1.3 Questions, Context and Relevance
It was an interesting exercise, trawling through six years of practice. The instruction was to collect and code not just the research I identified with my PhD, but also the design projects I had done at my consultancy, the diagram classes I had taught, the research workshops I had run, the work at Parsons. I somewhat begrudgingly laid it out – but didn’t believe for a second that it was all relevant to the ‘research practice’ I was framing. The first iteration of how I organised the projects had the ‘extraneous’ work physically marginalised. A later pass had the visual essays on a timeline with the interstitial projects in between. With each iteration I was pushed to examine my practice from another frame. This exercise, which seemed like something between a studio pin-up and a visual audit of my work, was making me see everything very differently. And I don’t just mean what was revealed about my research.
What struck me was the actual exercise. I had spent thousands of hours designing, weeks of my time blogging, written tens of thousands of words…and yet, this exercise in a few days had turned upside down the whole way I understood my project. I didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or elated that it took this exercise for me to pull far enough back from my project to really see what was there.
Preamble to the thesis
From early on, this project has been concerned with the purchase of communication design for visualising elusive concepts, and the potential of research through design as a method for understanding how we design. Throughout I have sought to negotiate these two levels. The case study explores how a graphic design language might productively manipulate the ambiguity of visual communication. This leads to the conceptual understanding of a how designer might intentionally protract the speculative/reflective negotiation of creative practice. The notion that creative tension can be productively intensified goes on to inform the meta-level research question of whether it is possible to develop strategies for engaging practitioner-researchers in deep reflection of their practice.
In this thesis I argue that the process of manipulating the centripetal/centrifugal tensions of practice can intensify the designer’s reflective back talk with the situation, the design, and the audience. The design-oriented research approach demonstrates the value of a designer operating in a heightened reflective state: attending to and noticing how he or she makes decisions and evaluates potential. With respect to researching the elusive nature of design praxis, this thesis considers the critical value of working towards, rather than fixing, an understanding. With an emphasis on becoming, the project recognises the value of operating in a suspended state of figuring out, rather than determining a fixed position. An open-ended, discursive approach allows the practitioner-researcher to have his or her background understandings challenged, in turn exposing perceived limitations of practice and revealing new possibilities to him- or herself and others. The benefit for practitioners is a more explicit understanding of the perspectives they bring to their work as designers and educators. With this insight they will be better positioned to contribute to a collective understanding of the praxis of design.
The Research Questions
As mentioned earlier this enquiry circles around the broad question: how might a speculative, reflective practice approach to design-led research contribute to the scholarship that seeks to understand design praxis? Given the practice-led orientation, design academy context and my communication design background, this project addresses this space by investigating the following three inter-related questions.
First, how might design as a research method interrogate the often only tacitly understood praxis of design? Second, which additional methods and strategies might enable a practitioner to more deeply reflect on and share his or her understandings of design? Third, how might research into the practice of design better reflect a practitioner’s perspective, expertise and motivations? The various components of this project address these questions by attending to the domain being investigated (reflective practice and design), the methodological orientation (design-oriented research) and the community of practice (design education).
The case study plays a critical role in providing an experiential insight into the opportunities and challenges presented by design-oriented research approach. The case study, framed by the context of communication design, was shaped by two more specific questions. First, what might be the purchase of a detailed visualisation for figuring complex ideas and promoting discussion around not-yet-fixed concepts? Second, how might the elements of a graphic language intentionally promote multiple readings and critical discussion?
I understand this investigation as designerly in that it is inquisitive, seeking to explore what might be disclosed, rather than seeking to uncover the truth or the solution behind a ‘problem’. In this way the project proposes a model for design-oriented research, while recognising the diversity of relevant approaches that would be full of potential for this space.
1.3.1 Context and Relevance
Given my personal background, the studio projects of this research work with the graphic designer’s expertise in manipulating text and image to communicate, and the visual artist’s expertise in creating pluralistic work that allows the audience to construct their own meaning. In many ways, as a strategy for engaging audiences, the visualisations within the case study appear more aligned to an art practice than to visual communication. Framed by the discourse surrounding design, the research aligns with many of the objectives associated with the practice of critical design: a field interested in the potential of design artefacts that do more than embody “alternative social, cultural, technical or economic values” (Dunne and Raby 2001, p58). What particularly resonates about critical design and the objectives of this project is the ambition for the artefacts of practice to facilitate ongoing critical reflection for the designer and the audience (Bowen 2007).
This orientation resonates with the notion that design’s “thinking-differently-about-the-present” affords “a space of thinking about the possible” that is distinct from the sciences and humanities (Dilnot 1999). With reference to how this framing of the possible relates to the role of making in practice-led research, Scrivener points out how “having made such a world, one can imagine why it was made, how it was made and what it does or does not mean” (2004, n.pag). Cognitive psychology and visual studies present many theories of how audiences engage and interpret visual material, but this project is more interested in the agency behind the future-oriented process of designing (Newton 2004). Specifically, the project is drawn to enhance the capacity of designing as a research methodology suited to framing loose and unstructured problems.
The Situated Context of the Research
The academic culture in which this research has been undertaken has shifted over the duration of the degree. Similarly to the productive conversation framed by the two practice spaces, it has been illuminating to work on the research project in two countries that have their own distinct cultural positions on design research.
The early research projects were conceived when I worked at an Australian institution responsive to a federal research agenda that emphasised the reporting and quantifying of research output. The research program and topic of the PhD are influenced by decades of conferences, symposia and papers that discuss the challenges, opportunities and frameworks for practitioners attempting to work with a national research agenda that implicitly privileges propositional knowledge. Most influential are the educators who have modelled through curriculum design and argued through papers that the creative practitioner should not contort his or her practice to work within the orthodox paradigms of other disciplines (van Schaik 2003, Crossick 2006, Rosenberg 2006, Haseman 2007). The ambition of the initial visual essay projects to explore alternative models for disseminating peer-reviewed practitioner research is both an accommodation of the federal agenda and a way of responding to the call for designers, by van Schaik et al, to claim the opportunities that practice as research presents.
The latter years of the program, including all the visualisation studies, have been undertaken within the academic research culture of the United States of America. Within this context there is a long history of independent art and design colleges that operate outside the broader university system, with no external pressure or federally funded incentive to work within a research context. This has allowed, to a large extent, art and design education to continue a longstanding tradition of a predominantly professional practice education. The lack of a public discourse around design research further highlights the absence of external drivers to motivate a community to examine what research means within the design academy. My experience would suggest that culturally and institutionally, the marginalisation of practice-oriented research is more pronounced in the United States than in Australia or the United Kingdom.
Yet, productively, this nascent research culture also promotes the opportunity to rethink and reposition the value of research beyond federal compliance. My project responds to this context, shifting away from the formal dissemination of research to prioritise strategies that engage practitioner-educators to participate in a critical, reflective conversation about design practice through a deep interrogation of his or her own practice.
Research Relevance
The model being proposed in this dissertation is conceived to engage practitioner-researchers in research that illuminates our perceptions of the agency of design. My ambition ultimately is for the collective research approach to contribute to academic discourse and ultimately result in new ways to educate novice designers about the ways designers think through making.
I have professionally experienced the importance of being able to articulate to others insights that only emerged as a consequence of this enquiry: insights that have radically changed my practice and the business model I follow (for example, in the chapter 2.1 visual essay ‘Designing a Space for Speculation’). But this research also considers more broadly how practitioners interested in a critical framing of practice might use newfound perspectives on design to simply advance their own practice. Many practitioner-educators have the opportunity to operate outside the narrow conventions of industry, but may not know how to position the contribution they bring as designers. In this dissertation I argue that by enhancing an understanding of his or her own expertise, the researcher also improves (for example) his or her capacity to articulate the value of design to a partner in an interdisciplinary collaboration, or to communicate what design thinking brings to complex socio-cultural situations.