Visualizing Design Knowing

Working through the grounded theory exercise I recognized the importance of acknowledging the breadth of work I have undertaken, while addressing that the project ambitions were quite distinctive. This is my attempt at classifying the projects by identifying three visualization categories for my practice. The categories also acknowledge that there could be different criteria for evaluating the success of the visualization.

RESEARCH PROJECTS // Projects defined by research inquiry.
Projects or exercises that attempt to visualize complex, ephemeral interpretations of design(ing), rendering concepts that are more contingent and/or experiential than concrete and/or fixed. The maps might be quick and dirty sketches or fully refined essays with layered photographic images, but all are annotated with titles, captions, headings or preambles. The challenge of visualizing something not-yet-known or not-visible dictates a reflective and speculative engagement that promotes new insights and further discussion.

The transactional agency of these projects could be evaluated for their facility to engage the designer and audience in critical reflection, speculation and discussion. The content should transcend the situated experience of the designer, invite alternative readings and speak to the open-ended possibilities the new insight(s) have disclosed.

CRITICAL PRACTICE PROJECTS // Projects that influenced research agenda.
Projects or exercises that attempt to visualize complex interpretations of content, presenting concepts that are more contingent than fixed.
The visualizations might be hand-drawn sketches or detailed charts, but all privilege visual communication over writing. The formal challenge of visualizing complex, contingent material ensures an intellectual engagement that encourages a close reading and interrogation of the subject matter.

The critical agency of these projects could be evaluated by their facility to engage the designer or audience in interrogating and advancing one’s understanding of the subject. The content should successfully communicate the complex material in a way that promotes the value of visualizations in contrast to written texts.

EVERYDAY PRACTICE // Projects redirected by research agenda.
Projects or exercises that attempted to deal with material through visual communication. The graphic 2D visualizations might be hand-drawn sketches or detailed charts, introducing simple ideas and/or communicating unambiguous information. The speculative visual thinking process affords the exploration of meta ideas or macro situations by only putting relevant elements in play.

These projects could be evaluated by considering whether a visualization was a more appropriate form of communication than a written text.

Following up from the GRC presentation I want to go back over the terrain of how I situate my work in relation to the research projects and my Parsons practice. Last month I wrote about how Cameron had corrected my description of my research by asserting that is was practice-led rather than project-based. At that stage I understood his point to specifically be that I had to consider all of my practice when talking about my research — that made sense. Going into the grounded theory exercise I had acknowledged that I should include much of my Parsons and Australian practice work, but I struggled with really making sense of how to prioritize all this work in relation to the more focused, discrete research projects. But after presenting my work last week this issue only seems more central to resolve.

At the review last week it became clear that Anne and Cameron were both discussing my Parsons work as if the primary contribution of my research could be mined from that practice. I hadn’t seen it like that at all! I had valued the dialogic relationship between the research projects and the everyday practice, but wouldn’t have sought to emphasize how my design practice has changed from Studio Anybody to Parsons as some kind of trajectory mediated by my research practice. Never. And it isn’t because I disagree…just that I hadn’t really seen the practice as addressing many of the concerns the research sought to engage with.

To a case in point. Anne highlighted that where the research made a significant contribution to the practice of design was in calling for a different kind of engagement by the designer. Not the designer who makes a final product but a participant in a discussion where designing becomes a part of how a designer contributes to the conversation. Making this point Anne pointed to the ephemeral, contingent, continually work-in-progress nature of the conversation artifacts. Asserting the very different expectations this kind of work places on designers and the role of ‘communication’. I agree that this is a significant, completely different way for a communication designer to act in the world - and similar to observations I had made about realizing that the Parsons diagrams were forever in negotiation, never ‘finished’. Yet, if I were to highlight this as a key finding of my research, how does it that align with my research projects that were in fact thoughtfully resolved and disseminated as finished pieces?

My sense at this point is that I need to assert not just the primacy of the visual essay in my research, but also acknowledge the ‘conversation’ diagrams from my practice. The way I see it is that the research projects directly framed and informed my capacity to redirect my practice. To this end my PhD is perhaps a practice-led program directed by a few core research projects. This is what I need to capture in the writing up. Next post.

Awhile back I mentioned Cameron getting me to do some kind of grounded theory exercise to evaluate what my projects were telling me about the contribution of my research. I have always made the claim that my research was done through some practice-led version of grounded theory…I previously stated this because I appreciated that grounded theory meant I didn’t need to begin with an hypothesis, but that I could acknowledge that the research would ‘emerge’ from the projects themselves. I also appreciated that this was a research method that spoke to my resistance of any theory-led practice. Grounded theory sees the research literature as just another relevant piece of information by which to understand what is emerging and does not privilege theory over the projects. That said, I cannot pretend to have followed a grounded theory approach completely, as I have found it valuable to iteratively work to a research question that framed my hunches. So although I wasn’t responding to a direct hypothesis, I think the cycle of making and reflecting was more similar to action research than a close, iterative audit of what I was doing throughout. Still, for my recent review I set out to gather all my projects together and code and memo what has emerged as a way of considering anew what the projects might have to say.

I went into the exercise thinking that the key issue to resolve was to identify the most important threads within the research and to assess whether the findings that emerge can really be substantiated by the projects I have already undertaken or whether I needed to do more.
My research masters was titled “Practice-led Research as an integral component of Professional Practice”, so it’s not like I am a stranger to the value of integrating one’s professional practice with their research ambitions, but still I had continued to be fixated on the perception that although I saw my research and institutional practices had informed each other, I hadn’t seen the ‘research’ itself as inclusive of the whole practice.

The second part of the grounded theory exercise includes a comprehensive, iterative process of sorting and resorting the projects until it seems like you have saturated all the possible connections and distinctions between projects. The goal being to let the key categories emerge from the work. Whereas the first phase emphasized how indirectly relevant so much of the work was, the second phase highlighted again a specific quality within the research work that distinguished it from the other exercises and projects. Not surprisingly, the research projects stood apart as more critically and directly engaged with the questions the research was exploring. To describe it from the broader perspective of the practice, it was as if the different practice contexts had provided endless situated spaces by which I could explore further, learn from or simply apply what I was only just beginning to grasp in my research-directed projects.

[As an aside, close readings of the individual projects contribution to the whole provided an interesting picture of practice-led research. Particularly in the number of different ways that projects influenced or were influenced by others. My attempt to assign ‘epiphanies’ visually highlighted how commonly they happened outside of the research projects (largely to do with the tensions and negotiations specific to a situated context). Similarly, projects that often sparked a revelation weren’t in and of themselves interesting, it was only designing and reflecting upon these projects within the context of a practice-led research project that the relevance is illuminated].

Writing up the ways in which my essays attempt to subvert normal readings of information design I made another connection to the Dunne and Raby text. D&R write about how critical design provides critique through designs that embody “alternative social, cultural, technical or economic values,” claiming that we should value design that asks “carefully crafted questions and makes us think” as much as pieces that “solve problems or finds answers.” (pp58) In this context the progressive nature of my work is simply that the work refuses to simply convey  information or promote an idea. Instead the communication is invested in a transactional, transformative experience that in valuing ambiguity over clarity and complexity over simplicity aims to generate discussion more than proclaim a statement. The provocation in this work does not lie strictly in the formal language of the artifact itself, so much as in the willful resistance of the familiar forms to simply meet standard graphic design objectives. Instead the communication is left incomplete, contingent and unfamiliar…all of which become part of the supposed formula for an unconventional engagement with the artifact.

In Design Noir Dunne and Raby introduce the idea of critical design as other to affirmative design. Stating that affirmative design “conforms to cultural, social, technical and economic expectations. The argument being that critical design critiques the status quo by proposing designs that present alternative values. It is this emphasis on critical design in relation to critical social theory that doesn’t particularly align with my work…and yet the broader ambitions still seem relevant. When D&R say that critical designs’ purpose is to “stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the aesthetic quality of our electronically mediated existence” (p58) I just want to switch out the last half of the sentence for: debate…about the embodied nature of designing and the critical and creative thinking one brings to the practice of design.
D&R go on to say that critical design creates this debate…”by developing alternative and gently provocative artefacts which set out to engage people through humour, insight, surprise and wonder.” (p63) Reading this made me think if I was making a claim that my work operated similarly to critical design and at the least sought to be discursive…then through what qualities do I attempt to do that.

The best I could come up with was: translate difficult to grasp ideas into insight then use open-ended, ambiguous communication to speculate the potential. Not much of a list…but translation, insight, ambiguity and speculation seemed a little too vague.

There is another nice reference where they talk about the value of ‘value fictions.’ This is where they highlight the tension between giving enough context that people can see the products in use while also playing to the audience’s imagination. “A slight strangeness is the key — too weird and they are instantly dismissed, not strange enough and they’re absorbed as everyday reality.” This statement is also interesting to play back in relation to using the ‘faux-information’ design aesthetic. I wouldn’t see my work as social critique or using value fictions but I can see similarities in how the work negotiates a formal language that at first glance masquerades as something that can be simply digested only to find out the visual calls for active engagement. I see that by appropriating the language of data and objectivity the maps introduce their authority, and yet once drawn in, the essay has to beguile the audience to not passively read the terrain but to reflect and imagine what the shifting landscape is telling us. The tension in my work should be between the quality of insight and the level of ambiguity.