Visualizing Design Knowing

There is a growing acceptance that research through design can elicit for the researcher and the community a form of design knowing. But in this blog I am concerned with the quality of dissemination; initially from the perspective of how an individual’s project findings are captured by the practitioner-researcher, secondly how they are translated into collective knowledge for the community of practice. The tension has always been that although the artefact is central to project based design research, conferences and publications continue to privilege the written word as the predominant vehicle for disseminating research. I think this standoff can at times unconstructively draw too sharp a distinction between the artefact and the exegesis.

I have no distrust of the artefact and still see it as central to design research—but I am interested in supplementing the artefact—or at least making the ideas embedded within the artefact more accessible.

Over time my research has become less about the formal dissemination of research and more interested in simply considering how we might find design-led strategies for evoking a more designerly engagement with design discourse. Most recently the research has become concerned with specifically exploring the role visual thinking can play in facilitating an open-ended, discursive interest in the specific expertise designers bring to conceiving of new possibilities, of imagining a new world.