach.   5 I add the hyphen here to indicate that research is something more than searching. The redoes not, in this case, mean again, but intensive force (Apple’s OSX Oxford Dictionary of the American Language. [Footnote added during editing.]   6 In my usage here, composing is synonymous with designing. The choice of which word is historical (and has a quite different intention in its etymology), but, in general, current usage is much the same.   7 I would argue THE significant way.   8 Other factors have also been important, for instance the development of CAD.   9 I accept that research is not exclusively a subset of design. There are, I recognise, aspects of research that are not in any sense contingent upon design. Nevertheless, in this debate, research is necessarily formed by design, and to invert this dependency is to distort. Research in architecture has had enough of such distortion already. 10 Some might wish to include other approaches, for instance philosophical research into aesthetics and utility, and sociological approaches to space. 11 I do not deny that research in the history of architecture can be valuable and valid as historical research, benefiting architecture on occasion; ditto the engineering / design science approach as engineering and design science. I do, however, insist that there should be research in architecture that is essentially ­architectural.

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12 Elsewhere I argue the word knowledge is inappropriate because it suggests something that exists without an agent, and I find it inconceivable that knowledge can exist without a knower. Therefore, I ­prefer the word knowing to the word knowledge. However, this position is not central to the argument presented here, and in order not to increase irritation caused by the central argument I will use the word knowledge in this paper. 13 Since I wrote this paper I have been reminded of Nigel Cross’s borrowing of Gilbert Ryle’s distinction ­between knowing how and knowing that. My paper ‘Why Design Research’ is in the same volume, and I should not have forgotten. See Cross, Naughton and Walker (1981). [Footnote added during editing.] 14 I have characterised the distinction between knowledge of and knowledge for in a recent paper, ‘A Cyber­ netic Musing: certain Propositions concerning Prepositions’ (Glanville, 2005). The paper also includes some history of the use of prepositions to indicate such subtleties in English including distinguishing modes of research and classes of knowledge. 15 This example is taken from Glanville 2005. 16 Although this position becomes less and less obvious as we discover new sensory modalities for which we cannot find distinct organs and as sensory prosthetics become ever more a conceivable dream.

References Cross, N., Naughton, J. and Walker, D. (1981), ‘Design Method and Scientific Method, in Jacques, R. and ­ owell, J.A. (Eds.), Design : Science : Method. Guildford: Westbury House. P Dunin-Woyseth, H. (2005), ‘The “Thinkable” and the “Unthinkable” Doctorates. Three Perspectives on ­Doctoral Scholarship in Architecture’, in Belderbos, M. and Verbeke, J. (Eds.), The Unthinkable Doctorates. Brussles, Gent: Sint Lucas, 81–100. Gibbons M., Limoges C., Nowotny H., Schwartzman S., Scott, P. and Trow, M. (1994),The New Production of Knowledge. London: Sage. Glanville, R. (1978), ‘Leaving space for design’, Presented to Design Research group, North London Polytechnic Glanville, R. (1981c), ‘Why Design Research?’, in Jacques, R. and Powell, J.A. (Eds.), Design : Science : Method. Guildford: Westbury House, 86–94. Glanville, R. (1988), Architecture and Space for Thought. unpublished PhD, Uxbridge: Brunel University Glanville, R. (1999), ‘Researching Design and Designing Research’, Design Issues, Vol. 15, No 2, 80–91 Glanville, R. (2003), ‘An Irregular Dodekahedron and a Lemon Yellow Citroen’, in Schaik, L. van (Ed.) (2003), The Practice of Practice. Melbourne: RMIT Press. Glanville, R. (2004), ‘Appropriate Theory’, in Redmond, J., Durling, D. and Bono, A. de (Eds.), Proceedings of the Future Ground Conference. Melbourne: Monash University Press. Glanville, R. (2005), ‘A (Cybernetic) Musing: Certain Propositions concerning Prepositions’, Cybernetics and Human Knowing, Vol. 12, No. 3, 87–95. Glanville, R. and Schaik, L. van (2003), ‘Designing Reflections: Reflections on Design’, Proceedings of the 3rd Doctoral Education in Design Conference, Tsukuba, Japan. Hes, D. (2004), Facilitating ‘Green’ Buildings: Turning Observation into Practice, PhD Thesis, Melbourne: RMIT University. Pask, G. (1969), ‘The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics’, Architectural Design. Vol. 39, No. 9, 494–496 Polanyi, M. (1967), The Tacit Dimension. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Popper, K (1969), Conjectures & Refutations. (3rd ed.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Schön, D. (1983), The Reflective Practitioner. How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books. Schaik, L. van (2005), Mastering Architecture. Becoming a Creative Innovator in Practice. Chichester: Wiley-Academy. Wittgenstein, L. (1971), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. (2nd ed., translated by Pears, D. and McGuinness, B.), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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PROJECT-GROUNDED RESPONSES: BORROWING / STEALING How did theories and methods from other disciplines inform your PhD – were they used on their disciplinary terms, translated in to design relevant approaches, or surpassed altogether, creating something else entirely?

Practice by research is inherently multi-disciplinary; in other words it doesn’t exclude other ‘non-aligned’ practices but includes their attributes, rethinks and filters their processes and reapplies these to the specificity of the research question. Research by nature is exploratory; it neither borrows nor steals from other disciplines but seeks to understand other practices to develop new ways of thinking into designing and making. To undertake practice-based research is to engage in how design and practice share similarities whether it be architecture, urban design, interactive systems, textile performance and wearable computation to name a few. PhD by research promotes the inquiry to engage with other forms of practice can ­influence the direction of the research being undertaken. Research by practice ­requires the ability to experiment and willingness to transfer knowledge gained to derive new concepts for spatial / theoretical intelligence. My own incorporation of methods and processes from aligned and nonaligned design disciplines come not through their transference but through the ability to transition their core modes of operation. Research by practice is conducted within real-world issues; it seeks material connections through material thinking and interrogates theoretical and philosophical positions fundamental for innovation. Benedict Anderson, Professor of Spatial Design (University of Technology Sydney) Dissertation: The Architectural Flaw, 2005. Royal Melbourne University of Technology (RMIT)

This is an interesting question as many disciplines intersected with my PhD through practice. In designing exhibitions, I work with artists, craftspeople, designers, architects, art administrators, writers, graphic designers, lighting technicians, video producers etc. And interior design as a discipline is one that works with many disciplines – much like an art director or producer. Prior to commencing a PhD, fellow curators referred to me as a spatial curator – as my practice was distinctive from the art historian as curator model. The conjunction of curatorial practice and exhibition making inflected by interior design practice produced a different exhibition practice through a focus on arrangements,

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sightlines, juxtapositions, activating spatial and material relations, movement of viewers, haptic as well as optic encounters. A motivation in doing the PhD was to engage with the work of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze specifically to follow the thread through his writings that dismissed interior and interiority as enclosure and given subjectivity. Concepts such as space and subjectivity have strong theoretical, philosophical implications that produce ways of seeing the world. The PhD was an opportunity to think through this in practice and to enable a trajectory within the discipline that opened up to other ideas than the current dominant phenomenological underpinning. Interior design as a practice of making relations where subjectivity, aesthetics and temporality are critical concerns highlights the value of engaging philosophical ideas to intervene and transform practice. In respect to these pursuits, I was often confronted with critiques of borrowing and stealing. However what also became apparent was the relation between knowledge and ownership. As a counterpoint, Deleuze had a particular style in his engagement with the work of others that encourages one to experiment with ideas in pursuit of the new; where a crafting of relations with others becomes important as an ethical consideration and distinct from a demonstration of expertise. This is thinking through doing: a philosophy about how one does, rather than a philosophy about what there is. My PhD, as a doctor of philosophy, became a philosophy defined through the practice of interior design; this is different to a theorisation of interior design practice. Suzie Attiwill, Deputy Dean, Learning & Teaching; Associate Professor of Interior Design (School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne) Dissertation: ?interior, practices of interiorization, interior designs, 2012. School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University

I borrowed heavily from other disciplines – mostly through translation into design relevant approaches. Initially I was very inspired by the science of ecology (the study of organisms at ‘home’), using theories of niche, adaptation, and habitat to draw an analogy ­between natural evolution and the evolution of artefacts. Domestication (artificial selection) became a particularly poignant theme as it exemplified the necessary changes (in terms of form, function, and interactions), an organism (or a technological artefact) needs to make in order to survive in the domestic habitat. This was helpful in better understanding how an emerging technology could potentially be domesticated. The core theme of the thesis was an analysis and explanation of speculative design methods – specifically the development and manipulation of the relationship between the audience and an artefact. I focused on how to best exploit the narrative

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potential of the designed object drawing inspiration from diverse fields such as observational comedy, psychology, horror films, and illusion, for the insights they offer into the complex workings of human perception. For example, Freud’s texts on the uncanny and how something familiar can at the same time be unsettling – an approach exploited by many film-makers and writers of the horror genre. Verisimilitude, or the blurring of fact and fiction, exemplified by Orson Welles’ 1938 radio play of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds – I examined the techniques he used to convince listeners that Martians had landed in the United States. Observational comedy and the use of shared experiences as a way of compressing data. From literature and historiography the technique used in counterfactual histories such as Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle – the approach facilitates the design of alternative presents through changing the outcomes of specific events in history, providing an extremely constructive way of breaking free of established product lineages. James Auger, Associate Professor (M-ITI) Dissertation: Why Robot? Speculative design, the domestication of technology and the considered future, 2012. Royal College of Art

The main question I asked in my PhD was: What can we borrow from gender theories, feminist epistemologies and the feminist science and technology studies for a gender-sensitive and power-reflected design research practice? The answer is: gender theories – especially the social constructivist, deconstructivist, and later on the posthuman ones – provide new mindsets that unmask the allegedly natural category of gender as a historically grown phenomenon of social order. Instead gender is described as man-made category of social inequality, the result of social interactions (Ethnomethodology), of socio-symbolic performances,1 as a ‘a free-floating ­artifice’, as a trait not exclusively belonging to humans, as a property that derives from human-machine interactions2 or socio-material intra-actions.3 These concepts make gender an objective of design that is changeable, designable and multipliable. Moreover, feminist epistemologies have a lot in common with user or – more generally – human-centred design models: e.g. they regard human experiences as the basis of knowledge, influenced by the instruments and techniques that are used to create them, and demand that knowledge is provided that changes the world for the better. Moreover, I identified that some feminist epistemologies correspond to the basic dimensions of human-centred design. They have become the basis of my design methodology. They provide concrete recommendations that can be tailored to the process of design research and practice. They guide the reflections of the ­designers’ intentions and power positions in a project, help to identify and select appropriate user groups, and recommend how to deal with them. They support the selection of suitable methods and approaches and provide criteria to evaluate the whole process of design and its results in use, according to feminist goals.

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Consequently, my PhD illustrates how theories and approaches of other disciplines can influence design research in a direct and indirect way. Sandra Buchmüller, Research Associate (University of Bremen) Dissertation: Gender powers Design – Design powers Gender. A draft of a power critical and gender informed design methodology (Original German Title: Geschlecht macht ­Gestaltung – Gestaltung macht Geschlecht. Der Entwurf einer machtkritischen und geschlechterinformierten Designmethodologie), 2015. Berlin University of the Arts (UdK)

Although temporary urban interventions are seen as a way of ensuring social cohesion, involvement of citizens and improving the quality of urban space, this phenomenon’s destination is unclear both in theory and in practice. In recent years, the development of a theoretical discourse about the phenomenon of temporary urban interventions based on the principles of DIY philosophy dealing with the city has been noticeable. These practices are related to the current definition of new types of informal urbanism: do-it-yourself urbanism, bottom-up urbanism, guerrilla urbanism, pop-up urbanism, etc. The research prompted by studying temporary urban interventions and practices has influenced the way these interventions are understood as practices that reproduce various value representations in the context of urban development. Thus, on the one hand, we notice socially mediated interpretation of actual use value, and on the other, the need for instrumentalisation in order to achieve commercial value. In that sense, there is a certain tension between non-commercial and commercial value in reflecting the impact of temporary urban interventions. For a more complex and deeper understanding of the phenomenon of temporary urban interventions in the context of urban development, it is necessary to examine the various aspects and theoretical approaches which defines them, especially significant amongst them are a) the concepts of the neo-Marxist school, which sees them as elements of the new urban sociability, reproducing everyday life through the production of space, differentiating itself from the dominant neo-liberal paradigm of urban development and establishing its own system of values; and b) the concepts of the neo-liberal theory with the focal point on the concept of creative class – the conception which tends to instumentalise temporary urban intervention with the aim of establishing commercial values that underlie the neo-liberal order. Critical theoretical work around the right to the city, self-organising and ­social movements helps to understand the importance of reclaiming such terms. Confronting the neo-Marxist and neo-liberal theories around this discourse serve to demonstrate the differences and to fill in the gaps with shared experiences towards critical reflexivity. In my academic and activist work, mashing up these two approaches in a local (post-socialist) context, helps me in producing knowledge which intentionally

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informs about changes that can be done. Yet, the practice serves me for conducting empirical research that involves these changes, and at the same time, the research becomes the experimental site for progressive strategies and methodologies that can challenge and reconstruct power relations. Iva Cˇukic´, Researcher (Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade) Dissertation: The Role of Temporary Urban Practices in Activation of Spatial Resources, 2016. ­Faculty of ­Architecture, University of Belgrade

The way I came to think about engaging with theories and methods from other fields is framed by the notion of ‘being in conversation with’ rather than by practices of borrowing or stealing. Theories and methods from other disciplines are important to my research practice as they constitute points of orientation, elements to think and practice with. As my work is very much focused on how designers can activate their skills to contribute to progressive eco-social change, being in conversation with other disciplines is crucial because that is where I find ways of approaching the world that substantially challenge conventional modes of thinking, being and relating. In conversing with other disciplines, in picking up as well as tweaking and transforming their conceptual and methodological tools, I try to adopt a pragmatic approach: Do they work? What new possibilities do they open in my research practice? To what extent to they challenge the rusty parts of my thinking and doing? What kind of progressive politics do they foster? But also, how does the knowledge produced through practice argue back? What does it bring to these conversations? How should I frame the knowledge created in this way so that others can enter into conversation? For instance, I looked at the feminist notion of situated knowledges and embodied engagement with knowledge production that have been taken up to create spaces in which the research questions could be inhabited on a daily basis. The purpose of those spaces was to shift the concern of the research questions from being an individual to a collective one. This allowed for explorations in a setting in which bodies, minds, desires, and needs collide – making the whole process messier, but at the same time allowing for speculations and proposals that are much closer to something that someone would actually want to actualise. The messiness and friction of this kind of practice made it possible then to create a counter argument and also, hopefully, move theoretical discussions to a more productive, i.e. transformative space. Bianca Elzenbaumer, Research Fellow (Leeds College of Art) Dissertation: Designing Economic Cultures – Cultivating Socially and Politically Engaged Design Practices Against Procedures of Precarisation, 2014. Goldsmiths, University of London

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My doctorate started with the question of rituals in the design context. There is not a lot of literature on ritual and design, although creating or using meaningful behaviour is a key element in design. Michael Erlhoff wrote one of the few books on that topic in the design context. So I started reading literature from the ritual studies. I liked the description of all those rituals of ancient times. I learned from ritual studies why societies around the world construct rituals, how they function, why they are meaningful to society and how they can change over time. I used the terminology of this discipline and as well their definitions. I could not find those insights in the literature of my own discipline. I did not use ritual studies research strategies, however. I built on the academic body of knowledge and introduced my research strategy as designer. I don’t think that any anthropologist would look at a phenomenon in an afternoon, take a couple of intuitively done photographs and then work from that. A designer does. Is that an appropriate way to do academic research? This is a question that has not received enough attention in academic discussion. My dissertation is an experiment regarding that question. Since academic design research does not have a long history, trying out alternative discourses is worthwhile, and the more the better. When I did my master in design, there was no ­opportunity to continue for a philosophical doctorate. I was the first one to start a doctorate with a design background when Austria changed its Universities Act. Disciplines with a long history are built on a huge body of knowledge. Disciplinary terms are deep rooted. They may not survive when you tear them out without care. But artistic knowledge is also sensitive to disciplinary thinking. We should also be careful not to steal artistic knowledge and kill it in disciplinary discourses that are not appropriate soil for cultivating insights. Arts-based research is a young field of knowledge generation within the academic arena. We have to find new forms to generate and discuss knowledge. Harald Gründl, Founder (IDRV Institute of Design Research Vienna) Dissertation: The Death of Fashion. The Passage Rite of Fashion in the Show Window, 2007. University of ­Applied Arts Vienna

In my PhD thesis, I worked on the edge of HCI, interaction design, and a bit of linguistics (as much of my prototypes were influenced by metaphors in everyday language). Thankfully, no major conflicts arose from that. Design research can help people to bring together different disciplines – that is a very powerful ability. I do have the feeling that a physical, tangible artefact can often serve as a facilitator for communicating between disciplines. It will stimulate taking different ­perspectives on the same thing, and it will turn into concrete matter that which was before abstract, vague thinking. It will, of course, be subjectively interpreted by different people – but so will a text. Building something is a great tool for thinking about the thing and speaking

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about it with other people. It’s also something that we, as designers, can do well. Too many young design researchers spend too much time thinking about the perfect way to approach their research question, waiting for a brilliant idea. But perfectionism is the wrong approach – it’s about getting concrete as fast as possible. This will help the researcher to understand how what they thought would eventually work out in the real world. Of course, getting concrete also means becoming vulnerable to critique – which may be painful but is equally important. I believe that it’s never too early to build a physical prototype, no matter how much duct tape, how much cardboard, and how many people hiding behind a curtain are needed to fake the envisioned interaction. Fabian Hemmert, Researcher (Design Research Lab, Berlin University of the Arts) Dissertation: Encountering the Digital: Representational and Experiential Embodiment in Tangible User ­I­nterfaces, 2014. Berlin University of the Arts

The interaction between borrowing from other disciplines and maintaining the core of design is difficult. I often experience that ‘design’ gets swallowed by neighbouring fields such as innovation, arts, or engineering that uses tools and insights from our area and presents it as their own. On the other hand, does design research need theories and methods from other disciplines in order to grow as a field and to communicate with others? Design researchers cannot and should not invent the wheel, but we should also have enough confidence to see that design is a unique area of knowledge in itself. I have seen a lot of so-called ‘design research’ were the actual designing, developing the product / service / tool, is presented in a few sentences, and the user-studies of the product is the ‘research’. There are also examples of the opposite, ‘design research’ that completely lacks contextualisation, references, or analyses. In my PhD I used theories from health sociology to understand how we coped with products and why meaningfulness was essential for understanding this interplay. It gave me tools and understanding that have been very useful in my research. One important factor for successful borrowing is that the theories are used from a firm position in design. You should not become a sociologist, an ethnographer, or a psychologist, but transform them into the design practice. Sara Ilstedt, Professor in product and service design (Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, School of Industrial Technology and Management) Dissertation: Making sense, design for wellbeing, 2004. Human-computer Interaction, KTH, and Interactive institute, Stockholm

While I have been drawing heavily from other disciplines in my thesis, I have worked hard to bastardise them. Or, more elegantly, to re-appropriate them to make sense

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within a design research practice. To re-appropriate in a respectful way it is necessary to get as close as possible to the original source to fully comprehend what you are building on. I did this, for instance, by systematically following Latour’s guidebook on how to compose by re-assembling.4 First by getting so close I could appreciate how to re-appropriate. Certainly, things do get lost in translation between disciplines – but that does not necessarily mean the worse; it perhaps allows, rather, for something different to come into being. Re-appropriation is what also enabled me to propose a non-anthropocentric framework in design. This was clearly informed by ‘borrowing’ from recent debates within social sciences. I would not have been able to sketch up this framework – a framework that responds not only to human needs but serves as a proposal to construct new forms of collective life – with design theories and methods alone. Consequently, I had to re-appropriate to be able to register and become sensitive to the design research practice I was constructing in my thesis. In my thesis, I actually refer to this as STS-design, as design research practice. Li Jönsson, Researcher (The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and ­Conservation, School of Design) Dissertation: Design Events – On explorations of a non-anthropocentric framework in design, 2014. The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Copenhagen

Having argued for the accountability of practice through analytical writing, I aimed to dispel what I saw to be a persistent doubt in the minds of some speculative designers about doing practice-based research. For speculative designers there is perhaps a sense that analysis would diminish the assurances and prestige granted by their designs. There is even perhaps a sense that the treatment of design as research acts as an obstruction to the making. Certainly the speculative designer becomes exposed to a variety of positions that challenge features of practice inherited from critical design. These include the formulation of a controversial and monolithic scenario that frames a future outcome of emerging technology, along with a set of assumptions about the forms of debate that are seen to be enabled by that scenario. However, I contended that the discomfort experienced by the speculative designer as they adopt an analytical mode is in fact productive. The experiences of practice go on to resource conceptually rich forms of analysis. In the case of empirical speculation, the core outcomes of design can be seen as partial concrescences of the data generated through a trajectory of practice. These outcomes of practice are then complemented and also unbalanced by the reflexive accounts of the broader activities that attend their making. Where I considered episodes from the project case, I drew on different literatures to conceptualise project activity. The literature reviews, one with a design focus and the other concentrating on public engagement, bring together resources

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from design research and STS to support this approach by dealing with accounts of practice and research into practice, and in this respect provide a framework with which to then develop the empirical sections of the thesis that is sympathetic to this reflexive format that mingles practice and analysis. Tobie Kerridge, Researcher (Goldsmiths University of London) Dissertation: Designing Debate: The Entanglement of Speculative Design and Upstream Engagement, 2015. Goldsmiths University of London

The PhD was carried out at a university of technology and, even though my thesis projects had a very different focus from the work of others, there was very little friction related to how research could or should be carried out or whether ideas or methods borrowed from other fields should be used or adjusted in a specific way in order to achieve valid research. To perform research in an experimental way was seen as unproblematic. Hanna Landin, Senior Lecturer (The Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås) Dissertation: Anxiety and trust and other expressions of interaction, 2009. Department of Computer Science, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg

The practice of action research is well developed in the field of education and occupies a niche defined by focusing on ‘practical problems with theoretical relevance’.5 It has been demonstrated as an effective method to eliciting designers’ own design activities in the conceptual phase of the design process.6 However, I adopted a modified action research methodology to conduct my PhD project based on the theoretical framework of this approach. Traditional action researchers study a group of people or an organisation over a long period of time. They conduct several cycles of the action reflection process to solve problems related to the focal systems and obtain evidence of the problem-solving process. However, my research project involved developing six different types of new products. As this study focused on cognitive activities, i.e. design decision-making, I regard the six NPD projects as six action research cycles in which I acted as the industrial designer engaged in an interactive inquiry and reflective practice. As such, I gradually refined my design approaches based on critical reflection on previous cases during the research process. This ­allowed me to explore and discover similarities and differences between different case studies. The methodological and theoretical framework of action research really helped to inform my research project, and thus it can also be seen as a kind of longitudinal action research, but one in which the researcher seeks empirical evidence from analysing cross-sectional data. In summary, I established a methodological framework influenced by action research that allowed me to conduct this

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study in a real world situation. In other words, I altered action research methodology to fit the specific needs of this design research. Yi-Chang Lee, Researcher (ImaginationLancaster, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University) Dissertation: Investigation of Design Decision Making in New Product Development in SME, 2015. Lancaster University

Translation into Design Methods: As a communication designer, I get inspired through patterns, colours, shapes, typefaces, photos, and signs. I constantly collect them in my sketchbook. It is equally important to me to know about theories and methods of all kinds in order to develop new and unconventional design solutions. During my entire research I never had the impression that I was ‘stealing’. Of course it is necessary to comprehend thoroughly what you are using in order to be able to change it and utilise it in designerly ways. This paves the way for unique methods, which must be necessarily attributed to the design research. As a thinking designer, I find myself obliged to develop socially and politically acceptable gender-sensitive communication design and not only to serve an aesthetic demand. Diversity of disciplines and body (self) images: I would like to clarify the influence of theories from other disciplines in my work, therefore, I mention the example of a media phenomenon I observed as a teacher with Egyptian design students in a practical subject; when drawing female bodies and characters in class, the ­students produced characters that had origins in the representation of ‘white’, North-American-European-influenced beauty ideals. In order to understand the deeper meaning of this phenomenon, I had to work hard with historical, political, media anthropology, postcolonial and gender-relevant theories. Bridging function of Interviews: The most important methodological bridge that led to several artistic modules was the interview. It was helpful to familiarise myself with the qualitative interview methods from sociology. I received numerous hints that helped me to find my role as interviewer. I refrained from the complicated coding process, which takes place in the field of sociology. Instead I designed small booklets, ‘Lesehefte’, in which I extracted voices and opinions of those interviewed, bundled them thematically and contrasted them with individual images. My picture question method, which can’t be found in any textbook, consisted of confronting the interviewee unexpectedly and unprepared with printouts of images that were likely to irritate the person or at least to cause surprising emotional reactions. Fred Meier-Menzel, Senior Researcher (German University in Cairo) Dissertation: From the life model through to the activist – the double colonization of the female body in Egypt, 2014. Bauhaus University in Weimar

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Theories from other disciplines were crucial to my PhD and appear frequently across my doctoral research. My work drew on a range of prior theoretical and philosophical works investigating the nature and character of material possessions, how they mediate between people and their actions in the world, and factors that shape the kinds of relationships people form (or dissolve) with them over time. I drew on these theories to critically explore the nature of people’s growing amount of digital content and to investigate how and why digital materials in some ways can seem so different than material things. I wanted to investigate how people’s rapidly expanding personal digital archives could in some way be leveraged to develop a longer-term place for in the home, similar to how people maintain possession of heirlooms over time and, at times, across generations. Beyond solely drawing on these theoretical and philosophical framings as lenses for analysing observed differences between physical and digital objects, I wanted to leverage these theories as inspiration in creating new design artefacts. Near the end of my PhD, my research had taken an additional strong turn toward exploring how the slow technology design philosophy could provide a critical framing for taking a more radical conceptual leap toward envisioning the longer-term place of interactive technology in everyday life. However, few examples existed of robust, fully designed and implemented slow technologies on a general level, and virtually no design research had drawn on this design philosophy to target the everyday consumption of digital possessions and archives. Through developing a design research artefact and studying it through various long-term field deployments in people’s homes,7 I was able to generatively develop new knowledge for the design research community about the viability of the slow technology design philosophy against the backdrop of several intersecting theories of material possessions and philosophy of technology. One could characterise this approach as an example of translating ‘higher-level’ theoretical concepts. I prefer to not make such distinctions. Rather, I see this work as a translation of written / verbal theoretical notions into a concrete, actual design artefact. It is not a ‘lower-level’ articulation of theoretical concepts, but can be seen as equally rich through its ability to ground and manifest abstract concepts in the material existence of an artefact. Will Odom, Banting Fellow (School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver) Dissertation: Critically Exploring the Virtual Possession Design Space through Fieldwork and Constructive Design Research, 2014. Carnegie Mellon University

While doing research in design, the use of the design practice in the research design played a significant role for me. I used propositions, methods and theories from Slovenian mythology, semiotics and architecture. It was very important that I developed approaches and methods for researching fashion design that would support the development of the practice in fashion. Following the idea that the design

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practice should be reflected in the research design, I used the understanding of the design process as something that consists of inspiration, realisation, and presentation as the guiding force for how to research in fashion design. I used Slovenian mythology as an inspiration. I got inspired by the mythological stories and while talking to researchers in the relevant fields. Through that I was able to form my research questions that were relevant for fashion design. Using Roland Barthes’ proposed methods as a form of a realisation, I was able to clear out the differences between clothing types and clothing variations. Using theories of semiotics enabled me to map the clothing inventory of Slovenian mythological creatures. Further, in the ­realisation phase, I used Alexander’s approach to a pattern language. With his ­approach I was able to form a pattern language that can be used to transform any narrative source: in my case, the descriptions of garments worn by Slovenian mythological creatures into a visual form. In the presentation phase, I used my designed objects as visual representations of my collected results and emerged theories. Through this approach I was able to form an interdisciplinary research environment that offered results and future research possibilities that can be conducted in the disciplines from which I translated the research methods. Jure Purgaj, Lecturer (Pädagogische Hochschule Wien) Dissertation: Design and Visualization of Garments Worn by Slovenian Mythological Creatures, 2013. Faculty for Natural and Technical Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

For me personally, design research was about creating something else from the start. Coming into design was for me initially the result of a collision: on one side music, on the other philosophy, coming together through an interest in experiments at the intersections between art and technology. Trying to answer this question, I can clearly trace ideas about form and aesthetics in the thesis to what I learned from music, and there is a great deal of philosophy in the ways I think not only about theory and the conceptual but perhaps even more when it comes to method. But the work in my thesis was neither music nor philosophy but something else that is probably best understood as one of many attempts at trying to make a design research practice, and to contribute to a kind of design discipline. The question about how one is building on thoughts and works in other areas seems to have two basic dimensions to it. One concerns the formation of one’s work, what once shaped its origins and what is continuously feeding into it as it evolves – a question of using, borrowing, stealing, etc. The other concerns with whom (or with what else) one aims to be in conversation – a question of responding, returning, of being in dialogue. Even though our main conversations might be with other design researchers within our own niche, there are also neighbouring fields that we eventually might want to talk to.

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At this stage of disciplinary development, it is perhaps reasonable to expect design research to be rather introspective, thinking about what (external) material can be incorporated and how. Over time, however, the more important question might become to what extent we’re able to not only listen and make use of ideas developed elsewhere but how we also respond and provide new ideas in return. Design research needs to be something more than a way of making a shift in design from ‘applied art’ to ‘the art of applying’. Johan Redström, Rector, Professor (Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University) Dissertation: Designing Everyday Computational Things, 2001. Department of Informatics, University of Gothenburg

Designers do not produce theories. They use them, abuse and misunderstand them. It is inherent in their (our) practice: funnelling intentionality into a more or less material artefact. And such intentionality opportunistically borrows and draws inspiration from anything. Anything that can support in getting an unexpected point of view, anything that can help in opening up new opportunities. Theory included. What heavily inspired me were ecological perception theory, phenomenology and post-phenomenology in particular. I needed a different perspective to escape the traditional patterns of the first and second wave of HCI and interaction design obsessed with functionality and usability. At the Designing Qualities in Interaction Group of the Eindhoven University of Technology, we have drawn from such theories to shift the point of view from a functionalist paradigm, rooted in modernism, towards a way of understanding HOW to design for the unknown, the unexpected, how to design for people ungraspable and ephemeral needs, emotions and dreams. Ambra Trotto, Studio Director, Senior Lecturer (Interactive Institute Swedish ICT, School of Architecture at Umeå University) Dissertation: Rights through Making – Skills for pervasive ethics, 2011. Eindhoven University of Technology

The theme throughout my thesis was the importance of physical, bodily action, and how it can create, manipulate and share meaning. The importance is apparent in the theoretical foundation of the thesis based on Gibson’s theory on affordances8 and Dourish’s description of embodied interaction.9 These theories were the inspiration and the guiding motive for the actual design practice. Other theories, such as emotion theory, informed the research and the design, without being altered. Theoretical characteristics from computer science for tangible user interfaces10 were translated into a design-relevant approach fitting the nature of the PhD work. Stephan A. G. Wensveen, Associate Professor (Eindhoven University of Technology) Dissertation: A tangibility approach to affective interaction, 2005. Delft University of Technology

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  1 Bulter, J.: Gender Trouble, New York, Routledge, 1990, p. 8–9.   2 Suchman, L.: Human-Machine Reconfiguration, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007.   3 Barad, K. (2003): ‘Posthumanist Performativity. Towards an understanding of how matter comes to ­matter’, in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, p. 814f.   4 Latour, B.: Re-Assembling the Social, 2010.   5 Cole, R., Purao, S., Rossi, M., and Sein, M. K.: Being Proactive: Where Action Research meets Design ­Research. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information System (ICIS2005). Las Vegas: ­Association for Information Systems, 2005.   6 Green, G.: Towards integrated design evaluation: validation of models, Journal of Engineering Design, 11(2), 2000, pp. 121–132.   7 See: William T. Odom, Abigail J. Sellen, Richard Banks, David S. Kirk, Tim Regan, Mark Selby, Jodi L. For­ lizzi, and John Zimmerman: Designing for slowness, anticipation and re-visitation: a long term field study of the photobox, in Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI ‘14). ACM, New York, 2014.   8 Gibson, J.J.: The Theory of Affordances, in R. Shaw and J. Bransford (Eds.). Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1977, pp. 67–82.   9 Dourish, P.: Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. 10 Ullmer, B. and Ishii, H., 2000.

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Discipline / ­Indiscipline

INTRODUCTION Michelle Christensen

Since its inception, the field of design research has been busy making and breaking rules concerning what it is, should be, or even could become. The fourth and last part of this book takes a deeper look into the question of the self-understanding of design research and whether or not it might be valuable to isolate and formalise its potential core competences in the form of an academic discipline. Discernibly, the diversity within design itself makes it difficult to identify uniqueness. Yet are there generally applicable characteristics in terms of scope, methods, and topics? Is there a borderline that can be drawn around design research, and if so, what would hold it all together? As discussed in this book so far, could it be finding out about the world through designing, the epistemological qualities of artefacts or perhaps even the ability to take what we need from wherever we find it to create the assemblages of knowledge that characterises the applied and academic design field? And finally, should we even locate this distinctiveness, or should we rather view design research as a transdisciplinary instance, or perhaps even as an extra-, meta-, or postdisciplinary approach? Over the last decades, we have observed the formation of a design discipline – a continuous academisation – the literal ‘disciplining’ of the field. On the one hand, of course, this process has been an important part of founding institutions, creating doctoral programs and realising funding options that have allowed us, if even for a moment, to go from working for a client to working for ‘society’. It has allowed us to speak to each other, across institutions and geographical borders, with new formulations that we could all understand. It has enabled us to put in words and projects something that is beyond what we could do as ‘just’ a community of professional designers, revealing distinct ways of thinking and acting, perhaps even something with a discernible originality that seems to be both senseful and relevant. On the other hand, however, with the formulation of theories and methods, agreed upon standards and ideas of rigour and what constitutes ‘good research practice’, we were not just ‘being disciplined’. We are self-disciplining, and actively disciplining a new generation of researchers in to ‘known and agreed upon’ standards of thinking and acting. However, design always adapts and reboots. At a time where we see the expansion of the design concept into the increasingly non-material and almost-metaphorical realm; where DIY, makers and fill-in templates sweep the markets that used to be home; and where we have come to believe that ‘everyone is a designer’ – we are once again in a fight against time, to isolate the elements which still make us not just useful but inventive. It might sound repetitive to say that the design research

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field is ‘diverse and in constant flux’, however, one might consider whether it is not in fact a distinctive feature of design research to always push to new territory. Perhaps we have moved from being a field that needed to claim its existence, independence and competence, to being at a stage where we can move beyond the act of ­defining-in-defence. Do we accept the potential of the transdisciplinary discourse, which anyway falls so naturally to us, and do what we do best – combine, translate, invent, surpass borderlines of knowledge to design the new expertise – shared with people, stakeholders, open source and open to all? Do we take a step into a brave new science, understanding ourselves as operating beyond current understandings of scientific categories – turning everything known up-side-down to destabilise any­ thing stable, and bridge everything split? Being a relatively young field of research, perhaps we do still have the chance to step back and reconsider our options – to consider within what (and whose) terms we would like to enter into this rite of passage? In his text ‘Transdisciplinary research through design – Shifting paradigms as an opportunity’, Matthias Held reminds us that specialisation, although becoming a large part of our discourse, is in fact a rather recent phenomenon. Definitions of disciplines can always only be temporary, as they are inherently imbedded in their own historical contexts – as so-to-say situated constructions policed by their gatekeepers. Perceptions of what constitutes ‘science’ is hence in constant flux, and as the discourse moves towards transdisciplinarity, not least as a necessity to solve wicked and complex real-world problems, design research has a promising possibility of making a very valuable contribution. Since disciplinary approaches can always only grasp a fragment of a practical problem, design research – in itself an integrative field, stands on fertile ground. This could even be formalised Held argues, through design projects, as being the very core of the discipline itself. Bill Gaver, on the other hand, takes a stance for indiscipline, arguing that this hallmark of design itself should be viewed as a strength rather than a vulnerability. He discusses whether it might be exactly in this willingness to abandon comfortable standards of methods, approaches, expertise, and standards of standards that we might find design to be a genuine and radical alternative to science in investigating the world. Arguing for what he calls aesthetic accountability over epistemological accountability, he draws out an approach to ‘judging science’ from a more holistic perspective. While science uses a variety of means to strengthen the reality of their facts, design can rely on more ‘jury-rigged assemblages’ to construct its facts, knowing that as long as they work, they can find their place among other alternatives. Raising an essential tension in this overall discussion, he questions the reification of experimental methods (or perhaps even the reification of designerly mischief) as simultaneously seeming to empower and enfeeble design research as a whole. In an argument to encourage the freedom and motivation for young researchers to take their own risks and make their own discoveries, he attempts to avoid closing down the productive indiscipline of design, whilst leaving us with the

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ambiguous question of whether encouraging practitioners to invent new forms of engagement for each situation they find would be madness, or perhaps not. Already in the title of Klaus Krippendorff’s text ‘Design, an undisciplinable profession’, he gives us a rather clear idea of his position on this debate. Krippendorff argues that discipline, the being held within the norms, is the policing of each other, and eventually of oneself. With his argument of what he notably calls second order understanding, he shows how the empirical domain of design cannot be limited as other scientific disciplines, such as the natural sciences. Designers must be free to think outside of disciplinary boxes, operating in defiance of the determinisms that scientific disciplines seek to import in the social domain. Designers must create spaces of unknown possibilities that reflexively embrace the social world of others, bringing forth novel realities, and enabling the possibilities of paths not yet travelled. They must, as he encourages, dare to question popular conceptions and deep-rooted habits, deconstruct vested interests in the present conditions, distrust theories that merely describe what already is, and be suspicious of claims concerning what cannot be achieved. In other words, the design discourses that we operate within must preserve the freedom to cross disciplinary boundaries, even when they provoke objections. Krippendorff believes that it is not theoretical or methodological boundaries of a discipline that shall form the base of the field; the complex process is far too empirical and shifting to be formalised. Rather, he advocates the adopting of a shared ethical imperative. Finally, Michael Erlhoff’s contribution to the discussion clearly takes position with his first sentence, as it begins with the Pink Floyd quote ‘We don’t need no thought control’. Due to the fact that design and design research are in essence the offering and implementing of possibilities, he argues, the disciplining of the field would in fact nullify its potential. It is vital, he points out, that we realise the current craze of forcing design in to a discipline and the prevailing stress of academics, which is characterised by anxiety, misunderstanding and a serious lack of self confidence. The inherent ability of cross-thinking seems to be better understood outside of the field than within it, and ignoring the potential of a meta-disciplinary discourse means that design continues to sell itself short of its inevitable ability of convergence, potentially making itself obsolete. As the field continues to repress possibilities and hence the substance of its work, avoiding the fact that it is a special quality that design inexorably justifies itself in use and thus in social context, he calls for a indisciplined exploration of the world, and to putting an end once and for all to what he refers to as stupid academic attitudes and gestures. So at a time when we experience the quick expansion of boards and journals, the formalisation and sometimes uncritical utilisation of experimental methods, the policing of peers, and the self-importance of titles, degrees and publication lists, these authors provide an interesting space of possibilities, as well as a vital warning. They advocate that we do not deceive ourselves, focus on the wrong measurements, get bored and lazy leaning on the work pioneered until now, or, make our field

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­ otentially obsolete. They encourage us to avoid engaging in a process that ignores p the inherent convergences in design, shifting our attention away from the task at hand, and from what is important and what we do best. They prompt us to make our own parameters. The reflections that follow these essays then proceed to shift our perspective to the individual experiences of project-grounded research. These short responses illustrate an interesting tension – while the belief that design is and should be treated as a transdisciplinary endeavour persists as an argument, many of these PhD projects attempted to contribute directly to a design discipline. This is the case largely due to the fact that this ‘discipline’ is still in the making, and hence, it is in dire need of examples and projects to understand what it in fact is. What emerges here is a series of doctoral research projects that embrace the cross-disciplinary wicked problems of the world, and struggle to find inventive answers to real-world everyday-life challenges. If these projects were to be viewed as being within one discipline, it would be a discipline of willingly barging into problems that no one else would necessarily have thought of or dared to formulate, especially in the limited framework of a PhD. They display a courage (or the productive naïveté of the field) to do this within the constantly emerging complexity of the world and the field itself – attempting not to force the development and directions of a discipline on design research but rather allowing it to emerge. In summery, it seems that design research appears to be quite an undisciplined discipline, guided more by the demands that it confronts than by its disciplinary terms, and judged more by its impact and what it enables than by any ideals of classical scientific validity or rigour.

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TRANSDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH THROUGH ­DESIGN – SHIFTING PARADIGMS AS AN ­OPPORTUNITY Matthias Held

From Disciplinary to Interdisciplinary Research The partition of the sciences into divisions is as old as science itself. As far back as the 4th century B. C. Aristotle identified three sciences: ‘theory’ aiming for truth, ‘practise’ aiming for action and ‘poietic’ aiming for production. In those days it was natural that a scholar would acquire a broad basis of knowledge in all these fields and then be able to make a contribution across this spectrum. However, special­ isation in sharply separated disciplines is a rather recent phenomenon. At the ­be­ginning of the 19th century chemistry, physics, and the literary studies became ­es­tablished as disciplines. It was only in the 20th century that the social sciences appeared. During this process, the overlapping fields of the natural and social sciences became separated into ‘natural history’ then into the ‘philosophy of nature’ and the ‘natural sciences’.1 A discipline is characterised by its epistemological interests, which include the considered and examined objects, the applied methods, the underlying theories and models as well as the paradigmatic problem solutions and cases. Furthermore, the definition of a discipline can only be temporary, because it is constantly evolving and is imbedded in its historical context. The differentiation of disciplines into specialisms went along with the specialisation of the researchers. A driving force was the pragmatic reason that the quantity of knowledge and the variety of methods had become too vast to be grasped by an individual for fruitful further development. The increasing specialisation of disciplines allowed for a deepening of knowledge in a manageable and definable section. Concomitantly within the respective discipline a collective ‘language’ was created that would simplify the discourse within the scientific community crossing linguistic and federal boundaries. The result is a ‘homogenous communicational coherence’.2 Besides these practical developments, the establishment of a discipline is paralleled by the generation of a scientific community and the attendant distinctions and exclusions, carefully monitored by gatekeepers controlling who is not ranked amongst the peer group and those who have not have passed the accredited scientific qualification and socialisation in accepted academic and research institutions. Since the 1960s more and more critical voices rose to challenge the ‘normative character’ of the scientific disciplines and their solidification in the institutions

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that were asking scholars to address the urgent problems of real life, such as population growth, poverty or environmental and ecological concerns. Moreover, much criticism was lodged against the limitation of a focused disciplinary perspective in processing such complex and practical problems. Disciplinary boundaries are at the same time knowledge boundaries, as a subject matter is only perceived and analysed with the methods of the respective discipline. Thus, only a segment of reality is perceived. Practical problems do not have these borders – they are multifarious and eclectic. A disciplinary approach therefore can only grasp partial aspects and not the full complexity and interwoven relations of practical problems. The combination of the individual results of the disciplines in ‘multidisciplinary research’ is insufficient and just allows for a collection of parts rather than the creation of a conclusive whole. As a consequence of this criticism, interdisciplinary approaches emerged and hybrid disciplines and programmes of study were developed. The definition of ‘interdisciplinary’ cannot be considered in either scholarly literature or in practice as consistent. This is because it extends, typically at the start or the end of a project, from just temporary cooperative phases to processes, theoretical models and methods. All of these are entirely supported, practised and maybe even developed by several disciplines in a cooperative setting. Today, interdisciplinarity is widely used in companies as a strategic approach for research and development. Furthermore, in research, especially in applied research, and in corresponding research funding, it is increasingly arrogated and ­promoted. From the perspective of a single discipline, the rising complexity of a ­globalised world seems to be less and less understandable, in workable questions, which then have to be competently resolved. Also this trend is accompanied by the hope for practical relevance and a high level of feasibility of the research activity. Opponents claim, somewhat polemising, that cases exist where discipline specialists are superior to an interdisciplinary team for tasks such as piloting a plane or conducting a heart-transplant operation. But these are clearly definable problems with a high level of specific knowledge and routine. What about strategies to reduce the ecological implications of air traffic or ethical questions on transplant medicine and the provision of donated organs? These problems are hard to define and difficult to correlate with the core competencies of a single discipline. The question as to whether a disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach should be given preference apparently cannot be answered generally but rather in consideration of the respective subject matter. Problems that are described as complex, fuzzy and hard to grasp, the ill-defined-problems seem to defy classification and processing by a single discipline. The specific character of wicked-problems as delineated at the end of the 1960s as ‘a social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve for as many as four reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, a large number of people and opinions involved, a large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of the

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problem with other problems’.3 Former professor at HfG Ulm Horst Rittel realised, as one of the first design researchers, the relevance of this matter for the process of planning and consequently its potential for design.4 The difficulty of finding solutions for such sets of problems today requires a new interpretation of the function of the sciences. The classic epistemic purpose of the sciences to describe, explain, and predict and thus create a system of knowledge is more often expanded by other objectives, especially when considering social or ecological processes of transformation. Science should define and describe desirable targets of social development, so-called target knowledge like evaluations of scenarios and projections, definition of limit values, generation of mission statements. Furthermore, science should reveal methods and ways to reach the intended targets thus creating ‘transfer knowledge’, covering methods and means that enable to accomplish the transition from actual state to target state.5 But target knowledge cannot impose requirements on the sciences to define ‘what should be’ but only ‘what could be’, thus revealing targets, options, and consequences of actions. A qualitative target definition needs a preliminary negotiation of hierarchies of values. This can only be accomplished by political and or ethical discourse and in a democratic decision-making process and not purely by scientific means as shown by Burger.6

Transdisciplinary Research Transdisciplinary research, although defined and described in the 1970s, is a relatively young mode of research, which lately has become widespread in the 21st century. It has recently manifested itself in institutions like the ‘Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy’ and in academic programmes such as at the Leuphana University, Lüneburg, out of a sustainability perspective and at the ZHdK (Zurich University of the Arts) out of the arts. The ‘International Journal of Transdisciplinary Research’ was established as recently as 2006. Transdisciplinarity as a form of cooperation between disciplines is more far reaching than interdisciplinarity both in its intensity and process continuity. This whole process is designed to be undertaken by teams whose members come from diverse disciplines and perspectives. Consequently, exchange is not limited to some phases of cooperation or disciplinarity but extends to the accomplished ­results. Typically, the process of transdisciplinary research involves the integration and participation of practitioners as well as non-scientific groups who possess practical knowledge and therefore are likely to be able to contribute to the solution, and stakeholders who are immediately effected by the problem. However, not all definitions of transdisciplinary research consider all these participants to be necessary.

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Similar to interdisciplinary research, there is a noticeable tendency towards dealing with real-life problems. Transdisciplinary research is characterised by the so-called approach of subsumption.7 The problem provides the starting point and, together with the identification of the stakeholders’ needs, a comprehensive cross-disciplinary coherent problem is identified and defined. The scientific problem description does not follow any disciplinary logic or language but should allow for an identification of those affected. The description is constantly widened, re-adjusted and corrected during the process. Consequently, the process is organised as a project with a clear direction but without defined targets or phases. The stakeholders, from practice, are not only informed, but integrated into the process as active contributors, being not only objects of observation but empowered decision-makers. Problems can occur as the ‘languages’ of the diverse participants might be very different, and so a common way of communicating and a shared understanding of the problem have to be arrived at. Specific methods of reflection, motivation, communication and moderation are required to do so. A wider acceptance of the results in the group of the affected persons, due to their inclusion, is occasionally opposed by scepticism in the scientific community and other outsiders, conceivably because of the lack of continuity in the methodology and a diffuse theoretical framework. Special care has to be taken that the participation is authentic and not fabricated so as to legitimise decisions already taken or objectives already identified or to overcome resistance as in other participatory and integrative processes. Based on the previous characterisations, it is evident that transdisciplinary ­research needs to possess specific methods, means and processes in order to exploit its full potential. Apart from the disciplinary competence and placing of the researchers, this kind of research does not merely amount to a collection and merging of expertise from different disciplines. Design researchers like to claim that they are well equipped to tackle ‘wicked’ and other real-life problems. Furthermore, design is labelled as an ‘integrative discipline’, being capable of fruitfully bringing together expertise from diverse origins. Therefore let us take a closer look at design research with regard to its potential for transdisciplinary research.

Design Research, as an Integrative Discipline, Suitable for Transdisciplinary Research? Design research is still a rather indeterminate concept and an emerging discipline that has not agreed on whether it wants to be considered and deployed as a discipline at all. Accordingly, the definitions are evolving and manifold.

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Bruce Archer defined in 1980 ‘Design Research [to be] a systematic search for and acquisition of knowledge related to design and design activity’. Here design is in focus as the primary subject of the research. In the early 1990s, Christopher Frayling’s widely quoted and common differentiation prescribes research into design, research for design, and research through design. He emphasises the different relations between design and research in the three categories: design as subject, as target and as method of research activity. Considering a possible contribution of design research to transdisciplinary research I would like to follow a definition by Alain Findeli: ‘Design research is a systematic search for and acquisition of knowledge related to general human ecology considered from a designerly-way-of-thinking perspective, i.e. project-oriented’. Hence Findeli extends Archer’s subject matter from design to ‘general human ecology’. Moreover, he seizes on Frayling’s ‘research through design’, pointing out two important characteristics: firstly, the perspective of the researching designer (thus a description of the acting subject) which he underlines by modifying Nigel Cross’s famous notion of ‘designerly ways of doing’ and, secondly, the setting of project-­ grounded research. Both determinations are an essential premise in our context for the argument which follows. Based on this definition I beg not to sharply differentiate between design research and researching designers. What reasons could be adduced as to why the design researchers we just characterised should be especially capable of integrating aspects from different disciplines and of contributing to interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary research? The design process in practice is per se interdisciplinary because innovation can most often only be achieved by the interplay of design, technical, economical, and psychological knowledge together with other aspects. The interdisciplinary teams are recruited from the involved design offices, companies and, if applicable, research institutions. Larger design companies occasionally have such staff internally available as and when required. Designers are anxious to understand the world from the perspective of others and to predict their perceptions, reactions and actions, just as Klaus Krippendorff has so profoundly shown and summarised in the term ‘second order understanding’.8 Designers are trained to work with experts and other stakeholders in different phases of a project and to integrate their knowledge, experience and understanding. They can draw on a variety of methods and tools to do so, from user-centred to participatory design. Furthermore, a project-grounded research approach can build on this expertise integrating other disciplines or stakeholders by using design methods in a scientific setting. As mentioned earlier, transdisciplinary research differs from interdisciplinary research by jointly integrating non-scientists in the process, via the thoroughness of the collaboration between the stakeholders, and due to its project-based character as well as its concern with real-life problems. All these facets bear a resemblance to design research.

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Designers and design researchers are interested in day-to-day and real-life problems and are experienced in their handling. Currently, this includes widely addressed questions such as sustainability issues, changes in consumer behaviour and consumption, and social transformations resulting from the implications and handling of demographic change. The design of scenarios, simulation, and visualisation of alternatives with the objective to ‘change existing situations into preferred ones’9 are characteristics of design and project-grounded design research and simultaneously offer strategies to support transformative research. The mode of transdisciplinary research is project based. The process of project-grounded design research is per definition a project and in that respect resembles the setting of transdisciplinary research. Alain Findeli frames it as follows: ‘If you want to find out about a problem, put it into project’.10 Designers’ abilities to project and most notably to visualise offer a novel layer of communication between diverse disciplines and stakeholders. This results from the openly accessible forms of description and simulation and not the disciplinary scientific language, which can be an obstacle. This aspect is especially crucial when a group of heterogeneous stakeholders has to be brought together in a team, just like in any transdisciplinary process. By using design methods, the group can ­develop and discuss possible scenarios much more easily and are therefore more likely to accomplish a shared understanding and agree on the further procedure. In participatory design, such formats of communication are deliberately applied in different phases of the process to lower disciplinary barriers and hierarchies. Implicit knowledge from practice can be made explicit and can be shared at an early stage. In the context of participatory design, Liz Sanders points out that this approach is not only a set of methods and a collection of tools and techniques but at the same time a mind-set based on empathy towards the stakeholders and the process as a whole, which then allows for real participation.11 In summary, it can be concluded, that design and design research methods are suitable and promising for their application in inter- and transdisciplinary research projects. But does this contribution actually take place?

Changing Paradigms as an Opportunity for Design Research Science has changed. The transdisciplinary research approach and shift towards real-life problems offers vast possibilities for design research to make a valuable contribution. In order to achieve this, a repertoire of methods and tools is required that is specially tailored to this scientific setting. A growing number of well educated design researchers have emerged in recent years from academic and research institutions to meet this challenge. Even so, they all too frequently are overlooked when such teams and projects are being set up. Why is that? Why are they,

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all too often, not recognised and acknowledged as potential partners by other disciplines? One reason might be that design research is relatively young and its competencies and capabilities simply are not yet established. In public perception and even among scientists, design research is strongly superimposed by design practice as a discipline dealing with concerns of companies, markets, and clients rather than epistemological questions. Secondly, the capabilities of design researchers differ greatly, due to the rather heterogeneous education and the resulting diversity in expertise. From an outsider’s perspective it is hard to grasp what they are capable of and what to expect from them. Therefore, design researchers do not meet the expectations in some cases, as their specific knowledge might be valuable but might not match with the required skills, however. These problems have not been solved, yet, but mitigated by continuing the formation of design research as a discipline, because this will help to sharpen the profile externally and internally establish a foundation of relevant knowledge, skills and methods. More to the point is that design research should be engaging with the urgent social, cultural and ecological problems rather than with itself. It is important to begin visualising the potential of intelligent projects with noticeable impact and not least enabling prospective design researchers to make competent contributions in inter- and transdisciplinary teams with adequately positioned graduate and post-graduate educational programmes.

  1 Mason, S. F.: A History of the Sciences, New York, MacMillan, 1962.   2 Stichweh, R. (Hg.): Wissenschaft, Universität, Professionen. Soziologische Analysen, Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp, 1994.   3 Churchman, C. West: ‘Wicked Problems’, Management Science 14, 1967.   4 Rittel, Horst W. J.; Melvin M. Webber: ‘Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning’, Policy Sciences 4, 1973, 155–169.   5 Becker, E. and Jahn, T. (2000): ‘Sozial-ökologische Transformationen – Theoretische und methodische Probleme transdisziplinärer Nachhaltigkeitsforschung’, in Brand, K.-W. (Ed.): Nachhaltige Entwicklung und Transdisziplinarität, Berlin: Analytica, 67–84.   6 Burger, P.: ‘Die Crux mit dem Zielwissen’ in TATuP, Zeitschrift des ITAS für Technikfolgenabschätzung, Nr. 2, 2005, 50–56.   7 Böschen, S. (2000): ‘Transdisziplinäre Forschungsprozesse und das Problem des Nicht-Wissens – Herausforderungen an Wissenschaft und Politik’, in Brand, K.-W. (Ed.): Nachhaltige Entwicklung und Transdisziplinarität. Besonderheiten, Probleme und Erfordernisse der Nachhaltigkeitsforschung. Berlin: Ana­ lytica, 47–66.   8 Krippendorff, K.: The Semantic Turn – A new Foundation for Design, Boca Raton, Taylor & Francis, 2006.   9 Simon, Herbert A.: The Sciences of the Artificial, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1996. 10 Findeli, A.: Searching for Design Research Questions, Questions and Hypotheses Conference, Design ­Research Network, Berlin, 2008. 11 Sanders, E. B.-N.: ‘Perspectives on Participation in Design’, in Mareis, C., Held, M., Joost, G. (Eds.) Wer gestaltet die Gestaltung?, Bielefeld, Transkript, 2013, p. 77.

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INDISCIPLINE William Gaver

There was a strange mix of pride and loss when my daughter started colouring in pictures. It marked a turning point from her process-centred delight in watching coloured traces appear behind her hand movements – magic! – to colouring within the lines, a subordination of process to the goal of creating a picture. Granted, the result was to produce recognisable images rather than scribbles, but something joyful was lost in the process. And as she has progressed in her skills, adding new tricks like the ability to draw different clothes, or to sketch braids, or draw people in profile, that mixed sense of achievement and entrapment has continued. For as she builds her palette of techniques the possibilities multiply, but the sense of freedom, of being able to explore outside her rehearsed procedures, seems difficult to recapture. It seems that the lines she colours within are no longer on the page, they’re in her mind. Just as learning the discipline of colouring in the lines helped my daughter achieve artistic representations, so learning some of the basic methods of Design can help designers achieve good results.1 But equally, just as learning drawing techniques has constrained or at least altered the joy, spontaneity, and range of results of my daughter’s drawing, so relying too much on known design techniques can dampen the freedom and innovation of designers. I believe we need to balance inclinations towards advocating expertise and standards in Design, which often seem to lead to calls for greater methodological discipline, with an appreciation for how great designs often seem to spring from indiscipline: a willingness to abandon understood methods, approaches, and even ideas about expertise and standards. At this point, particularly in discussions of design as a form of research, it seems the balance has swung too far towards calls for discipline, and I’d like to resist this. Indeed, I want to advocate a view in which indiscipline is one of the hallmarks of Design itself, and to celebrate this as a strength rather than any kind of vulnerability. Early in my studies for a PhD in Experimental Psychology, I devised and ran a study to see if familiarity increased preference for short melodies. This involved asking the ‘subjects’ of my experiment to rate how much they liked each of a collection of tunes that I had generated using a simple compositional algorithm. To control familiarity, I played some tunes many more times than others. To collect enough data to look for statistical differences between tunes, I had them rate each tune a number of times. To control for order effects (in which the rating for one tune might be affected by the tune that came before) I counterbalanced different sequences of tunes, which meant playing even more repetitions. By the time the ‘stimuli’ were rigorously arranged to pinpoint the possible effects for which I was looking, the to-

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tal sequence was about two hours long. I left subjects in a soundproof booth, listening to the tunes over headphones and rating each one in a thick booklet of rating scales. Perhaps it is no surprise that when I returned, I often found them slumped over the desk, sound asleep, while the simple electronic melodies played on and on. I felt a bit guilty, but in the end I managed to collect the data I needed to test my hypothesis. A defining feature of scientific approaches to study is what I call epistemological accountability: in order to claim that an assertion is scientific, you have to be able to defend how you know it to be true.2 This involves aligning theory, logic, and data to construct an account that leads from observation to causal theory, an account that is consistent, unbroken, and resistant to alternative explanations. For the empirical sciences, methodology is a key player in constructing such an account. Perhaps the most common attack on the scientific status of a given assertion comes through its methodology – that the wrong kinds of data were collected, or in the wrong way, or that they were analysed wrongly. Controversies dog even relatively well-known methods (should rating scales have five or seven alternative choices – or should they be continuous?). In such a context, it is far easier to rely on existing methodologies than to introduce genuinely new ones, to avoid having to engage with the epistemological battles that new ones incite. Over time, then, a canon of methodologies develops and is propagated in curricula and publications, to be superseded only in the event of more profound conceptual revolutions in the domain. Epistemological accountability is not integral to design. To be sure, it can be useful to know the provenance of statements about the context for design (are you sure people really care about those things?) or the materials used in design (how heat resistant is that plastic?), or about a design’s reception (how much did people use it, and for how long?). The rigour with which such questions are answered is not definitional to design in the way that it is to science, however. Instead, design can be defined by the aesthetic accountability of its outputs. Aesthetics here does not refer to a judgement of beauty, but to a holistic assessment whether a design ‘works’, functionally, conceptually, culturally, and aesthetically (in the more narrow sense). If an artefact ‘works’, then it is a good design, regardless of how it came to be. If it doesn’t work, it is not a good design, and may not be considered a design at all, no matter how systematic and well established the methods that gave it rise. One reason that science and design answer to different forms of accountability is that they produce different sorts of ‘facts’. Science tends to make assertions about a world assumed to be objective, real, and unitary, so two incompatible ­accounts of the same phenomena cannot both be true. The ‘facts’ that design produces, in contrast, are the new entities and activities it brings into the world, and just as many different kinds of chairs can co-exist, so can many different perspectives on what chairs are, or on sitting as a human activity, or on the ways we might learn about such things. Science seeks to build unitary facts and theories, whereas design proliferates multiple ways of being in the world. So science uses a variety of

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means (described, for instance, by Bruno Latour) to strengthen the reality of facts and build fortifications around them, while design can rely on more jury-rigged assemblages to construct its facts, knowing that as long as they ‘work’, they can find their place among other alternatives. Understanding design as aesthetically accountable makes clear the extraor­ dinary methodological flexibility that can be accessed in using it as a basis for research. If we embrace the idea that design is and should be judged by the quality of the results rather than the means used to achieve them, then we can develop design as a genuine and radical alternative to science in investigating the world. If we deny aesthetic accountability, on the other hand – perhaps because it is resistant to codification, and open to individual and subcultural differences of opinion – then it becomes tempting to introject the epistemological accountability of the sciences. And that, I suggest, would be a shame both because we risk subordinating ourselves as unsophisticated beginners at doing ‘real’ research, and – equally importantly – because we would miss a huge opportunity. What are the opportunities offered by embracing aesthetic rather than epistemological accountability as a basis for design research? My colleagues and I have been exploring this over last decade or so, not least by developing a range of ex­citing (to us, at least) methods for design-led research. For instance Cultural Probes – collections of playful tasks designed to elicit inspiring responses from people that are revealing of their lives and dreams – knowingly subvert scientific assumptions of reliability, replicability, comparability, generality, validity, and so on. Design Workbooks collect large numbers of proposals together to develop design spaces for consideration; the proposals themselves are purposefully left indicative and open rather than detailing specific technologies or scenarios of use. We use documentary filmmakers to help us capture and assess our designs in the field, enjoying the ways their perspectives are overlaid on those of participants to create stories that are in no way answerable to criteria of objectivity, balance or representativeness. We have extended this to work with other Cultural Commentators, including journalists and poets, to see our work refracted through their genres and individual styles. Overall, we have revelled in the space between fact and fiction, play and serious investigation, data and narrative in exploring how the meanings and potentials of computational devices can be appreciated. A funny thing has happened over the years that we’ve been doing this work, however. As we’ve tried these techniques, growing confident about their use – over many iterations in some cases – they’ve stablised in our research practice. Every filmmaker may differ and every set of Probes may be designed afresh, but deciding to run a Probe study or to work with a filmmaker to document a field trial is no longer a deeply experimental move within our practice. To be sure, we have occasionally sought to rethink these approaches – for instance, reconceiving Probes as unfinished storybooks, or as online experiences – but on the whole these methods have become genres of their own, part of our standard approach to pursuing a

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­design-led research project. Moreover, some of the methods have spread, and are not only used within other practices, but regularly taught to students. It seems these methods have become part of a canon of approaches that defines, more or less ­explicitly, how design research should be approached and conceptualised. Of course I am largely pleased to find that the techniques developed by my colleagues and me have been found useful by others, not least because those techniques carry with them, at least to some extent, the subversive ethos of pursuing design research as a matter of aesthetic rather than epistemological accountability. Nonetheless, it is a bit sad to see our moments of methodological experimentation being taught to new design researchers, if that means that there is less freedom or motivation for their own risks and discoveries: it is uncomfortable to think of students being graded for their Probes. Just as my daughter’s growing repertoire of learned tricks for drawing braids, noses, and dresses simultaneously represents a growth in ability and a decrease in autonomy, so the reification of our methods seems simultaneously to empower and enfeeble design research as a whole. Just as I want to make sure she still has the freedom to scribble or scrawl, so I want others to experience the mix of enthusiasm, risk, and mischief I did when the idea for Cultural Probes emerged with Tony Dunne, over the course of a half-hour conversation in Amsterdam. Just as I want to avoid inheriting the methodological discipline of the sciences, so I want to avoid closing down the productive indiscipline of design. It should be clear from the examples I use that discipline and indiscipline tend to dance around each other, seldom if ever existing for long without their ­opposite. My daughter’s scribbles would go nowhere if they were never channelled by lines or drawing techniques; equally, those techniques become sterile without room for experimentation and appropriation. Design workbooks would be ephemeral as a method if they weren’t taught and reproduced; they maintain their ability to inspire when they are re-imagined and particularised. From this point of view, discipline is a matter of establishing boundaries around methodologies, creating areas of stability for consolidation, while indiscipline is a mechanism for transgressing those boundaries and allowing new territories to be explored. Both appear necessary. So while I am defending indiscipline here, this is not a call for anarchy. ­After all, to suggest that we should eschew the recognition and reification of successful methods and encourage practitioners to invent new forms of engagement for each situation they find would be madness. Wouldn’t it?

1 2

I’m leaving questions about what good processes or results might be to one side here. I am aware that this discussion reflects a cleaned-up version of what can be a much messier process of ‘doing science’, but this is a version often implied by scientists, and assumed by those who promote a view of design research based on ‘scientism’.

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DESIGN, AN UNDISCIPLINABLE PROFESSION Klaus Krippendorff

Is Design a Discipline? I offer three reasons for why this question does not deserve a yes-or-no answer: • First is the implied existence of a true answer. My hope is that the deliberations in this book will shape a more nuanced answer. • Second is the lack of clarity of what it means to be a discipline. Let me reflect on what makes a discipline a discipline: To discipline is to punish someone for deviating from a norm. Academic disciplines educate what it takes to become part of a community of practitioners after which it is legitimate to discipline their disciples when not conforming to the prevailing expectations. Academic disciplines are somewhat closed systems of beliefs in how reality is to be constructed. Biologists attend to a reality that has little to do with how physicists see it, and economists do not care for how psychiatrist explain the world they claim to face. They all construct their own bubble so as to excel within them, largely independent of one another. In academic disciplines, deviance tends to be punished by exclusion, withdrawing the license to practice them, refusing to publishing unorthodox research in their journals, and resisting infringements by despised disciplines. Michel Foucault wrote of various disciplinary regimes in similar terms.1 Claiming that ‘disciplines punish deviant disciples’ makes the epistemolo­ gical mistake of attributing agency to an abstraction. A discipline cannot act as ­humans do. Claiming that ability hides the fact that it is disciples that police each other by invoking the abstract norms of the discipline they ventriloquise. Accordingly, an affirmative answer to the leading question would invite designers to police each other for whether they qualify to be called designers, perhaps until they have succeeded to internalise the norms of their discipline and show evidence of having enough self-discipline to police themselves. My discomfort with the prospect of calling design a discipline leads to • The third and more important reason for not giving a yes-or-­no answer to the above is that questions of what we call design, what we expect designers to do, how we educate people to become designers, and for what should designers be respected by their clients and society at large, are wide open. Let me try to answer some of them.

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What Do We Want Design to Embrace? Unfortunately, the word ‘design’ is being used variously. The sense of intentionality is implied when scientists speak of designing experiments, architects propose buildings, and politicians devise policies. Design can serve as a synonym of fashionableness as in ‘designer clothes’. Design can refer to a particular pattern, a clever assembly, or an outstanding arrangement. Dictionary definitions come closer to my conception by distinguishing design from natural processes of emergence. This leads to distinctions among design practitioners in such terms as fashion, product, service, graphic, engineering, or food designers. Let me not address the differences among these specialisations and locate design from a larger perspective. I like to start with the well-documented fact that scientific predictions of technological and cultural developments are notoriously unreliable. Not that there are futurists who claim to know what comes next. Some of them may well be believed by designers who have the ability to make them come true in the manner of self-fulfilling prophecies. But the histories of predictions, scientific or prophetic, are full of failures. Instead of learning from failed predictions, their proponent stop mentioning them as soon as developments take unanticipated turns. Who could have predicted the advent of writing, automobiles and highways, airplane travel, personal computing, smart phones, the Internet, and digital commerce, before they actually happened? Yes, we have Moore’s law asserting that computing speed doubles roughly every two years. We have Ziff’s law predicting that frequently used words become shorter, more efficient in use. We know that the mass-production of technological devices, services, entertainment, and games tends to homogenise the population of their users and in turn opens the doors for more mass-production. We can observe that digitalisation irreversibly reduces the size of everyday artefacts until they reach their human interfaces.2 Such predictions, seemingly valid, concern simple measurable dimensions of our material culture but say little about what we will wear, how we will communicate, which technologies will fascinate us and transform our lives in the near or distant future. To understand the failures of scientific predictions, it is important to recognise that predictions succeed only when the phenomena attended to are causally connected. Patterns that have demonstrably persisted over time can be extrapolated into the future under the assumption that they continue to persist. Probabilistic predictions may not be perfect but cannot exceed what was expected at the time they were made. So, why do scientific predictions of technological and cultural developments fail? I contend that such failures are due to the social practices of designing. To me, ‘designing constitutes being human’.3 Arranging the furniture in one’s home is a design practice as is planning a vacation, writing an influential paper, building a business, passing a law, and creating art. Humans co-construct their worlds to dwell in them. All design practices introduce innovations into individual lives and society. By definition, innovations have no historical precedents and support novel ways of living, not necessarily to the better. It follows that design activi-

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ties undo the causalities that scientists seek to theorise. Indeed, designing, whether every day or professional, is the main driver of technological, social, cultural, and economic developments. Designing keeps cultures and the institutions of societies viable. In the absence of innovations, societies become vulnerable to environmental challenges and collapse in stagnation. In complex societies, such as ours, professional designers arguably are the most important source of change. Unlike everyday design, professional designers channel innovations via institutions of production and dissemination to how humans interact with one another, interface with technology, and relate to the natural environment. This is why designers undermine and render invalid scientific theories of continuities, especially involving them. Recognising the inability of scientific disciplines to cope with what designers do, Herbert Simon proposed a Science of the Artificial, which addresses improvements over what exists.4 The logic he proposed was a major milestone in conceptualising design. However, his science exhibits a myopic view of design. Let me mention three limitations not worth adopting. It does not explain how something comes to be a problem and to whom. It is limited to solving well-defined problems, such as in logic, engineering, and logistical decision making in management. And it is entirely oblivious to problems that emerge after an existing problem is solved and implemented, an apparently obsolete practice is retired, or an out-dated institution is replaced by a better one. In other words, Simon’s science of the artificial does not recognise the social system in which it is meant to be practiced. Harold Nelson and Erik Stolterman suggest design to be of service to those who care: clients, representatives of interested parties, customers, and end users.5 They correctly describe scientific disciplines as essentially self-serving. Scientists, they say, are motivated by their own curiosity and pursue their passion for objective knowledge within the confines of their disciplinary boundaries. Nelson and Stolterman do not want to equate ‘being of service’ with being a servant or providing exactly what their clients say they need. They allow for design to be surprising, to exceed clients’ expectations. Unlike Simon, they recognise that design takes place in relationships between designers and non-designers. Accordingly, design practices cannot be limited to ‘design thinking’, a currently fashionable term that celebrates cognitive skills. Designers need to negotiate their criteria of success with communities outside their own. To be of service to others calls for reflexive engagements with the diverse worlds of those they serve. It means acquiring what I have called second-order understanding, the understanding of others’ understanding and of these others’ understanding of the world in which designers work. Clearly, the empirical domain of design cannot be closed as are the disciplinary domains of the natural sciences. My misgiving with the idea of design as being of service stems from its implication that designers need to respond to the interests and perspectives of those they serve. Most clients pursue limited objectives, often at the expense of competitors, the environment, communities that cannot pay for their products, or populations

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whose ignorance can be exploited, for example, by designing for obsolescence or creating financial products that are ruinous in the long run. I like to see designers to be leaders the human use of technology and culture, not being led by special interests.

Professionalism Versus Disciplinary Commitments Nelson and Stolterman are quite right to talk of design as a profession. Professionals have particular competencies and profess to conduct themselves according to shared ethical standards. In the case of professional designers, I am suggesting that their competencies need to embrace public interests, the viability of cultural practices, and the general good of society not only the objectives of particular clients. Designers ought to be free to think and act outside disciplinary boxes, not just by being able to work in multidisciplinary teams, but also in defiance of the determinisms that scientific disciplines seek to import in the social domain and of special interests that seek to direct the design process to their limited ends. Merely following a trend, varying the appearance of a well-established product, importing a known technology, or plagiarising a design in the hope to get away with it can hardly be considered innovative. And delegating design decisions to a computer system may yield surprises that remain confined, however, within the preconceived logic of its software. Design means creating spaces of heretofore unknown possibilities that reflexively embrace the social worlds of others. Horst Rittel’s conception of design is a step in this direction.6 His ‘wicked problems’7 are not merely ill-defined as Simon would describe them. They acknowledge the competing interests expressed within networks of political and economic actors who ultimately enable or oppose the realisation of a design. For him, design means making compelling arguments for realistic plans and proposals for actions. I am adding that designs need to fuel the conversations within what I conceive of as networks of stakeholder communities and bring forth novel realities. One needs to acknowledge that designers do not create products, services, and multi-user systems. They envision and articulate plans and proposals for actions in terms of a specialised language, a design discourse.8 A design discourse enables ­designers to create, talk of, collaborate within, and communicate spaces of possibilities beyond what is widely known and imaginable. Designers are often oblivious to what they do in language. A design discourse includes designers’ ­visions, of course, but must also link them to the intended and unintended real­isations of a design, almost always with the help of others. Literally manifest in visualisations, experiments, simulations, demonstrations, and presentations that designers develop with or without those who matter, the communication of a design must moreover provide spaces that motivate their stakeholders to add their own creative contributions to what designers propose. Providing such spaces enables designers to

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lead their stakeholders on paths not yet travelled. Leadership requires passionate articulations of future possibilities for others who may not have imagined them, possibilities that deviate from what would happen given the natural drift of events. In sum, professional design needs to be bigger than what individuals can ­articulate and accomplish on their own. The conversations that designers initiate need to venture into uncharted territories and develop attractive paths not ordinarily taken. In pursuit of such objectives, designers must not be afraid to question popular conceptions, challenge deep-rooted habits, deconstruct vested interests in present conditions, undermine powerful institutions, awaken silenced voices, doubt theories that merely describe what is, and be suspicious of all claims of what cannot be done. Their design discourse needs to preserve the freedom to cross-disciplinary boundaries even if it provokes objections. To me, these abilities are a prerequisite of all design practices – but only one half of what designers need to embrace.

Undisciplinable Does Not Mean Irresponsible While design ought not to be disciplinable by abstract conceptions or vested interests, this should not be construed as claiming unconstrained freedoms. The virtue of identifying design as a profession is that professions are constitutively open to the worlds of those they affect. For designers, these worlds include not only the above mentioned stakeholders who are able to articulate their interest in a design and have resources to support or oppose it, but also those who are knowingly or unwittingly affected by it, and mere bystanders who may well act on what they observe. Insofar as the work of designers affects the lives of other human beings, designers cannot escape ethical constraints. Such constraints become manifest when designers are held accountable for the consequences of what they develop and propose. Recently, I had the opportunity to comment on the policies and educational choices of design in India.9 The ethical commitments that designers need to make became part of the ensuing discussions. Let me briefly sketch the four most important imperatives. • Professional designers need to acknowledge the interpretive flexibility of their designs10 and respect the diversity of conceptions that users can bring to their use. They may suggest best practices but it is imperative to renounce the temptation to control the meanings their designs could acquire for their stakeholders. Users’ conceptions and growing competencies naturally deviate from designers’ intentions and respecting them is ethically imperative.

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• To interface with things in their worlds, people can draw from a rich reservoir of culturally available conceptions. The way artefacts are designed to function selectively affords some user conceptions but not all. To the extent designers can control the internal make-up of what they are proposing, it is an ethical imperative to ensure that their designs do not afford conceptions that can get their users in trouble, for example, by causing life threatening breakdowns. Stated colloquially, a design should not deceive their users, causing harm or injury, and always fail safely. • As already mentioned, it is tempting for designers to create benefits for targeted communities, for example, for those who are willing to pay for and utilise their designs. With reference to the larger cultural and societal obligations of professional designers, the more important ethical imperative is not to propose designs that can be realised or used only or mainly at the expense of non-targeted and future populations, regardless of who they are and whether they know, understand, and can articulate what is happening to them. This ethical imperative is not meant to exclude designs that compete with ­existing designs. Competition stimulates innovation. But designs that irreversibly impair communities that are not represented by active stakeholders should not be undertaken. Examples include designs that discriminate against minorities, spyware that hacks into the private lives of unsuspecting computer users, and media that disadvantage vulnerable populations. For one example, designers should not overlook that most high-tech devices tend to be manufactured by slave labour in poor countries. Norbert Wiener11 and Gregory Bateson12 have warned of the grave and ultimately self-destructive consequences of pursuing narrowly focused purposes. • As already alluded to, a design succeeds or fails in the conversations that guide it through the networks of its stakeholders – executives, engineers, managers, producers, sales personnel, buyers, and end-users – before retiring into our ecology. All of these stakeholders pursue complex interest, have diverse resources at their disposal, possess creative competencies of their own, and are motivated by what they can contribute to the realisation of a design. It follows that in an open society such as ours, designers cannot claim to be in charge of everything that happens to their design. Lucy Such-

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man insists that viable plans (designs) have to stay vague.13 They have to convince, inform, and provide sufficiently large spaces for their stakeholders to add their part in bringing a design to fruition. It calls for respecting the various interests in a design, even if the designers’ conceptions evolve into something else. Previously, I summarised the above by saying that designers need to delegate design to their stakeholders.14 This ethical imperative calls on designers to lead by letting go of some dimensions of a design and trust the network of their stakeholders with its continuous development. These ethical imperatives define good designs as designs that flow freely throughout interested populations and evolve continuously, with or without their originators.

Design Research The above, Simon’s insights, and a previous essay15 come to the same conclusion that design research, modelled after scientific research, is an oxymoron. Scientific research is re-search, the repeated search within existing data for enduring pattern that provide the evidence for predictive theories. Re-search cannot possibly inform innovations which, by definition, deviate from past precedents. This is not to deny that even the most innovative designs are built on proven contingencies. They offer scientific re-search a role in the development of a design – but not the defining one. Innovations cannot be searched, computed, and found in available data, which represent what had been observed or measured prior to searching through them. Insisting that designers ground their work in scientific re-search of this kind, perhaps to gain some short term respectability, will certainly curtail designers’ ability to live up to their professional potentials. Insofar as all innovations, whether they emerged spontaneously, followed the use of generative metaphors,16 or emerged in conversations17 with non-designers, must be plausibly justifiable to those who come in contact with them, this condition gives design research an objective that fundamentally deviates from the aims of scientific re-search. I am suggesting that design research efforts generate empirical support for the justifications that designers need to advance in order to enrol stakeholders into their project of realising something not yet existing. Let me distinguish its four most important targets: • Inquiries into the possibilities of innovation. Such inquiries cannot remain limited to what consumers want to have more of.

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They need to explore what people would be willing to give up should currently unknown alternatives become available. I am advocating the use of ‘ethnographies of possibilities’ to uncover what is considered cumbersome, requires too much attention, is likely to cause accidents, is easily forgotten, too costly, difficult to live with, and oppressive or humiliating. Such inquiries can provide the empirically grounds for designers to grow inspirations in the second-order understanding of non-designers’ meaningful futures. • Inquiries aimed at improving the process of designing. Such inquiries target a range of professional practices, from testing alternative ways to collaborate in multidisciplinary design teams; evaluating the successes and failures of design methods; surveying available literature, materials, technologies, manufacturing techniques, and competent stakeholders; experimenting with alternative approaches and prototypes, including brainstorming with leading stakeholders; developing and testing new design support systems, and recording and analysing post design accounts. Their aim is to make design processes more efficient and generate methods that demonstrably increase the probability of subsequent successes. • Inquiries that improve the public standing of the design profession. There is some merit to the claim that associating design with the arts makes it difficult for designers to assume larger responsibilities. Indeed, talking of designs in fashionable terms, soon to be abandoned for more recent ones, does not give the design profession the public respect it deserves. I suppose the call for design research recognises this image problem. The inquiries suggested here are to evaluate the quality and comprehensiveness of professional design education; the growth of the design discourse by which designers communicate among themselves and in public, especially by means of popular and professional publications; reports on how professional designers contribute to the viability of society and the lives of its members. • Finally but undoubtedly most important are inquiries into how to effectively participate in, energise, and assemble stakeholder networks that can be entrusted with the realisation of designs. Recently, designers have been preoccupied with the psychology of assumed or statistically constructed end-users. However, as elaborated above, the stakeholder networks that need to be animated to bring a design to fruition tend to be com-

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posed of diverse and sophisticated experts who live in rather unlike but interconnected worlds. These worlds need to be examined not only to assure that designs are compellingly communicated – following Rittel – but also to provide designers with the ability to be held accountable for their compliance with the above four ethical imperatives, for the intended and unintended consequences of their designs. This calls for inquiries into the multi-dimensional spaces in which these stakeholders work and coordinate their various contributions. Possibilities pertain to what does not yet exist but might. They are articulated and shared in language. Inquiries that would reveal what could compel stakeholders to become part of designers’ projects need to take seriously how stakeholders talk of what matters to them and the kinds of commitments they are willing to make. Such inquiries would have the effect of strengthening and expanding the reach of design discourse vis-à-vis the discourses of those who have a stake in what designers do. Compelling arguments for a design are also supported by what the preceding three design research aims can provide: demonstrations that a sufficiently large space of possibilities was explored, that the proposed design resulted from applying proven design methods, and that it was developed by competent and ethically compliant professional designers. In my experiences, the kind of design research outlined above has a good chance to increase the respectability of the community of professional designers and expand the responsibilities this community can assume in inter-disciplinary collaboration aimed at human-centred technologies and social practices in culture and society.

  1 Foucault, M.: Discipline and Punish. The Birth of Prisons, Alan Sheridan (Tr.), New York, Vintage, 1977.   2 Krippendorff, K.: The Semantic Turn; A New Foundation for Design, Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis CRC Press, 2006, p. 5, 78ff.   3 Ibid., p. 74.   4 Simon, H. A.: The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd Edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.   5 Nelson, H. G. and Stolterman, E.: The Design Way; Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World. ­Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications, 2003.   6 Protzen, J.-P. and Harris, D. J.: The Universe of Design; Horst Rittel’s Theories of Design and Planning, New York, Routledge, 2010.   7 Ibid., pp. 147–165.   8 Krippendorff, K.: ‘Redesigning design; An invitation to a responsible future’, in Päivi Tahkokallio and ­Susann Vihma (Eds.). Design – Pleasure or Responsibility? Helsinki: University of Art and Design, 1995, pp. 138–162. http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/46 (Accessed 20 April 2015).

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  9 Krippendorff, K.: The Social Consequences of Three Models of Design. Keynote address to an international conference titled Design for a Billion at the Indian Institute of Technology, November 7–9, 2014, in Gandhinagar, India. 10 Pinch, T. J. and Bijker, W. E.: ‘The social construction of facts and artifacts’, in their (Eds.) The Social ­Construction of Technological Systems, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987, pp. 17–50. 11 Wiener, N.: God and Golem, Inc., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964, pp. 49ff. 12 Bateson, G.: Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago press, 2000, pp. 446ff. 13 Suchman, L.: Plans and Situated Actions; The Problem of Human-Machine Communication, Palo Alto, CA, Xerox Corporation, 1985. http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports ISL-6_ Plans_and_Situated_Actions.pdf (Accessed 20 April 2015). 14 Krippendorff, K.: The Semantic Turn; A New Foundation for Design, Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis CRC Press, 2006, p. 145. 15 Krippendorff, K.: ‘Design research; An oxymoron?’, in Ralf Michel (Ed.), Design Research; Essays and Selected Projects, Zürich, Birkhäuser Verlag, 2007, pp. 67–80, http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/45 (Accessed 20 April 2015). 16 Schön, D. A.: Generative metaphor: A perspective on problem-setting in social policy, in A. Orthony (Ed.), Metaphor and Thought, London: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 137–163. ­ omputation’, 17 Krippendorff, K.: ‘Conversation: Possibilities of its Repair and Descent into Discourse and C Constructivist Foundations 4, 3, 2009, pp. 135–147, http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/134 (­Accessed 20 April 2015).

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BETWEEN POSSIBILITY AND DISCIPLINE OR: DESIGN RESEARCH AS PROVOCATION TO THE FAINT-HEARTED Michael Erlhoff

We don’t need no thought control (Pink Floyd)

Those who constantly go to great lengths to describe design and design research as a discipline, somehow nullify all the potentials that design, due to its genesis and present capabilities, is able to offer and to implement in research. Disciplined activity or research curbs and negates the true nature of design, which is offering and implementing possibilities. The same is true, of course, for the walk through the universe of the sciences. Hence, we first have to attempt to understand both the current craze of forcing design into a discipline, as well as the academic stress in design and in design research, which are characterised by anxiety and misunderstanding.

1. To this end, it makes sense to start by briefly discussing the recent history of the development of both the sciences and design. Therefore, let’s first remind ourselves that with his Conflict of the Faculties essay, Immanuel Kant started the eponymous dispute because, on the one hand, he wanted to differentiate his own faculty – philosophy – as an absolutely independent and free one from the purpose-oriented or dependent faculties of medicine and theology. In terms of politics, this was a strategic argument. On the other hand – and this is also implicit in Kant’s text – he was aware of the term ‘faculty’ deriving from facultas, which means ‘possibility’ and hence embraces a large horizon of concepts and negotiations. In Kant’s days, universities were actually organised as a ‘university’, in which today’s real or seemingly clear boundaries between individual scientific fields were completely unknown. These boundaries only emerged in the mid-19th century – analogous, as it were, to the division of labour in the manufacturing industries – and very rapidly established themselves. In an almost fashionable way, one sought to define one’s own field of work and science and to sharply distinguish it from others. This led to such distinct separation and indeed disciplinarity that by the end of the 19th century the situation had engendered substantial discomfort, not only at the

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universities themselves but also in the business world and in the entire intercultural context. Consequently and understandably, at around 1890, the discourse on synaesthesia and the many corresponding experiments started to overcome those separatist efforts of creating disciplines, and at around 1900 engineers and engineering universities entered the stage. Their name ‘in genius’ already promised a programme of returning to thinking and working contextually, transdisciplinary and in a networked way. Contrary to the profound enthusiasm of convergence, over the following years, engineering would also split up into different sciences, which was certainly due to the military disciplines of WWI and other problem areas. At least some scientists and researchers, and certainly not the most stupid ones, for example Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg, continued to work against the trend of having their thinking departmentalised and at times broke down or transcended the boundaries of their respective scientific areas. In the 1960s, and even more so from the beginning of the 1990s onwards, the focus shifted towards design as the field that would potentially offer the new ability of acting and thinking across assumed and unrealistic boundaries. An example: As early as in the 1990s, the following happened quite frequently in the German ­Research Funding Commission: when the commission had to decide on applications from the areas of sociology, architecture, psychology, ethnology or law, the high-profile specialised professors of theoretical mathematics, chemistry, medicine and from certain areas of technology looked at the design professors, obviously assuming that those were the ones capable of, and responsible for, making decisions on applications from those areas. And: when there was once an appli­cation from the area of theoretical mathematics and the commission members looked at the colleague from that area, this professor stated that in theoretical mathematics, there were only five or seven experts who would still be able to understand each other. The reasons why in particular design experienced such appreciation, which, over the last few years, has even become stronger, also in the public realm, can certainly be explained, on the one hand, by the fact that there is an increasing, and today also general, recognition of the truly complex tasks design and design research are faced with: design vehemently engages in all social, economic, technological and cultural, and hence in all research-related, contexts and tries to analyse, describe, understand and use them. On the other hand, the new appreciation of design is based on its genesis: far removed from the ideological and totally superfluous effort of deriving design from arts & crafts (a movement that, in parts, harked back to the Middle Ages) or from German craft traditions, the first attempts to develop a profound understanding of design and its complexity already emerged at around 1920 with Peter Behrens’ work for AEG. However, this modern understanding of design only started to truly come into its own in the 1930s with Raymond Loewy and other US-based designers. With empiricism’s typical undulations, this new movement rapidly took hold and gained recognition.

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Today, design is seen – definitely also in the sciences – as a model for the integrative and highly networked abilities and skills, which are so urgently needed in order to think and act in the present and to develop perspectives for the future. Hence, design’s ‘youthfulness’ and the non-fixation or openness implicit in this youthfulness seem to provide – if one understands this openness and acts accordingly – a good opportunity to remind ourselves of the qualities of facultas: understanding the importance of openness, understanding chaotic situations and realities and acting within these conditions. As an aside: In his book The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil already referred to ‘a sense of possibility’.

2. In the light of the above considerations and historical developments, at first glance, it is all the more difficult to understand why these processes are acknowledged by many outside the design field but hardly comprehended in the design field itself. What’s certainly remarkable is that the potential one should be able to see in the genesis of design, i.e. in its youth, has the reverse effect that those who practice design, and partly also design research, obviously agonise over precisely the fact that they cannot derive their practice from times long since past. Being able to point to long-standing tradition somehow seems to generate the self-confidence (a crucial part of which is also well-founded self-criticism) that is so important for the acceptance of one’s own practice and thinking. What’s lacking is the confidence to accept and present oneself in an unpretentious way and to simply deal with the scope of the tasks ahead. Sure, lack of self-confidence always leads to talking oneself down, to kotow, to permanently apologise and, in an apparently deeply impressed manner to idolise and emulate allegedly more important metiers. On the other hand, this attitude also goes along with aggressively attacking and putting down those other areas of competence that seem to enjoy greater reputation. Michel de Certeau excellently describes this paradox in his book The Practice of Everyday Life where he precisely points out that although theoretical discourse, the sciences and also the arts are held in high regard in our societies, at the same time, there is the need to permanently attack and possibly destroy them just because people feel they are obliged to respect them. Those who are unable to do the things they admire, or are expected to admire, start to hate those things and those who are able to do them (admittedly this is a somewhat generalised way to put it) and at times are simultaneously eager to adopt the perceived or real attitudes of those who represent these areas. This is exactly what happened in design and what also affects some areas of design research. In the 1960s Richard Buchanan already described a telling situation where he visited a design congress together with a surgeon who asked him,

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with a notion of bewilderment, why the participants were constantly apologising for being designers. In actual fact, this submissive attitude still characterises many ­design practitioners today (and is also reflected in their salaries or fees). A similar situation can often be observed in design research because, in a downright desperate way, some people actually write about finally wanting to attain ‘eye level’ with the sciences. They therefore argue for forcing design into the disciplinary boundaries of a traditional science and they imitate the corresponding gestures, attitudes and debates: you only have to read MA or PhD theses or many other publications in the field of design. The hunt for definitions, the need to derive oneself per definitionem from the projection of some or other ultimacy, is another indicator for this pining for acknowledgement and certainty. It is truly absurd, or even depressing, to observe how such attitudes in design fail to recognise, or simply repress, the possibilities and hence the substance of our work. While for about two decades all traditional sciences the world over have made major efforts to establish convergence and meta-disciplinary discourse and to use all possible options of theory and practice, many involved in design research have ignored their very own, and essentially inevitable, ability of making possible this convergence and other theoretical desires. Given the increasing bureaucratisation of universities and the silly competition among teaching staff, there is reason to fear that, in the foreseeable future, design will obligingly establish itself, and therefore make itself obsolete, by selling itself short and neglecting both its real skills and its ‘sense of possibility’ with the effect that other scientific coalitions will prevail.

3. I can only hope that the fundamentals relating to the question as to how design should, or will, use the historical body of diverse scientific research have already been formulated in what I have described above. In my view, it is obvious, especially in design, that we can use everything we consider appropriate. While we can hardly talk of ‘fundamentals’ in design, for example in design education – because everything has to be considered, and fundamentals also includes physics, sociology, literature, music, economics, ecology, psychology, technology etc., as well as media skills and digital skills – it is all the more important to understand that the category and the reality of use value has to be the way forward. Everything that helps to recognise, understand, represent or develop something in a meaningful way is also substantial for design research. The singular most important aspect in this approach is critical awareness and the ability to read and to perceive not in a blindly obliging, but in a precise and critical way and, in so doing, to be able to discern how much nonsense, or only temporarily valid wisdom, has also been published in the traditional sciences.

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Therefore, Max Horkheimer’s thoughts are certainly still valid today when he states that each historical tradition is connoted by three aspects: by what actually happened, by the conditions of how what happened is communicated, and by the current societal interest. Obviously, this is easily identifiable in the fashions of many scientific areas. However, there is still another aspect worth mentioning, one that is very particular to design, both intellectually and substantially, and that constitutes a special quality: design inexorably justifies itself in use and thus in a social context. Considering this, one ought to be able to see that use value, and also the use value of insight, is something that constantly and curiously moves into focus. With regard to lectures, talks and publications, everyone knows, and has to accept, that the listeners’ or readers’ reception is always predominantly determined by what is of interest to them, what is useful to them, what satisfies their desire for knowledge or – more bleakly – by what provides guidelines for their behaviour. Inevitably – and this relates to all aspects of design – as a publicist one appeals to the audience’s critical faculties and offers as many aspects as possible, if necessary even contradictions, to support critical thinking. Therefore, let’s examine everything that exists in terms of how we could use it in intelligent ways. And let’s put an end, once and for all, to those stupid academic attitudes and gestures.

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PROJECT-GROUNDED RESPONSES: DISCIPLINE / INDISCIPLINE Would you characterise your PhD research as mainly contributing to the academic discipline of Design Research, to a transdisciplinary research culture, or perhaps rather to a postdisciplinary research discourse?

PhD research by practice creates the opportunity for an interdisciplinary approach in exploring the research question. It allows for specific enquiry yet engage with ­related areas to broaden the field of knowledge. Observing various processes and practices, coupled with reading across related fields, generates the ability to think beyond a singular field of research. The stimulus for research by practice is the ability to rethink how current forms engage with design issues in the here and now. The reflective process design experimentation along with evaluating and synthesising research projects undertaken creates the interlinking chain of charting the PhD journey over time. For my own research and fields of enquiry: architecture, city, and urbanism allowed the opportunity to explore the PhD research by identifying gaps in which the specific focus of the research could be situated. By its nature practice-based research involves the translation of other practices and processes, generating the understanding and interlinking of design practices to formulate new proposals in how design, materials, function, and programme can be realised to create new knowledge. Benedict Anderson, Professor of Spatial Design (University of Technology Sydney) Dissertation: The Architectural Flaw, 2005. Royal Melbourne University of Technology (RMIT)

During my PhD, I found it valuable to think in the discipline of interior design, to think how there are particular ways of thinking and doing that are shaped by discipline. Having a discipline as something where one intervenes to make a contribution and enter into a relational field is valuable. Creative practice research involves techniques, i.e. ways of doing. And there is a distinctiveness that inheres in these techniques that comes from ‘discipline’. There are genealogies of practice that one has to negotiate. These are important for research that is to be evaluated as a PhD. The question of discipline in relation to design, however, is not straightforward. Within design there is a diversity of practices – graphic / communication, architecture, industrial, interior, fashion, digital, product, service, and others. There are critical differences between spatial practices such as architecture and interior

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design – and the other design disciplines; a difference between design as a verb – designing – and design as a noun. Interior Design as a discipline is often disregarded or overlooked as having research capacity. This is probably due to the discipline’s associations with the decorative, ephemeral, and subjective; qualities that are not associated with research or knowledge. (Modernist judgements continue to linger here!) Therefore, when research is done within the discipline, an applied science model is engaged such as ergonomics and psychology. My experimentation with concepts of interiority / subjectivity engaged philosophy to enable a shift that could not be achieved within the medium of the discipline itself nor through the reference to a scientific paradigm. This comes back to the first question and how the concept of research and knowledge are foregrounded in the PhD and how creative practice research involves a transformation from a scientific paradigm to an aesthetic one – and the implications of this socially, culturally, politically, environmentally. Process as well as outcome becomes valued. A continual re-posing of a problematic to address each situation anew is implicated in creative practice research and PhDs by project – and this requires a re-conceptualisation of how we understand and practice research and knowledge. Suzie Attiwill, Deputy Dean, Learning & Teaching; Associate Professor of Interior Design (School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne) Dissertation: ?interior, practices of interiorization, interior designs, 2012. School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University

I would hope that my thesis contributes in different ways to multiple audiences: The key element of the PhD is an outline and analysis of speculative design methods. These are primarily of interest to the design community – those interested in practicing speculative design, and also those willing to engage in discussions on the role of design in general. In the commercial context the term design is rarely used without a qualifier (product, graphic, fashion etc.), roles are straightforward and borders well-defined. Design in this context has always been multi-disciplinary as interactions with experts from other areas (engineering, programming, marketing etc.) are essential in bringing a product to fruition. The pragmatic, contained, and skills-based nature of traditional education, to a large extent, still reflects this old-fashioned notion of design. This version is largely uncritical, blindly optimistic, and frequently unaware of the larger complex systems in which its activity plays a small but fundamental role. Design research should demand the same levels of good design as any other form of design – historical educational borders can help with this. However, as the purpose of design shifts and expands so the borders become problematic. The

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changing and expanding role of design (with its genesis in research) requires a different approach to practice and to education. Its more critical and interrogational function demands new skills, knowledge, and interactions that cannot simply be brought to a project by the multi-disciplinary approaches of the past. Disciplines such as Science and Technology Studies (STS) and bioethics are far in advance of speculative design in their understanding of how complex social, political, and cultural values relate to scientific research and technological application; philosophers of technology have for decades been questioning notions of automation and our increasing dependency on technology; psychologists are researching the impact of contemporary media (amongst other things) on the lives of humans. So far, designers have remained largely disconnected from these discourses; however, I would hope that my thesis begins to make a clearer case of what design might bring to these investigations. James Auger, Associate Professor (M-ITI) Dissertation: Why Robot? Speculative design, the domestication of technology and the considered future, 2012. Royal College of Art

What design research and practice have in common with gender studies and feminist science and research is ‘queerness’! That means design research is inter- or cross-disciplinary in its nature or as Uta Brandes defines it: it is a transitory discipline,1 therefore it is an undisciplined discipline. My PhD research is transdisciplinary and postdisciplinary alike. It refers to feminism as a critical epistemological stance that puts design activities into the broader context of society, which thereby makes design visible as political practice. It starts from gender as a category of social inequality that penetrates every knowledge domain and life-world. This is definitely a higher order concern that still has crucial societal outreach. Bardzell even claims, ‘Feminism is a natural ally to interaction design, due to its central commitments to issues such as agency, fulfillment, identity, equity, empowerment, and ­social justice’.2 From this point of view, my PhD is definitely a contribution to a transdisciplinary research culture in reference to the following definition: ‘Transdisciplinary design – which is the idea of design that transcends disciplinary boundaries – has been proposed as a fourth design paradigm of interaction design education, scholarship, and practice alongside the technical, cognitive, and ethnographic paradigms. … Its focuses are design frameworks, values and ethics, design for important themes such as sustainability, equity, adaptation, justice, and social responsibility’.3 What perhaps makes my PhD a form of postdisciplinary research is the combination of different theories and approaches and their integration into a joint framework that is guided by the demands of design research and not by their disciplinary terms. From this point of view, it again follows feminism – not due to its commitments – but due to its strategy of deconstruction and recombination of

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­ otentially contradictory entities that turns them into something new, hopefully p something better. Sandra Buchmüller, Research Associate (University of Bremen) Dissertation: Gender powers Design – Design powers Gender. A draft of a power critical and gender informed design methodology (Original German Title: Geschlecht macht ­Gestaltung – Gestaltung macht Geschlecht. Der Entwurf einer machtkritischen und geschlechterinformierten Designmethodologie), 2015. Berlin University of the Arts (UdK)

The main aim of the research is to contribute to the theory and practice of urban planning and urban renewal, investigating the role of innovative ideas in activation of abandoned spaces and establishing opportunities for improving policies and practices of urban planning in Serbia. The contribution will also be in defining the new field of open-source urban planning and creating new possibilities and approaches. The subject of the work is guided by three basic levels: the first reference plane is the urban architectural character of the area and reveals the intensity of ­activation of unused space; the second plane refers to the social and cultural contribution of the programs and actions that are implemented by civil initiatives through temporary urban interventions and practices; while the third plane refers to the mobilisation, involvement and routing of actors from different sectors (public, private, civil society, as well as experts and professional associations). The role of the civil sector in the activation of neglected urban spaces is a broadly investigated topic around the world, but meanwhile studies that deal with this subject in the context of post-socialist cities are rare. Critical reflection on the phenomenon of urban practice in Serbia should emphasise the characteristics and limitations of the process of activation of neglected urban spaces by the civil sector in the post-socialist cities and consequently establish appropriate modalities. A particular research problem is the analysis of the relation between temporary urban practice and social, economic and political development of the environment in which they are created, representing a corpus of research questions within the field of urban studies. Theoretical research, in my PhD, serves as a means to produce knowledge that informs social and political change. The theories that I have combined have already been taken up by the urban activist and advocacy groups that promote social and political change. Once the research for local context is done, it can contribute to policy debates and serve policymaking. I want to strive to bring attention to the problems in our cities and also to offer viable and creative solutions to those problems. Being academic and activist makes this research applicable in two directions: in the field of interdisciplinary research discourse and also as a knowledge that can be used in activist campaign work. Contemporary urban development and architecture needs to develop a new sense for upgrading the common environment. Communication between individ-

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uals, bottom-up initiatives, experts, public services, and private entrepreneurs can transform the effects of the adopted urban development models into more integrative ones, based on mutual dependence and solidarity. Iva Cˇukic´, Researcher (Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade) Dissertation: The Role of Temporary Urban Practices in Activation of Spatial Resources, 2016. ­Faculty of ­Architecture, University of Belgrade

Instinctively I’d say I’m all for indiscipline. This is because I see my alliances going way beyond the field of design and because my interest in design is less focused on design as a discipline and rather on design as a tool through which transformative processes can be catalysed, supported, and directed. But then my PhD research might not have been that indisciplined at all – since, on the one hand, by engaging with the political economy of design and its connections to global processes of exploitation and depletion, I mainly contributed content-wise to dealing with issues of precarity in design practice and education. On the other hand, through the practice-based process adopted, I contributed to the field of design research. This is mainly because – at least in the UK – practice-based PhDs are going through a phase in which the parameters of what constitutes good research are just being set, and practice-based PhD candidates are experimenting with how to make practice accountable while intertwining it with a thesis word-count of 40,000 to 60,000 words. In both these areas, however, indiscipline as a horizon and as a practice was important in order to not get too caught up in inward-looking disciplinary debates or in traditional academic formats. It was also important for not losing sight of the larger socio-political context within which the thesis was developed and to which it should connect in transformative ways. Bianca Elzenbaumer, Research Fellow (Leeds College of Art) Dissertation: Designing Economic Cultures – Cultivating Socially and Politically Engaged Design Practices Against Procedures of Precarisation, 2014. Goldsmiths, University of London

For my dissertation, I moved from the ritual studies to the field of visual culture and Bildwissenschaft (image studies). Here I was able to compare the visual strategies of the seasonal sale windows to predecessors in human history. Images have power – as rituals do – and this was the discipline to discuss it. A lot of discourses on sacral images inspired and informed my work. But almost all that knowledge that I used as reference for my work was generated outside the academic discipline of design research. My insights, inspiration and findings were based on the body of knowledge of other disciplinary fields. But my arguments and research tactic was based on my artistic gaze and my experience as designer to create meaning and knowl-

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edge with my own poetry. The fact that I had to change academic supervisors during that scholarly journey might highlight the problem of such an endeavour. The argument for discipline versus indiscipline does not always come from the PhD candidates; rather it is predetermined by their supervisors. Design history still often reads a lot like art history, fetishising the artefact. In design anthropology, the artefact can get lost in social practice. I would find it worthwhile to think more about how artistic practices of designers can be beneficial to academic knowledge building. In the context of arts-based research tandems between artists and disciplinary academic researchers are quite common. Is co-research a good way to protect artistic research autonomy? My work as designer has always been influenced by looking at different areas of knowledge to inspire my practical work. Borrowing research tactics from other disciplines might run the risk of poor academic thinking. Design studios like Ideo have interdisciplinary research teams. Quite different from designers, social scientists have their own informed gaze for arriving at consumer or user insights. They might have a theory for why people react as they do. Designers can build on those insights create new insights by research through design. Maybe the practice of design is already a step ahead of the academic discussion, and we have to build up new contexts of design education for design practitioners and academic design researchers. When we want to do research on sustainable design, for example, how can we without connecting to other disciplines? But that means that academic design research has to create knowledge that benefits other disciplines as well. Harald Gründl, Founder (IDRV Institute of Design Research Vienna) Dissertation: The Death of Fashion. The Passage Rite of Fashion in the Show Window, 2007. University of ­Applied Arts Vienna

I believe that separated disciplines are a legacy cultural phenomenon. There was a time when it was necessary to ‘belong’ to a certain school of thinking, and often even to a certain sub-discipline. Often, these disciplines and sub-disciplines were also competing with each other. Therefore, borrowing from several (or even many) of them would surely have violated the rules of one’s ‘home discipline’. But, I would suggest, times have changed, and for the better. Personally, I haven not experienced any problems with orchestrating thoughts and concepts from different disciplines – rather the contrary: people from one discipline are usually curious to learn from other disciplines, be it for intellectual tourism, or for seeing things from another theoretical vantage point. It’s often a matter of respectfully bringing thoughts from one school of thinking to another. But also within a single discipline, there are good reasons to be undisciplined. Pushing a discipline’s boundaries is what develops it further. It involves, of course, taking the risk of being opposed by the discipline’s traditional forces, which are of-

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ten keen on keeping things the way they are. Under the surface, there is often a lot of disciplinary politics going on. A discipline is a good starting point, as it provides young researchers with one piece for the puzzle of their academic identity (e.g. ‘Hello, I work in X research’) – but at some point, it’s only natural that they will look beyond the boundaries of their discipline. Every young researcher should be encouraged to follow this call and venture into other disciplines – bringing along a backpack full of ideas from where they originally came from. Fabian Hemmert, Researcher (Design Research Lab, Berlin University of the Arts) Dissertation: Encountering the Digital: Representational and Experiential Embodiment in Tangible User ­Interfaces, 2014. Berlin University of the Arts

Design practice is an amoebic creature, stretching its arms into different contexts and fields, from computers to craft, from social innovation to space shuttles. Despite that, there are some features of design that are common to all these areas. The famous process of design, with its phases of research, sketching, prototyping, and testing. The openness in the creative process, that drives more rational team members crazy. The wish to engage directly with users and use contexts. The habit of sketching and prototyping as an iterative tool. And then – the magic when a brilliant and innovative result appears out of the seemingly unstructured process. We still know quite little about this process and its nature, partly because it’s tacit and practice based and acquired through an apprentice based studio teaching rather than taught through books. Because of this we also have problems communicating what is so special with design. The same is true for research in design. Design research is influenced by and a tool for many related fields in innovation, HCI, social science, human factors, and engineering. But in spreading thin and being seen as a method rather than a discipline, design research risk to loose its identity. It is great to have a design researcher in the research team for user interactions, creative ideas, and visualisation. But ­design also needs to understand itself. To develop this understanding, to make it more profound and to be able to communicate it we need more research focusing on design itself. If we do that I believe we will understand more of other disciplines as well. Design practice and research shares approaches with art, with humanistic research and with natural science, but none of these are, like design, looking for how things ought to be. Ultimately design is a distinct field of its own. Sara Ilstedt, Professor in product and service design (Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, School of industrial technology and management) Dissertation: Making sense, design for wellbeing, 2004. Human-computer Interaction, KTH, and Interactive institute, Stockholm

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From my previous answers, it should be clear that I very much favour transdisci­ plinary research culture, in the sense that a bit of crossbreeding makes design ­research stronger and more interesting. As we borrow and learn from other disciplines, the wider (and hopefully wiser) our repertoire becomes – and the more important design and its knowledge becomes for other disciplines. In many ways, I ­believe our not building a heavy design research repertoire to be one of our major strengths. Design, rather, is an anti-heroic kind of research in which we take the qualities of design, of adding to something in a modest way, and slowly building something up together. This way, we can escape what I suppose Latour would call the modernist dream of research and what I, by extension, would call design ­research. Li Jönsson, Researcher (The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and ­Conservation, School of Design) Dissertation: Design Events – On explorations of a non-anthropocentric framework in design, 2014. The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Copenhagen

At the outset of the thesis I appealed to speculative designers to attend to their practice as research, and to provide analytical accounts of the activities they undertake, so that knowledge about their practice can be shared with others. Those who identify with the label of speculative designer may not be seeking partnerships with ­biomedical researchers (as in the case discussed in the thesis), though they will probably be working with partners from some other professional setting. They might not be conducting interviews in labs, but there will likely be processes of ­discovery within partner settings where ideas are generated and outcomes are ­designed. Those outcomes might not be encountered by particular publics and ­responded to in ways that are characterised as challenging the configuration of biotechnology, but no doubt there will be an emphasis on the imaginative reaction of a particular community or participant. The thesis provided an example of how the features of a particular case of speculative design can be captured and shared across disciplines. On the other hand, I argued that in the case of interdisciplinary activity, in my case speculative design and upstream engagement, the configuration of design practice needs carefully considered in relation to the approaches it mixes with. I ­argued that the term public engagement is not useful, mobilised as it is through ­divergent and incompatible energies including education, public relations and deliberative policy, none of which align with the designers’ ideas of practice. I endeavoured to provide an alterative to articulations of speculation that would align it instrumentally to one or another of these schemes, particularly where the designer is seen to be the creative, imaginative collaborator of an entrepreneurial, scientific innovator. Here, speculation becomes reduced to being a communicator of the beneficial

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­impacts of biotechnology, transmitting scientific value and knowledge to the public.4 Crucially, I argued that the events of speculative design are ends in themselves. Speculation does not explicitly link into some later mechanism, be it policy of the educational strategy of science uptake. Tobie Kerridge, Researcher (Goldsmiths University of London) Dissertation: Designing Debate: The Entanglement of Speculative Design and Upstream Engagement, 2015. Goldsmiths University of London

My perspective, both then and now, is that my research contributes primarily to the academic discipline of design research, largely within only one of the varied design fields. Hanna Landin, Senior Lecturer (The Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås) Dissertation: Anxiety and trust and other expressions of interaction, 2009. Department of Computer Science, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg

The purpose of my research is to discover how NPD teams design new products in a real world situation, explore how design decisions evolve and investigate the relationship between design decision-making and innovation. Simon’s5 view of seeing design management as a process of making design decisions is explored and supported in this study. I thus characterise my research as adopting what Saikaly 6 ­refers to as a practice-based approach to design research, which is found in cases where ‘the development of design projects is considered, not as the objective of the research, but as an integral part of the process’. In this way, this study can be seen as a kind of transdisciplinary research project because the activities related to knowledge creation would involve the discovery of new information and the exploration of the knowledge, attitudes, and practices related to each particular design decision-making problem. The use of the action research methodology to investigate the complicated and detailed design decision-making activities that are part of the design process in a commercial setting has been relatively neglected by previous researchers. My work thus highlights the importance of practice-based studies with regard to gaining a better understanding of participants’ tacit experience in the design decision-making process. Yi-Chang Lee, Researcher (ImaginationLancaster, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University) Dissertation: Investigation of Design Decision Making in New Product Development in SME, 2015. Lancaster University

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Attribution: I would want to classify my work as design research, also partly as artistic research. At this point, I don’t find it beneficial to draw boundaries between the two. In my opinion, it weakens the discourse instead of strengthening it. The production of (interim) results that allow us to experience the researcher’s findings in a sensual way, for example through artefacts, is a specific property of design research and is not offered by other disciplines. Design research is not a science by specialists for specialists but is aimed at all users of design, thus at all people. The design research community is where I feel at home. Institutionalisation of design research: I would like to express the need to ­institutionalise design research as a scientific discipline and not to engage in a spongy ‘interdisciplinary research’. To be taken seriously as a partner in research, it requires a common language and means of expression, gatherings and a common voice. The reality of the situation at the universities and major research institutions is far from being postdisciplinary. Hierarchies and responsibilities in the individual disciplines prevent an interdisciplinary climate, although people from different disciplines come together in order to carry out joint research projects. Design researchers certainly have to approach scientists from other disciplines more often than the other way around. Strategies of Empowerment: The urgent need for strengthening the position of design research has in my opinion mainly strategic reasons. For some time now, I have been working together with researchers from the Free University of Berlin and was able to gain some experience with external funding. Design researchers are not yet listed among potential financial recipients as a target group; Web forms are not yet customised for them. In many colleges and universities that offer art or design programs, there is still a distinction between artistic and scientific research assistants. Scientific research assistants seem to be treated as ‘worthier’ than the artistic staff. There is a shortfall of professorships for practice-based design research in Germany. Therefore, I find the effort to gather our voices in this publication to be an important step that will allow us designers to make our contribution to research internationally and nationally. Thank you. Fred Meier-Menzel, Senior Researcher (German University in Cairo) Dissertation: From the life model through to the activist – the double colonization of the female body in Egypt, 2014. Bauhaus University in Weimar

I would characterise my PhD research as mainly contributing to the Design ­Research and design-oriented HCI audiences. However, depending on the audience the framing and communication of the contribution of my PhD research did differ. These differences in some ways speak to the current debates within Design Research about the extent to which it ought to be formalised into a more scientific (or in the least systematic) discipline. Within the HCI research community

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­ esign-oriented work is arguably not as well established as other constituent disd ciplines, such as computer science and behavioural science. In this context, my PhD research went at lengths to argue for my Research-through-Design methodology, in addition to unpacking the findings that surfaced from study participants’ experiences with ­design artefacts deployed in the field. Here, I often had to make clear how my ­design-oriented research approach was rigorous and comprehensive, yet differed from computer science or engineering-oriented ways of making novel technologies and behavioural science-oriented ways of evaluating the effects of interactive ­systems. Since there was less of a need to argue for the design-oriented ­research ­approach within the broader Design Research community, the contri­ bution and framing of my PhD research often focused in on articulating the design intent and attention to detail that shaped choices in the form, materials, and ­computational behaviour of a design artefact. Here, I aimed to describe how various design de­cisions cohesively came together to create a design artefact that, inand-­­of-itself, could stand of a form of theoretical articulation and intellectual argumentation. If there were more formal criteria for how design research is practiced, structured, and evaluated, then it certainly could have saved me from writing many paragraphs in my dissertation and research articles. Yet, one power of design research is its ability to grapple with the evolving complexity of the world. While there are clear (and good) reasons for wanting design research to be taken more seriously alongside more established and formalised research approaches (e.g., those found in the natural sciences), we must keep in mind what design research has to offer. Moving toward formalised processes of conducting design research and developing evaluative metrics or criteria based on reproducibility or verifiability may undermine the richness it offers to grapple with complexity in real, situated, speculative, critical, and reflective ways. Will Odom, Banting Fellow (School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver) Dissertation: Critically Exploring the Virtual Possession Design Space through Fieldwork and Constructive Design Research, 2014. Carnegie Mellon University

The design process is always concerned with pushing boundaries and we should adopt this in our understanding of design research. Coming from a country where fashion design is being taught within the Faculty for Natural and Technical Sciences forced me to wrap my research proposition into a technical box. The same problem happens when applying for research funds. The classification of science classes in Slovenia and Austria still does not include design research or fashion design. ­According to the selected classification of a research proposition, the donor institution selects the reviewers. This means that the researcher has to define their re-

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search propositions following other disciplines’ frameworks, methods, and theories instead of those from design research. In addition, they have to look for scientific disciplines that would understand propositions and methods of design research as important and as qualified as other disciplines. Defining design research as a ­scientific discipline that would have its place in scientific classifications would open doors for funding and probably limit some undisciplined approaches in research. Jure Purgaj, Lecturer (Pädagogische Hochschule Wien) Dissertation: Design and Visualization of Garments Worn by Slovenian Mythological Creatures, 2013. Faculty for Natural and Technical Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

My thesis was carried out in an inherently interdisciplinary context. Although there was a distinctive orientation towards technology and engineering, the problem was not finding the freedom from restrictive disciplinarity but rather the opposite. Perhaps ‘pre-disciplinarity’ could describe the situation, and thus the need was more to form something akin to a design research discipline than breaking away from one. A particular frustration was finding formats that could accommodate an aesthetic and experimental orientation, something that would not fit in to the venues, such as human-computer interaction, that were the main venues for research related to interaction design at the time. Now things are quite different, and thus the question of disciplinarity is also different. Indeed, some of the perspectives of the thesis are quite out-dated by now. If my main concern at that time was the relation between design research practice and other forms of research to which I had to relate; a main concern arising now that ­design research is becoming an established part of many design institutions is the relation between design research and design education. For instance, if design is to be considered a discipline, to what extent does design research provide for its foundations (like research in other areas is thought to provide the ‘new’ knowledge needed)? Or, if seen from the perspective of traditional training in design based on professional practice, what aspects of disciplinarity emerge as we ask: if design is a practice and to be a designer is a profession, to what extent does design research provide new knowledge and extend existing ways of working? To me, the notion of design research as something trans- or postdisciplinary means something in the context of research and something quite different in the context of design education. In the former case, such notions highlight the integrative and innovative aspects of design as it continuously opens up new ways to address an unfolding whole that cuts across different areas. In the context of design education, however, to emphasise that design research as trans- or postdisciplinary seems to suggest that it is not meant to address existing foundations of design but rather how to escape such framings, which, to me, is more problematic. Indeed, I

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do think (certain forms of) design research is needed to address and evolve disciplinary foundations as well. Johan Redström, Rector, Professor (Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University) Dissertation: Designing Everyday Computational Things, 2001. Department of Informatics, University of Gothenburg

As a supporter of a phenomenological approach, therefore keen to indulge in the dynamics of perspectives rather than taking a precise point of view, I find it challenging to frame my work in one of these categories. Design research, as a relatively new discipline, is in the process of defining its nature and fighting for its recognition within the constellation of academic research disciplines. It might be that all the different explorations on how to tackle that task will eventually condense into a main-stream way-of-doing design research. I hope it will not, since that would defeat the inherent purpose of design ­research and the struggle to define, in a way that is as varied as possible, how to ­design for transformative qualities. Ambra Trotto, Studio Director, Senior Lecturer (Interactive Institute Swedish ICT, School of Architecture at Umeå University) Dissertation: Rights through Making – Skills for pervasive ethics, 2011. Eindhoven University of Technology

The audience of design-research consists of multiple populations, i.e. designers, researchers, users, marketeers, and design students. Catering to these different segments poses another challenge. For me, in the first place my thesis is directed to an audience of practicing designers / design students. This position has its effects on the research on the way it is communicated. The research question is formulated with designers and the act of designing in mind. Therefore it explicitly includes ‘How can we design for …?’ where I have focused on new methods and tools, and used existing but also newly generated design as inspiration. In the communication there are plenty of images to spark the designers’ imagination, and help them to see the picture. The main knowledge contribution of the PhD research has been to the academic discipline of design research with the design notions and frameworks. However one can often discern elements of transdisciplinary research culture and even postdisciplinary discourse in perhaps any novel works of PhD research. In my case the transdisciplinary aspect can be found in the combination of design action and reflection with the controlled lab experiments coming from the tradition of psychological experimentation. The postdisciplinary research discourse came after the

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PhD research where the work was identified as a canonical example of research through design. Stephan A. G. Wensveen, Associate Professor (Eindhoven University of Technology) Dissertation: A tangibility approach to affective interaction, 2005. Delft University of Technology

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Brandes, U. (2000): ‘Dazwischen: Design und Geschlecht’, in A. Cottmann, B. Kortendiek and U. Schildmann (Eds.), Das undisziplinierte Geschlecht: Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung. Einblick und Ausblick. ­Opladen: Leske + Budrich, p.178. Bardzell, S. (2010): ‘Feminist HCI: Taking Stock and Outlining an Agenda for Design’, in Proceedings of Computer Human Interaction (CHI’10). New York: ACM, p. 1301. Blevis, E., Koskinen, I. K., Lee, K.-P., Bødker, S.,Chen, L.-L., Lim, Y.-K., Wei, H. and Wakkary, R. (2015): ‘Transdisciplinary Interaction Design in Design Education.’ CHI ‘15 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ‘15), ACM, USA: New York, p.1. The public understanding of science, Report of a Royal Society ad hoc Group endorsed by the Council of the Royal Society, London, 1985. Simon, H. A.: The new science of management decisions, (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977. Saikaly, F.: Approaches to Design Research: Towards the Designerly Way. Paper presented at the Design Research Society International Conference 2004. Futureground, Australia: Monash University, 2004.

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AUTHORS UTA BRANDES born in Hannover / Germany, lives in Cologne / Germany. Until July 2015 she was professor for design research and gender & design at the Koeln International School of Design, University of Applied Sciences, Cologne. She is co-founder and partner of the consultancy agency be design. She also works as an author. Amongst others she was visiting lecturer in Sydney (UWS), Tokyo (Musashino Art University), Fukuoka, Japan (Kyushu University), Hong Kong (School of Design, HK Polytechnic University), Hangzhou, PR China (Academy of Art and Design), Taipei, Taiwan (Shih-Chien University), New York (Parsons The New School for Design), Berlin, Germany (University of the Arts), University of Bologna, Italy. She is co-initiator and co-founder of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Designtheorie und -forschung (German Society for Design Theory and Research), where she was elected chairwoman for the first 5 years. In 2013 she co-founded the ‘international Gender Design Network’ / iGDN. Meanwhile the iGDN held exhibitions and conferences in New York, Hong Kong, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, and Hannover. In her former (non design related) life she earned her PhD in sociology and psychology. Amongst others she worked as senior lecturer of Psychology at the University of Hannover / Germany, was deputy director of a research institute on gender studies, deputy secretary of state of the government of the federal state of Hesse / Germany. Since the mid-1980s she lives and works in the field of design and culture. She was responsible for the establishment of the Swiss Design Center, and was director of the ‘Forum’ of the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany (Bonn).  KATHARINA BREDIES is a senior researcher and head of the electronic textiles research group at Design Research Lab in Berlin. During her PhD project, she developed an affinity for science and technology studies, semiotics and social systems theory and a lot of curiosity for old and new craft and construction techniques. Today, her research interests cover design methodology and theory; her medium of exploration are interactive textile interfaces. She completed her PhD on ‘Use as Design’ at Hochschule für Künste Braunschweig in 2014 and has been looking for design in unexpected shapes and improbable places ever since. MICHELLE CHRISTENSEN is a sociologist and design researcher specialising in the practice-based co-construction of (social) theory. Her research interests include trans- and postdisciplinarity, design methodology and epistemology, the politics of objects and the social dimension of ‘thingness’. Michelle studied social and political science at Roskilde University (BA), conflict studies at Utrecht University (MA), gender studies at the University of Amsterdam (MSc), and integrated design at the Köln International School of Design in Cologne (MA). She has worked at the Crisis Department of Amnesty International USA, was a Humanity in Action Fellow in Copenhagen and Amsterdam, and a Congressional Fellow in the United States Congress in Washington DC. She has given courses and work-

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shops in conflict analysis, gender studies, design and research methods at universities in Utrecht, Amsterdam, Cologne, Berlin, and Tel Aviv. Currently she is writing her doctorate at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), where she also teaches design methods, and since 2014 she is a board member of the German Society for Design Theory and Research (DGTF). FLORIAN CONRADI studied communication design at the University of Applied Sciences Mainz, as well as art at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Following this he completed an MFA in Design at the Sandberg Institute (Rietveld Academy) in Amsterdam, and an MA in integrated design at the Köln International School of Design in Cologne. Since 2008 he has been initiating sociopolitical design projects with collaboration partners in the field of critical media and political advocacy, carrying out field research in Europe, as well as in Israel, Palestine, and northern Uganda. He has taught critical design and design methods at the FH Mainz (2005–2006), the KISD in Cologne (2010–2012), and the UdK Berlin (2013–2016). His works have been published and presented internationally, amongst other places in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Gothenburg, New York, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Currently, he is based in Berlin, where he is an asso­ciated researcher, lecturer, and doctoral candidate at the Berlin University of the Arts. RACHEL COOPER OBE is Distinguished Professor of Design Management and Policy at the University of Lancaster, she is Director of ImaginationLancaster (a centre for research into products, places, and systems for the future), with a cohort of 30 PhD students. She is also co-director of Highwire, Digital Economies Innovation Doctoral Training Centre, bringing together 40 PhD students from design, computing and management. Professor Cooper’s research covers: design thinking; design management; design policy; new product development; design for wellbeing; design in the built environment; design against crime; and socially responsible design. Her latest projects are: 1) Director of a £4 m knowledge exchange hub The Creative Exchange (2012/15) that works with companies, academics, and students (undertaking a new type of PhD) to look at citizen engagement in the Digital Public Space. 2) Co-director of a £6m project (2012–2017) Liveable Cities – a research programme to identify and test radical engineering solutions that will lead to low carbon, resource secure future cities in which societal wellbeing is prioritised. Professor Cooper has written extensively in the field, including The Design Agenda (1995), Creative Product Design (2000), The Design Experience (2003), Process Management in Design and Construction (2004), Designing Sustainable Cities (2009), Constructing Futures (2010), and is currently commissioning editor for an Ashgate series on Socially Responsible Design. Her latest books include  The Handbook of Design Management (Berg August 2011) and Wellbeing and the Environment (Wiley Blackwell 2014). Professor Cooper is Founding President of the European Academy of Design, Founding Editor of The Design Journal, and a was also member of the EU Design and Innovation Leadership Board. She is now a Lead Expert advisor to the UK government on the Foresight Programme Future Cities, and a member of the to the UK Academy of Medical Sciences working group on the Health of the Public 2040.

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CLIVE DILNOT has been Professor of Design Studies at Parsons School of Design in New York since 2002. He previously taught at The School of Art Institute of Chicago, in Hong Kong, and at Harvard University as well as in the UK. Educated in fine art and social theory / social philosophy, his work ranges from art history, aesthetics, the politics of photography, and economics to design history / design studies, design ethics and questions around design knowledge. Current teaching and study is largely focused in areas of design understanding and mapping the relations between design, the artificial, and technology. MICHAEL ERLHOFF was the founding dean of the Koeln International School of Design (KISD), where he was also professor of design theory and history. He was the dean of the department of cultural studies at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences and CEO of the German Design Council. A curator of numerous art and design exhibitions and a board member of documenta 8, he has written and edited many books on design, art, and culture-related themes. Michael Erlhoff is a member of the German Association for Design Theory and Research and of AICA. He regularly gives guest lectures and runs workshops at international universities, e.g. in Tokyo, Nagoya, Fukuoka, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, and New York. Michael Erlhoff is a frequent member of national and international design juries. He lives in Cologne, Germany. ALAIN FINDELI was Full Professor at the School of Industrial Design of the University of Montreal (Canada), where he has been teaching for about 30 years, and is currently Full Professor at the University of Nîmes (France). Trained as an engineer in physics and researcher in materials science, he reoriented his career and interests toward the human and social aspects of engineering, technology, and design. He concluded his extensive study of the history of design education in his book Le Bauhaus de Chicago: l’oeuvre pédagogique de Làszlò Moholy-Nagy (1995). His current research topics and recent publications cover more general philosophical issues of the theory and practice of design (methodology, aesthetics, ethics) as well as some key pedagogical aspects of design research education. He founded the Master’s programme in ‘Design & Complexity’ in Montreal (1999) and, following his research in social innovation by design, co-founded the Master’s programme in ‘Design-Innovation-Society’ in Nîmes (2011). In 2006, he also cofounded the international francophone design research community ‘Les Ateliers de la Recherche en Design’. BILL GAVER is Professor of Design and leads the Interaction Research Studio at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research on design-led methodologies and innovative technologies for everyday life led him to develop an internationally renowned studio bringing the skills of designers together with expertise in ubiquitous computing and sociology. With the Studio, he has developed approaches to design ranging from Cultural Probes to the use of documentary film to help assess peoples’ experience with designs, pursued conceptual work on topics such as ambiguity and interpretation, and produced highly-finished prototypes that have been deployed for long-term field trials and exhib-

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ited internationally at venues such as the V&A Museum, Tate Britain, and New York’s MOMA. He has published over 70 articles (h-index of 36) and is an elected member of the CHI Academy. He currently holds an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant and is principle investigator of a joint project with Sociology the co-construction of communities and environmental devices. RANULPH GLANVILLE (13 June 1946 – 20 December 2014) was an Emeritus Professor of Architecture and Cybernetics at the Bartlett, University College London, and Senior Professor of Research Design at Luca Faculty of the Catholic University of Leuven. He was Professor of Research in Innovation Design Engineering Royal College of Art in London, Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia, as well as Adjunct Professor of Digital Futures at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, Canada. Furthermore, he was President of the American Society for Cybernetics. Ranulph’s collected writings have been published in three volumes as the Black Boox series by Echoraum, Vienna. He believed that design research should be undertaken from a designer’s point of view, reflecting the subject matter, approaches and concerns of design and designers – rather than being forced into the moulds of other fields. And he argued that research is a subfield of design. Utilising second order cybernetics to shed light on design and research, and in turn design and research to further develop cybernetics, he viewed cybernetics and design as two sides of the same coin. Sometimes he built things. He was seduced by almost any interesting idea. In December 2014, at age 68, Ranulph sadly passed away. MATTHIAS HELD received his Master of Industrial Design (MID) in 1996 after studies in Germany and in the US. He returned to Germany and founded the quintessence design office in Stuttgart. The award-winning agency works in product design, interior design, exhibition design, and trans-media design and its clients include Blanco, Caritas, Daimler AG, Hugo Boss, Le Creuset, and SWR (South German Radio). In 1998, Held additionally joined up with other entrepreneurs to found ensaco, a solar technology company, to develop, promote, and distribute integrated solar systems for regenerative energy and realised many projects in that field. From 2001 on, he became more interested in design research and epistemological questions and started to teach as a lecturer at the HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd in 2003. In 2006, Held became full Professor for Foundations of Design at the HfG. Subsequently he was founding member of its Institute of Applied Research and initiator of various research projects. Since 2004, he has been active in the German Society for Design Theory and Research (DGTF) and has been a member of the Board since 2008. Held is reviewer for various institutions and conferences. As member of the advisory board, he helped to develop and establish the ‘Bundespreis ecodesign’. WOLFGANG JONAS studied Naval Architecture at the Technical University Berlin. In 1984 he finished a PhD on the optimisation of streamlined shapes. In 1994 he earned the teaching qualification (Habilitation) for Design Theory. Since 1994 he has been teaching

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in Halle, Bremen, and Kassel. Since 2010 he is professor for ‘Designwissenschaft’ and head of the Institute for Transportation Design (ITD) at Braunschweig University of Art. His working areas are design methodology, systemic and scenario-approaches, and the development of the concept ‘Research through Design’. At ITD Braunschweig he is responsible for the new master’s programme in Transformation Design, which has been launched in the winter term 2015–2016. GESCHE JOOST is Professor for Design Research at the Berlin University of the Arts and since 2005 heading the Design Research Lab. With international partners, she conducts research and development projects in the areas of human-computer-interaction, wearable computing, as well as user-centred design and participation. She is the chairwoman of DGTF e.V. [German Society for Design Theory and Research] and board-member of Technologiestiftung Berlin. She is also board-member of the German National Adademic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes), appointed member of the Synod of the evangelical church in Germany (EKD) as well as full member of the Goethe Institute. In 2014, she was appointed as a Digital Champion for the EU commission. Since 2015, she is member of the Advisory Board of SAP SE. KLAUS KRIPPENDORFF is Professor for Communication at The Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. He graduated from the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, received his PhD in Communication from the University of Illinois, Urbana, and has been a communication professor, researcher, and theorist ever since. He has written several books and numerous other publications on social science research methods, content analysis in particular, reliability statistics, information theory, cybernetics and systems theory, and contributed to communication theory. In 1984 he returned to design, co-coined ‘product semantics’, edited several publications and contributed various papers on human-centred design and design research topics, including The Semantic Turn; A New Foundation for Design (translated into Japanese and German). He consulted as a designer, organised workshops on human-centred design in The Netherlands, Finland, Taiwan, Sweden, Japan, Italy, Brazil, and Columbia, and taught design at The Ohio State University, The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and the Lineaus University in Kalmar, Sweden (which awarded him a PhD honoris causa for his contributions to design). He is an elected fellow of several academic honour societies, including the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. His current interest centres on the role of language in the social construction of realities. CLAUDIA MAREIS is a Swiss designer, design researcher and cultural scientist. Since 2013 she is professor for Design Studies and director of the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW in Basel. There she is also the funder of the Critical Media Lab Basel, opened in 2014. She completed her PhD on ‘Design as Epistemic Culture’ at the University of Arts and Industrial Design Linz in 2010. Over the last years she has been lecturing and researching internationally at

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various institutions, amongst others at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2009), University of the Arts Berne (2006–13), Zurich University of the Arts (2011–13), Humboldt University of Berlin (2011), NCCR Iconic Criticism eikones – University of Basel (2001–13), Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge (2012), Berlin University of the Arts (2013), and Vilnius Academy of Arts (2014). Her research interests comprise the history of design theories and methodologies in the 20th century, especially with regard to design epistemology; the intersections of design, media and STS-Studies, as well as the history and practice of ideation and creativity techniques. MIKE PRESS is Chair of Design Policy within Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee. He is also a partner in the Open Change consultancy. He has written and researched widely on design, innovation, contemporary craft, and the management of creativity, speaking at conferences worldwide. An extensive publishing record includes authorship of three books, including The Design Agenda: a guide to successful design management and The Design Experience, both of which are standard texts and translated in Chinese, Russian, and Spanish. He is also a contributor to television and radio programmes on design, an experienced supervisor and examiner of PhDs in design, and has been an advocate of practice-based approaches to design research. He has recently led transformation workshops for the Scottish Government’s Quality, Efficiency & Support Team (QuEST) enabling people from services to think creatively about the integration of health and social care. He has led projects on Design Against Crime and Design and Counter-Terror. Recently he has led workshops on design thinking and design leadership at the European Institute of Brand Management and at the Dasman Diabetes Institute in Kuwait. Mike currently teaches design thinking to health and social care practitioners on the MSc Leadership and Innovation Programme and creative entrepreneurship to designers at the University of Dundee. ELIZABETH B.-N. SANDERS is the founder of MakeTools, LLC where she explores new spaces in the emerging design landscapes. As a practitioner, Liz introduced many of the methods being used today to drive design from a human-centred perspective. She has practiced participatory design research within and between all the design disciplines. Liz’s current research focuses on co-design processes for innovation, intervention, and transdisciplinary collaboration. Liz joined the Design Department at The Ohio State University (OSU) as an Associate Professor in 2011 after having worked as a design research consultant in industry since 1981. At OSU she invites students to use co-designing to address the significant social, economic and environmental challenges we face today. Liz has a PhD in Experimental and Quantitative Psychology and a BA in both Psychology and Anthropology. ARNE SCHEUERMANN is Professor for Design Theory and Head of the Research Unit Communication Design at the HKB Bern University of the Arts. He holds a PhD in Communication Design and has lectured at different universities from 2000 onwards, com-

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ing to Bern in 2005, where he established one of the main research groups in the area of communication design today. Together with international partners, he has developed several research projects in the areas of health care communication design, visual rhetoric, graphic design history and knowledge visualisation. He has published numerous books, journal articles, and book chapters. Among his major books and edited volumes are Design als Rhetorik. Grundlagen, Positionen, Fallstudien (with Gesche Joost, eds. 2008. Basel: Birkhäuser), Zur Theorie des Filmemachens (2009. München: edition text + kritik), Handbuch Medienrhetorik (with Francesca Vidal, eds. 2016 (in print). Stuttgart: de Gruyter). Since 2008, he has been a board member of the research council of the Bern University of Applied Sciences, since 2012 he has been President of the SDN Swiss Design Network, and since 2014 a board member of the Graduate School of the Arts Bern; he works as an advisor to scientific institutions and is a member of numerous scientific societies; he lectures and runs workshops on design research and cultural studies at several universities. CAMERON TONKINWISE is the Director of Design Studies at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. He has a background in philosophy; his dissertation concerned the educational philosophies of Martin Heidegger. Cameron continues to research what designers can learn from philosophies of making, material culture studies, and sociologies of technology. Cameron is also chairing the PhD Committee that is currently restructuring the School of Design’s PhD program. He has extensive experience with practice-based design research, having supervised and examined reflective practice and artefact-based research projects and written about the epistemologies particular to this kind of work. Cameron came to CMU from Parsons The New School for Design in New York City where he was the Associate Dean Sustainability, and before that Director of Design Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney, and executive Director of Change Design, formerly known as the EcoDesign Foundation. Cameron’s primary area of research is sustainable design. In particular, he focuses on the design of systems that lower societal materials intensity, primarily by decoupling use and ownership – in other words, systems of shared use. ANDREAS UNTEIDIG is a researcher and lecturer at the Design Research Lab / Berlin University of the Arts, where he explores the relationship of design, technology and the political. Prior, he studied at KISD/Cologne and Parsons/NYC and worked as a graphic, interaction and service designer. He has been teaching design methods and theory in Berlin, Cologne, Hildesheim, Athens and Jerusalem. His work has been published and exhibited in Europe, the US, Israel and China. Andreas co-founded the transdisciplinary research group Civic Infrastructures, within which he is currently co-leading the EU-funded projects MAZI (CAPS/H2020) and HYBRID LETTERBOX (CHEST/FP7). BRIGITTE WOLF is professor for design theory and strategic design at the University of Wuppertal since 2007. At the same time she was lector of the Centre for Brand, Reputa-

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tion and Design Management at the Ichthus Hogeschool in Rotterdam for the period of two years (2006–2008). Before she was teaching design management at the Köln International School of Design. With Universities in Europe and South America she established cooperation programs in teaching and research. She is initiator of the Design Management Forum and the Sustainable Summer School.

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RESPONDERS BENEDICT ANDERSON works in spatial design, scenography, and curation. Projects commissioned include: Laboral Gijon and ARCO Art Fair Madrid Spain, Fondation Cartier Paris, CDC Toulouse and Festival of Arts Amman, Jordan, Museum for Contemporary Art Leipzig and Vivid Festival, Sydney. He co-curated SEAM2009/2011/2013 Symposiums Sydney. Recent publications include: The Architectural Flaw (2014); Trümmer Geographies (2015); Self-ruining and Situated Vagrancy (2015) and is currently writing a book titled Buried City for Ashgate. He studied scenography at St. Martins London and MA and PhD at RMIT University Melbourne. He is Professor of Spatial Design and Director of the Centre for Contemporary Design Practices, University of Technology Sydney. SUZIE ATTIWILL’s research poses questions of interior and interiority in relation to conditions of inhabitation, subjectivity, and learning. The research is conducted through a practice of designing with a curatorial emphasis that focuses on spatial, temporal, and material relations. In 1991, she set up a practice involving exhibition design, curatorial work and writing on interdisciplinary projects in Australia and overseas. Other activities include: artistic director, Craft Victoria (1996–99); board member / chair, artist-led initiative West Space (2006–10); chair, Interior Design / Interior Architecture Educators Association (2006–12) and executive editor, IDEA Journal (2014–15). Suzie Attiwill has academic qualifications in Art History, Indian Studies, Weaving & Interior Design. JAMES AUGER has a BA in Product Design from Glasgow School of Art and an MA in Design Products from the Royal College of Art. Between 2002 and 2005 he was employed as a research associate at Media Lab Europe, where the focus of his research was a ­design-based investigation into technology-mediated human interaction. After MLE he worked at the Issey Miyake Design Studio in Tokyo as a guest designer. Between 2005 -2015 James was based in the Design Interactions department at the Royal College of Art where he taught on the MA programme and completed his PhD. He is currently an associate professor at M-ITI in Madeira, Portugal. SANDRA BUCHMÜLLER graduated from the Cologne International School of Design in 2001. She has since worked as a freelance designer for RTL Enterprises, the Entwicklungs-Gesellschaft Zollverein, for Vodafone, T-Systems, Deutsche Telekom, as design researcher in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Uta Brandes and for the Telekom Innovation Laboratories as well as research assistant at the design research lab of the University of Art Berlin. There she started her PhD developing a power critical and gender informed design methodology, which she defended at the end of June 2015. Currently, she works for a project financed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research at the University of Bremen that focuses on the technological development for the aging society.

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IVA CˇUKIC´ is an activist, architect, and PhD candidate at the Faculty of Architecture, Belgrade. The areas of her research include public space, self-organisation, DIY philosophy, and urban-cultural discourse. She works as teacher associate on the Interdisciplinary studies at the Faculty of Architecture, Belgrade. She is a member of INURA (International Network for Urban Research and Action) and Independent Cultural Scene of Serbia (a joint platform of organisations, initiatives, and individuals in the fields of culture and arts in Serbia). Every year she gives numerous lectures and presentations and participates in several conferences and workshops in Serbia and abroad. She co-launched one of the first initiatives aimed at fostering citizens’ participation in urban development, initiating dialogue between citizens, social activists, urban developers, architects, and city officials about development of the city, called the Ministry of Space. BIANCA ELZENBAUMER has worked with Fabio Franz as the collective ‘Brave New Alps’ since 2005. Together they produce design projects that engage people in discussing, rethinking, and intervening in social, political, and environmental issues. In their projects they combine design research methods with radical pedagogy, conflict mediation, communication design as well as ‘DIY’ making techniques. Amongst others, Bianca holds an MA from the Royal College of Art (2010), a PgCert in International Peacebuilding and Conflict Mediation from the University of Bologna (2007) and a BA in Design from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (2006).  HARALD GRÜNDL is a designer and design theorist. He finished his habilitation in Theory and History of Design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in 2009 and is the founder and director of the Institute of Design Research Vienna, which he has built up since 2008. Harald is co-partner at the design studio EOOS since 1995. He teaches design theory as well as design practice at several national and international universities and stands for bridging disciplines. Harald published the books, The Death of Fashion: The Passage Rite of Fashion in the Show Window in 2007, and The Cooked Kitchen: A Poetical Analysis in 2008. He is co-editor and co-author of the book Tools for the Design Revolution (2014). FABIAN HEMMERT is a design researcher, born and raised in Germany. During his studies towards an MA degree in interface design at FH Potsdam, he has worked for Nintendo of Europe and Marvel Comics. He holds a doctorate in engineering (Dr.-Ing.). In 2014, he was a guest professor for interface design at the Muthesius Kunsthochschule in Kiel, Germany. Today, Fabian works as a researcher at the the Design Research Lab at the Berlin University of the Arts. His work focuses on new interactions with technology. SARA ILSTEDT is a professor in product and service design at Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. She has an MA in industrial design and a PhD in human-computer interaction where she focused on wellbeing and design. In her research she has focused on gender issues, sustainability, and behavioural changes. Her team was awarded

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‘The coolest invention of the year’ by Time magazine 2006 for ‘Flower Lamp’ and 2010 for ‘Power Aware cord’. She was editor of the anthology Under Ytan about Swedish design research, and director of study for Designfakulteten. In 2012, Sara started Green Leap, an arena for sustainable design www.greenleap.kth.se, that aims to act as a catalyst for change by engaging design in sustainable development. Green Leap initiates projects joining academy and design business in interdisciplinary and transformative design ­research. LI JÖNSSON works at the intersection of design and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Her work is set in the context of new technology and innovative projects. In her ­interdisciplinary approach to design she engage a diverse set of critical and practical ideas; in her PhD work, for example, she demonstrates how we can move beyond the anthropocentric positioning of design by linking more recent materialist approaches with practices of design / making. Earlier work evolved around topics from energy consumption to senior health care by way of explorations into computational technology and the politics of participation. TOBIE KERRIDGE is committed to taking a collaborative and speculative approach to design, and in providing empirical and critical accounts of that practice. His research projects have been supported by Philips Design, Intel and France Telecom, and funded by UK and EU funding councils. He is Co-Programme Leader of MA Interaction Design, which offers a research-based approach to postgraduate interaction design. Tobie’s PhD thesis provided an empirical analysis of Material Beliefs, where speculative design and public engagement with science and technology become mixed up. HANNA LANDIN is a senior lecturer in interaction design and design methods at the Swedish School of Textiles. She holds a BA in multimedia engineering from Lund University and an MA in interaction design from Chalmers University of Technology. She presented her PhD thesis in interaction design, on form and aesthetics, at Chalmers in 2009. Her work centres on how to in a design process regard the fact that design decisions have an effect on the way people perceive the world through the things they use. YI-CHANG LEE received the BA degree in industrial design from National Taipei University of Technology, Taiwan in 2000, MA degree in design management from University of Leeds, UK in 2008, and completed his PhD in design from Lancaster University, UK in 2015. His research interests include design decision-making, design driven innovation, and practice-based approaches to the study of designing. FRED MEIER-MENZEL works as a Senior Researcher and presently teaches interaction design at German University in Cairo (GUC), Berlin Campus. Formerly she was a professor of Visual Basics at Berliner Technische Hochschule and Campus Leader in Iserlohn. In April 2015 Fred obtained her doctorate with the title ‘From the life model through to

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the activist – the double colonization of the female body in Egypt’ at Bauhaus University in Weimar. She worked for six years as a professor at the GUC as Head of the Drawing Department and as a founding member of the Faculty of Design. She cooperated with the Goethe-Institute and the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo. Her research and field of interest includes social and intercultural motivated design interventions as well as gender and design studies. She expresses herself in in a set of various media: film, drawings, artefacts, prototypes, performances, collages as well as theoretical analysis of gestures, body language and movement. WILLIAM ODOM is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. His research focuses on the growing presence of interactive technology in everyday life and its sometimes delightful, often disruptive, and unanticipated effects. He leads a range of research projects themed within slow technology, the growing digitization of people’s possessions and archives, and design-­ oriented methods to critically envision and investigate potential technological futures. He holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University and was a Fulbright Scholar in the Design Futures department at Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art. JURE PURGAJ works as a designer, design researcher and lecturer. In 2005, he graduated in Fashion Design at the University for Applied Arts Vienna and received the Diesel Support Award for his master collection. In 2012, he got a research grant from the German Academic Exchange Service, for a research stay at the Berlin University of Arts, Germany. He has taught subjects connected to Fashion Design on a regular basis since 2008 at the Academy of Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia and Raffles University Iskandar, Malaysia. His main research interests are in the field of fashion practice and fashion design didactics. JOHAN REDSTRÖM is Rector and Professor at Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University. He has previously been Design Director of the Interactive Institute (Sweden) and Associate Research Professor at the Centre for Design Research at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, in Copenhagen, Denmark. He received his PhD from the University of Gothenburg in 2001, where he also became Docent in Interaction Design in 2008. AMBRA TROTTO’s fascinations lie in how to empower ethics, through design, using digital and non digital technologies as materials. Strongly believing in the power of Making, Ambra works with makers, builders, craftsmen, dancers and designers to shape societal transformation. Within her design research activity, she produces co-design methods to boost transdisciplinary designerly conversations. From her master degree in architecture, she slowly but certainly drifted towards interaction design. She fell for it at the Eindhoven University of Technology, where she defended her PhD thesis in 2011. She

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currently leads the Umeå studio of Interactive Institute Swedish ICT, where they design and research the Unexpected for their partners. She is also senior lecturer at the Umeå School of Architecture. STEPHAN A. G. WENSVEEN is an Associate Professor in the Designing Quality of Interaction group at Industrial Design, TU / eindhoven. He has an MSc and PhD in Industrial Design Engineering from Delft University of Technology. His PhD work is viewed by the academic design community as a canonical example of research through design. His papers helped introduce notions of ‘aesthetics of interaction’ and ‘feedforward’ and are part of the standard curricula in interaction design schools. He is co-author of the book Design Research through Practice.

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Editors: Gesche Joost, Katharina Bredies, Michelle Christensen, Florian Conradi and Andreas Unteidig Translation: Susanne Dickel (text from Michael Erlhoff), Toby Axelrod (text from Claudia Mareis), Chris Walton (text from Arne Scheuermann) Copy editing: Jacob Watson Project management: Lisa Schulze Production: Katja Jaeger Layout and typography: Sven Schrape Design Concept BIRD: Christian Riis Ruggaber, Formal Typefaces: Akkurat, Arnhem Paper: 100g/m² Offset Printing: Kösel GmbH & Co. KG Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of ­illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in databases. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. This publication is also available as an e-book (ISBN PDF 978-3-0356-0738-3; ISBN EPUB 978-3-0356-0740-6). © 2016 Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, Basel P.O. Box 44, 4009 Basel, Switzerland Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin / Boston Printed on acid-free paper produced from chlorine-free pulp. TCF ∞ Printed in Germany ISBN 978-3-0356-0919-6 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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