Tools to think: writing, sketching, programming, dialogue

Reference: Davis, M. (2013). Research Writing in Design. Design and Culture, 5(1), 7-12.

My notes: Many controversies bubble around the topic of writing and design. It is ironic of course that this brief paper from 2013 by a respected professor in the field has a total of 2 (two) citations until 2020. Some opposition to (academic) writing (and reading) in design comes from a certain resistance to the written text dominating other types of outputs including images, sound, video, etc. To me, this is a straw-man fallacy since it presents an either/or argument. In my own experience, writing has been instrumental from a young age as a tool for thinking. Likewise drawing (not the artistic variety), programming (not the engineering variety), and over the years I have also realised how fundamental is holding a rich dialogue to help me think. In that spirit, I fully agree with Meredith here, we should all read and write more and we should all be teaching more writing including academic writing to design students. But not "just" academic writing as it is taught across academic programmes, we need to work on "designerly" ways of teaching writing.

Of Designers and Researchers

Reference: Yee, J. (2017). The researcherly designer/the designerly researcher. In L. Vaughan (Ed.), Practice-based Design Research (pp. 155-164). London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Abstract: A ‘researcherly designer’ is a practising designer trained in research and a ‘designerly researcher’ is a practising researcher trained in design. These terms are used in this chapter to highlight and discuss how design skills contribute to a research practice and similarly how research skills contribute to a design practice. I do this by reflecting primarily on my personal experience through my PhD, my more recent supervision experience of design PhDs, and I ground my situated knowledge with existing literature. I will start by providing a brief background to my practice and discussing how I transitioned from a design practice into a hybrid practice consisting of research, teaching and design. It is worth noting that I have only focused on what I consider to be key skills and attributes, since there are many other skills that benefit both practices

My notes: This book chapter by Joyce Lee is one of the best sources I've come across in the growing literature on "practice-x research" (based, led, oriented, etc). As someone who started as a design professional and then transitioned into an academic researcher, I have had over the years some problems understanding a majority of the people who make claims such as "design methods stand as research methods". One of my core problems with a lot of "practice research" is that it heavily draws from conventional artistic research ideas, which seems to be unquestioned by many in the "art and design" community. I was lucky/unlucky to become a designer in a faculty that didn't include art (or engineering for that matter), so for me to hear people complain about the quant/qual dominance and then blindly adhere to the dogmas of (Western) artistic methods, well doesn't sit well as an argument. This is why I have been more interested in "Research through Design" ideas. But back to Joyce's chapter: a very well-written, insightful and persuasive position which next to Gaver's and Markussen's ideas form the basis of how I approach practice research in all its varieties. For a class on these topics, I assembled this collection of the people that I have learned the most from, so thought it'd be a good image for this post:

Annotated portfolios

Reference: Gaver, B., & Bowers, J. (2012). Annotated portfolios. interactions, 19(4), 40-49.

Abstract: [Note that this paper doesn't have an "abstract", so I'm placing here what I consider one its core paragraphs: "We propose the notion of annotated portfolios as a way to communicate design research. In part, we do this to provide an alternative to accounts that suggest for design to become productive as research, it should engage in some sort of theory formation. While what exactly is meant by theory is not always clear, writers usually have in mind some conceptual machinery that can explain and predict. Experiments test theories. While we do not dispute that sometimes a designed artifact and the experience of its use can have an experimental status, we do not believe this is typically the case in the kind of design research we do in HCI. Accordingly, it is moot whether we want to regard annotated portfolios as a contribution to design theory in HCI, if by theory is meant something with explanatory and predictive power."

My comments: A good addition to the ongoing discussions in design research about what constitutes knowledge, what and how is research conducted, and what are its outcomes. This is the type of valuable contributions to more explicitly distinguish between practice and research in a field like design, beyond merely adopting ideas from artistic research and other traditions. We could also learn from fields such as robotics, where "the thing" (artefact) plays a central role in the contribution to the field. My own thoughts around practice-x research (based, led, oriented, through, etc) have evolved significantly in the last four years and now that I'm teaching research methods, these issues have become one of my main concerns.