Usage and Overview

This website

is actually two websites

The one you're looking at now (we figured you had to start somewhere) is the thesis component of Lisa Grocott's PhD: Design Research and Reflective Practice: the facility of design-oriented research to translate practitioner insights into new understandings of design. Above is the menu for the content, in four chapters.

Over to the right you'll see a tab that will let you flip over to the second site, which is a case study for the PhD.

The content for these two sites is so interdependent that we thought it made little sense to separate them completely, and a lot more sense for them to be seen through one another.

Also archived here is Lisa's blog, which is mentioned throughout, and was a key tool during this study.

Summary of this thesis

This PhD research explores the potential of design-oriented research for investigating design practice. This project is interested in drawing attention to the value of a designer’s perspective, and showing how this perspective can play a more significant role in shaping how academic discourse frames and understands design. This goal is explored through the critical undertaking of a design-oriented research case study. In reflecting upon the methods adopted the project can evaluate, from a practitioner’s perspective, the limitations and the opportunities of designing as a research methodology. The visualisation case study includes academic and professionally framed design projects that examine directly and indirectly the potential and appropriateness of design-oriented research for disclosing productive insights into design praxis.
 In advocating the relevance of practitioner-researchers contributing to the academic discourse surrounding design practice, the audience for this research is the studio-based educator. The disciplinary values of the research model would be relevant for educators with a design background who are interested in undertaking research that is motivated to both influence teaching strategies and contribute to our collective understanding of design practice.

This research operates at the nexus between Brad Haseman’s notion of performative research, Alain Findeli’s framework for project-grounded research and Donald Schön’s idea of the reflective practitioner, in turn casting the act of designing and reflecting as central to the project-orientation of the research. Exploring the methodological practice of a designer-researcher, this project is driven to adopt and adapt studio-based methods and reflection-based research interventions that will promote the synergetic relationship between speculation and reflection. In noticing and accounting for the designer’s reflective conversation with the research situation, the project proposes strategies for how what I am calling the back talk of a reflective design practice might be productively amplified to establish resonance and facilitate the external consultation of practitioner-led research.

Preface – The Research Narrative

This research study explores the potential of a design-oriented approach to research. The framework for this reflection-based approach can be characterised as multi-modal, iterative and engaging with multiple methods. The following dissertation is designed to structurally embody the nature of the research approach. This translates to a dissertation with an interwoven narrative and reflections layered on reflections. The three key elements of the study that shape this documentation are blog entries, case study projects, dissertation diagrams and writing.
 The projects of the visualisation case study fall into two categories: the primary design projects including visual essays and visualisation studies and the secondary references including images that document the broader research and design activity. The primary projects are introduced and documented in full in chapter two, with the secondary illustrations inserted throughout the dissertation as snapshots of my broader research activities. The snapshots might include, for example, a single proposition diagram that provoked debate, a frame from a research presentation or a detail from a grounded theory exercise. This research program is described as project-grounded and these tangible project details are included to render a holistic understanding of the research/practice experience. The research website (on the DVD) includes extended commentary on the visual essays, the visualisation studies and full examples of some PhD and professional practice presentations.
 The research blog provided a structure for the reflexive writing that runs through this PhD program. These conversations with myself were critical to the design-oriented approach of this study, since the blog operated as the equivalent of a writing sketchpad. The tentative writings allowed perspectives to be in flux and newfound understandings to surface. More than simply a medium for thinking-through-writing, the blog provided a unified space for negotiating the back talk within and between the research and professional practice spaces of the research program. In this interconnected space, the blog became a place of active reflection on my study from multiple perspectives – including the experiential knowing of the practice experience, the meta-conversation of the research program, and the relevance of a theorist’s conceptual framework with respect to my understandings of praxis. Sample blog entries are included throughout the dissertation and the full blog is on the research website. The reflective accounts that introduce chapter sections are selected blog entries that have been revisited. These short entries weave together a composite narrative that seeks to candidly highlight how I used these internal conversations to negotiate reflections of the research experience.

The projects extend beyond the dissertation text to full-page diagrams that introduce major sections of the research. The diagrams and the dissertation text were developed simultaneously, informing one another through various iterations . The diagrams and text (along with the reflective accounts) provide multiple entry points to the dissertation as well as potentially appealing to different literacies and levels of engagement. Designing the dissertation diagrams did not begin as a speculative process and yet the act of translating the dissertation argument into visual form served to raise possibilities while simultaneously challenging some assumptions. The objective behind the diagrams was distinct from the visualisations of the case study as they intended to fix the argument in visual form. Yet the recursive conversation between the diagrams and text once again underscored the discursive value of an ambiguous text. The short captions go some way toward framing a reading of the diagrams and yet, just as the proposition diagrams of the case study are positioned for open interpretation rather than ‘deciphering’ by the reader, there is intentionally no legend or comprehensive caption. These diagrams and the reflective accounts were also the primary artefacts of the PhD exhibition. 

The full complement of research artefacts may have been side-lined to the website, but the design of the dissertation is conceived to reflect a nonlinear research process, reminding the reader that designing, writing and framing exercises were undertaken iteratively throughout the PhD. The website makes multiple entry points explicit by allowing the reader to scan the reflective accounts or study the dissertation diagrams while reading the full text. I believe that together these elements present the evidence of a critically reflexive approach to researching design praxis by way of interrogating my own situated practice.