Design-oriented Research
Projects
Exploring Design Praxis: Three Visual Essays
In the visual essay practice space I designed and disseminated three different essays over a period of three years. These research-led visual essays present a body of work that seeks to visualise how designers think through the process of designing. Each essay explores and proposes a different conceptual frame by which to visualise the process of designing. The visual essays offer a vehicle for attempting to figure a few key ideas. The adopted visual language promotes an experiential practice space where I can, in the flow of designing, examine how I act out my designerly knowing.
The design-oriented subject of each visual essay presented new insights and knowing about design that were further investigated in the next project. For example, the second essay considered how the speculation concept of the first essay needed to be understood in relation to the more instrumental tactics associated with design strategy, and the third essay built on Rosenberg’s ‘push and pull’ metaphor in relation to the hunch of how the designer negotiated the creative tension of a speculative yet strategic approach. The disclosure of new ideas led to more explicit understandings of the agency of designing and new trajectories for the research presented themselves. Simultaneously, I reflected upon and refined the purchase of the visual essay as a mode for sharing research insights. For example, if the first essay posed the idea of communicating potential over accounting for what a case study told us, by the final essay this idea was accepted and extended to consider specific strategies for promoting this potential through audience engagement. The academic paper developed between each visual essay further informed the knowing that came from designing the projects and the questions explored in the paper framed the next project. The conference papers, documented in Volume 2 of this study, worked through in-depth descriptions of the process and developed the conclusions — providing an explicit space by which to reflect on the experience and frame future moves.
Looking back over the visual essays the interrelated insights falls into two areas: the discursive agenda and the visual language. Together these insights signal a potentially different approach to communication design. First, the discursive agenda departs from the conventional practice of persuading or informing a passive audience with a predetermined message. For the communication objective of the essays is defined by thinking of how the essays could provoke active reflection and discussion. This allows the designer researcher to be liberated from explicitly communicating a single, unambiguous message as it alternatively created a critically discursive space for the designer and audience to explore new ground. Second, the visual language of the essays works against convention by building on the above idea that ambiguity could be productive and clear communication should not always be the primary goal. The visual language developed, in this case the proposition diagram, served to amplify the capacity of drawings to facilitate a designerly approach to thinking through ideas that resist easy explanation. In this way the act of designing and reading the proposition diagram is conceived to be challenging, requiring a particular attention to and engagement with the sophisticated ideas under examination.
Imagining Design Education: Three Visualization Studies
Over a four-year period hundreds of diagrams, charts and maps were designed for my workplace. The professional practice singled out for study are the visualization studies I undertook in my role as an academic administrator. The particular situation was framed by being an academic dean at an independent, urban design school within the United States, with 4000+ students and 140+ full time faculty and a hundred year old history. The School was going through a radical rethinking of it’s mission and working toward wide-spread institutional changes. The context provided a professional practice environment whereby design was recognized as being uniquely placed to navigate the disciplinary, managerial and economic dynamics at play when ‘re-designing’ an art and design school. Over time the diagrams came to model the institutions interest in recognizing and enacting the meta agency of design in the process of redefining the future of design education.
For the purposes of this case study a select number of visualizations have been curated into three studies that respectively explored institutional change: curricular, cultural and organizational. The insights that emerged from designing the parallel visual essays practice served to make explicit the professional potential of the proposition diagram. The hunch was that in using diagrams in this applied space the act of visualizing should support the following objectives: first, for the designer to be able to critically imagine, through visually speculating and proposing, possible futures for the school; second, provide an accessible platform by which to share material propositions of verbal discussions with colleagues for critique and evaluation of what these schemas might afford (distinct from sending a white paper around for review and comment) and third, cultivate a design-led environment where the predominantly practice-based community could engage in the discursive process of designing by speculating upon the potential disclosed by the diagrams-in-conversation-with-the-situation.
Although visual data can be a standard component of business communication, especially presentations, these provisional, iterative diagrams played a different role to conventional business graphics and to the field of information design in that they did not set out to lock down and present information. However, the diagrams did use sketching as a tool for thinking which is a strategy familiar to designers (Lawson 2004, Cross 2007). In this way the graphics were constructed to enable a new way of seeing, critiquing and discussing the potential of a variety of given situations. Whereas usually a designer draws toward the artefact (the building, product or publication), these drawings were not steps toward the finished thing — they were to be forever provisional.
The utility of these professional graphics aligns directly with the agency of the visual essays. The diagrams, like the essays, primarily work to critically and creatively advance the designer and their peers understanding of the subject being visualized. With the visual essays the context was a research conversation framed by an investigation of design praxis, and with the visualization studies the context was a professional conversation framed by an exploration of design education.