1. The Context

This research investigates the potential of a design-oriented approach to researching design practice. This dissertation structures the thesis into four chapters: a critical framing of the research project; documentation of the design-oriented research case study; a reflective account of how the case study was undertaken; and an evaluation of the potential of design-oriented research. 
 This introductory chapter lays out the broader context and the critical framework on which this research project is founded. The first section outlines the ambitions of the project by identifying the relevance of the practitioner-educator contributing to the theoretical framing of design praxis. Situating the project in relation to design research discourse, the next section discusses the paradox of ‘design research’, a field of scholarship that often does not appear to embrace the designer. The latter sections orient the reader by providing snapshots of parts of the project, including the components of the case study, the basic research strategies adopted and the overall structure of the research program. In theoretically situating and conceptually framing the methodological elements within the study, this dissertation addresses how and why the study is motivated to both model and advocate for a design-oriented approach to researching practice.

Throughout this dissertation, when I reference the research project, I am talking of the subject and content of the overall research. References to the research program are related to the methodological orientation of the research, specifically how the research was structured and undertaken. Design projects refers to the studio-based artefacts that are the central component of the visualisation case study.

1.1 Situating the Project

The Rationale for this Research

At the outset the broad motivation underpinning this research was for designers to have a more explicit understanding of the potential of design practice beyond the style and utility of the artefact. I was less interested in what designers crafted and how objects functioned, and more driven to consider how designers acted in the process of making. This orientation is in part personal since I have always been more interested in the process of designing than the crafting of the material object, but it was also framed by the societal and professional forces that are shaping the future of design education.

Observing what drives the conversations at my institution and the agenda of design conferences internationally it is clear that there are significant changes facing the design profession. It is also apparent that the design academy recognises that these forces will necessarily inform future models for design education. The impact of these technological, social and economic changes will require designers to not just generate material objects but to also design systems, services and experiences (Davis 2008). Indirectly the rationale behind this research is framed by the conversations that circle around the development of research cultures in design and the need for designers’ to make themselves more attractive to interdisciplinary collaborators (AIGA/NCSU 2010).

I believe this period of change represents a time when new practice opportunities can emerge for designers, but this will in part depend on the design academy’s ability to prepare graduates who can communicate to employers, clients, stakeholders and potential collaborators what expertise they, as designers, bring to the particular situation. The practice of research presents a multitude of potential projects and different research methodologies for addressing the issues facing design education. However, the design-orientation of this research seeks to develop a methodological approach that respects the expertise of the practitioner. With this in mind this project is specifically interested in practitioner-led models for researching practice that subsequently offer the studio-educator a more-than-tacit understanding of his or her practice.

This research is framed by the broad idea that a useful step designers can take in navigating the paradigm shift away from objects to experiences is to become more adept at accounting for design expertise. The assumption is that if design practice is going to operate within an increasingly dematerialised realm then the practitioner-educator would benefit from building on his or her already sophisticated lexicon for presenting and critiquing the material world of design objects. These changes in design education are going to require not just the introduction of new skill sets but also a new way of talking about what designers do. Therefore it would be valuable if the designer were able to consciously use and explicitly teach the more cognitive attributes of design that practitioners draw on every day, yet that are often only implicitly embedded in design curricula. The issue of the transferability of design attributes from one design field to another is just one example that highlights the value of educators – and subsequently design graduates – being more comfortable with explicating the tacit knowing they bring to their teaching, research or professional practice.

Essentially I am interested in designers being better able to articulate not just what they make and why it is useful, but also the thinking involved in making and what this way of thinking has to offer.

An Introduction to the Research Design

There are two communities of scholars researching the field of design praxis that this project intersects. Young and Spencer argue there is a general consensus that design methodology can be characterised by two different paradigms: “rational problem solving” and “constructionism” (2009, p155). The epistemological and theoretical perspectives that distinguish these fundamentally different ways of understanding design have also led to a breadth of scholarship that further enacts different research approaches and methodologies. Nigel Cross, Kees Dorst and Brian Lawson are three of the primary researchers in the community of technical rationalists who investigate this terrain of design knowing by working with a deductive, experimental methodology that allows the designer’s decision-making practice to be observed and analysed. In contrast, scholars such as Clive Dilnot, Tony Fry and Wolfgang Jonas theorise the praxis of design in conversation with philosophical texts and interpretations of artefacts/services.

This research project shares an interest in research subject with these scholars – the desire to contribute to the theoretical framing of design praxis. However, my epistemological and theoretical perspective is distinctly different from the position of the techno-rationalist social scientist, and my methodological approach and research tactics and strategies are intentionally dissimilar to that of the humanities scholar. This research project is interested in how approaching this subject from another theoretical perspective may either substantiate or triangulate theories that have emerged from these related fields.

This practice-led research project investigates design knowing and praxis by adopting a reflective practice approach to my professional and research practice. Young and Spencer provide an operational definition for reflective practice in this research context (2009, p2):

The reflective practice method for practice-led design research refers to the paradigm as reflective practice and the action-orientated theory of reflective inquiry (Schön, 1983 and 1987). Reflective practice methodology is an epistemology of practice focusing upon acts of intelligence within situations of uncertainty, placing technical rationality (Simon, 1969) within a broader context of reflective inquiry.

My research adopts a self-directed and open-ended heuristic approach to this field. In this research program the reflective practice orientation has three inter-related methodological components that have been appropriated for a design-led context: the case study, the discipline of noticing and narrative enquiry. The central importance of the design project underscores the relevance of the situated design case study. The discipline of noticing reconfigures the cyclical approach and intention to effect change-of-action research and the emergent and disciplined observations of grounded theory, offering tactics for reflective conversation with the design projects and the research practice. Narrative enquiry complements the design orientation by providing a strategy for pulling far enough back from the situated context to observe the self-as-other. In creating a hybrid reflective practice that triangulates insights from across and between these various methodological approaches I hoped to compensate for some of the limitations of reflective practice while maintaining the integrity of offering a practitioner’s perspective on designing. The research design is described in detail later in this chapter.

An Introduction to the Research Context

The audience for this research is the studio-based educator who seeks to participate in the scholarship and discourse that will move us toward a richer understanding of design and subsequently reveal new ways of articulating the relevance of a design education. This research project puts forth a framework for practitioner-led research so that the design educator can offer a practice-driven perspective to researching design praxis. The decision to focus on research undertaken by the design educator, as opposed to research within a professional practice environment, is in part due to the impact that education can have on preparing future designers, and also due to the responsibility of the academy to support the advancement of practice through critical enquiry. If the academy drives most research into design, then this project seeks to put forward approaches to researching praxis that will resonate with practitioner-educators. By engaging in a critical research practice, the studio-based educator would be rewarded with the visual and linguistic tools to contribute to our understanding of design: through exhibition, publication, presentations and leadership roles within institutions.

From my position as an academic administrator and researcher I am interested in enhancing the designer-educator’s capacity to make explicit how the designer thinks and acts when designing. From my position as a studio-based design educator I am motivated to engage other academic practitioners to undertake and debate the contribution of practitioner-led research. Tracing a connection between these two motivations I have become particularly interested in considering the role research can play in how practitioner-researchers might come to know and articulate the usefulness and relevance of design in new, unfamiliar contexts. Ultimately the research program represents my interest in learning more about what designers know so that the practitioner-researcher working within the design academy can contribute to the immediate conversations within his or her institution and the scholarship that serves to define the domain of design. Within the visualisation case study this interest is made manifest through the visual essays that critically explore the tacit knowing of my design practice. Within the overall research project this interest is realised through the broader exploration of the potential of practitioner-led research. This leads to the broad research question: how might a speculative, reflective practice approach to design-led research contribute to the scholarship that seeks to understand design praxis? Section 1.3 outlines the specific research questions that the project investigates through the practice of communication design.
 As the academy negotiates how to develop learning experiences for this new landscape, much academic discourse has required a move from focusing on the professional education of specific design guilds to more closely attending to the general purchase and relevance of design. This discourse may, for example, assert the relevance of design thinking for addressing complex humanitarian problems, or considering core design literacies for non-design majors. This is why I am choosing to focus on the general domain of design. I believe the practitioner to already play a distinct role in defining the specific procedural, material and technological knowing of his or her chosen field of professional practice (in my case, communication design). I am specifically interested here in how the practitioner’s voice might influence the conversations within the academy that seek to better understand design thinking and design expertise in general. This more abstract interest in design discourse may once have been associated with the scholarly domain of the social scientist, yet in rethinking design education there is value in the academy grounding this discourse by framing the relevance of a designer’s cognitive expertise within these new practice spaces. The design theorist may have the conceptual frameworks for this work, but the practitioner has the situated experience and the designerly knowing to explore the potential of these new contexts. For these reasons I believe the practitioner-educator can and should play an active role in critically framing our forever-evolving perspectives on design.

Working with my specific skills as a communication designer, this project explores visualising as a design-led research method. A sub-field of design, communication design is concerned with the message, media and strategies for engaging an audience. Whereas communication design is a term that references a wide range of practices that can draw on multiple senses and technologies, this PhD limits its exploration to the practice of visual design. Specifically, the study focuses on two-dimensional graphic design of visualisations that are conceived to evoke discussion for a peer community of design practitioner scholars. Over the course of the project, additional reflection-based research activities have been introduced to address the limitations of designing as a form of enquiry. Together, the studio-based strategies and the reflection-based activities propose an approach for moving toward understanding of design. Within the framework of this research project I have come to name this reflective, yet design-driven, approach ‘design-oriented research’.

As a communication designer I understand this research to be about visualisations and their potential for investigating and communicating design knowing. As a design administrator/educator I perceive the research project to be about the potential of design-oriented research to make a contribution to academic discourse about design praxis. The first orientation appeals since it is clearly grounded in practice and embraces practitioner-led research. Yet, I also appreciate that the second orientation directly addresses my interest in practitioners playing a more active role in researching the general domain of design, as opposed to the specific field of design their practice engages them in. There were many times I wished I could confirm which of these orientations was more important. Ultimately I have come to realise the value of a research project that operates on two levels.

The first level comprises the design-oriented research case study that is at the heart of the PhD. The case study represents the site of exploration where, as a practitioner-researcher, I investigated the capacity of using communication design to advance my personal understanding and potentially our collective understandings of design. At this level the research uses different practice spaces to explore the tacit knowing of design and the potential of design in unfamiliar contexts. Over time it became evident that, although the case study might stand alone as a contribution to the field of communication design, if I wanted to more generally examine the potential of practitioner research then another tier of reflection was required.

This led to a second level of reflective engagement with the PhD, as I now saw the need for reflecting on not just the studio experience of the case study, but also on the limitations and possibilities that practitioner-led research presents. This level of enquiry frames the design work and methodological approach of the case study as the primary ‘project’ of the PhD. In this way the research seeks to reflect upon my research practice: how ideas are generated by the process of designing, debated through critiques and presentations, and then written up as research outcomes. The chapters of this dissertation represent the additional level of analysis and abstraction necessary to evaluate the potential of design-oriented research beyond the specifics of the particular case study.

This explains how the research project has come to specifically explore the reflective capacity of design-oriented research for interrogating a designer’s practice and sharing a designer’s knowing.

1.1.2 Situating the Discourse

Design Research Discourse

This is a PhD by project, which presupposes that the PhD operates within a context that already acknowledges and supports a project orientation to design research. But, given that the research topic explicitly explores the potential of practitioner research for informing research into design, it is important that the project is situated within the discourse that articulates the merit of performative research (Haseman, 2006), underscores the importance of design research being project-grounded (Findeli, 1999) and explicates why the act of designing and reflecting is central to the project-orientation of the research (Schön, 1983).

A short text published in the early ’90s identifies three categories of art and design research: research “into”, “through” and “for” art and design (Frayling 1993). Christopher Frayling’s notion that research could exist through creative practice laid claim to the legitimacy of designing as a research method, while generating further debate about what this might really mean (a debate I return to in chapter 2.1.1). This research project initially privileged the research being practice-led above anything else, in the belief that new opportunities for practice would emerge from researchers sharing the exploration of their practice with their peers (van Schaik 2003). Grounded by an individual’s situated, professional practice this emphasis on the mastery of the practitioner-researcher firmly privileges advancing critical practice. What is less established is how a practitioner’s reflections on practice transfer and contribute to the academic community’s interest in constructing theories of design praxis. Given the ambition of this project to promote practitioner research that helps to build the academic discourse surrounding design, the project operates at the interstitial space between Frayling’s research through and into design.

Writing almost two decades after Frayling, Daniel Fallman examines Frayling’s theory closer and distinguishes between deploying research to make more successful design objects/experience and deploying design to research a topic (2005). Fallman makes the distinction that although both approaches may use design as a method, the first may have no intention of being knowledge-productive (what Fallman calls “research-oriented design”), whereas the second approach is motivated to disclose new knowledge about a field yet may not result in a designed outcome (“design-oriented research”). This research project adopts Fallman’s definition of design-oriented research, since it emphasises the declared intention to contribute to the knowledge of the field and share the outcomes of the research.

One of the challenges facing design-oriented research is that the work is often evaluated against the methods, value systems and research criteria of the sciences or humanities. Countering the binary framework presented by qualitative and quantitative research, Brad Haseman proposes the need for a third paradigm that is sympathetic to the values and methods of practice-led researchers (2006). Haseman recognises that qualitative and performative research both offer multiple methods for researching, yet he makes the distinction that the precondition for performative research is that the methods be led by practice. Haseman argues that “some researchers have become impatient with the methodological restrictions of qualitative research…[leading to] a radical push to not only place practice within the research process, but to lead research through practice” (p3). This research project sympathises with Haseman’s characterisation of performative research to the extent that he accounts for how the research is initiated. Haseman describes how:

…many practice-led researchers do not commence a research project with a sense of ‘a problem’. Indeed they may be led by what is best described as ‘an enthusiasm of practice’: something which is exciting, something which may be unruly, or indeed something which may be just becoming possible as new technology or networks allow (but of which they cannot be certain). (Haseman 2006, p3)

This position is further supported by the idea that practice-led researchers need to be confident that “their designing activities reside within a theoretical framework that allows the methodology and research question(s) to be held in suspension” (Young and Spencer 2009, p2).

I was initially drawn to the practice-led argument that the research should also be disseminated “through the symbolic language and forms of their practice” (p4). Haseman describes the practice-led researcher as having “little interest in trying to translate the findings and understandings of practice into numbers (quantitative) and words (qualitative) preferred by traditional research paradigms” (p4). This disinterest might hold if you want to share your research with other practitioners in your field, but for this research project the research outcomes needed to be translated to the broader community of design scholars. The project seeks to overcome the “collective muteness of the profession” by resisting the “binarism between action and contemplation” (Bonsiepe 1999, p154).

Findeli proposes a model that helps to “build a genuine theory of design by adopting an epistemological posture more consonant with what is specific to design: the project…[The] epistemological figure is that of embedded, implicated, engaged, situated theory” (1999, p108). The methodological approach of this research project can be equated to Findeli’s model of “project-grounded research.” Findeli characterises this approach (used within a doctoral program) as a “kind of hybrid between action research and grounded theory research…that reaches beyond those methods, in the sense that our researchers in design are valued both for their academic and professional expertise” (1999, p111). In this way, the research is grounded by the projects and the theory emerges from the applied project experience.

Given the goals of the PhD my research project does not liberally accept Haseman’s call to resist the constraints of translating practice into words, nor does it assume Findeli’s emphasis on constructing the research problem and questions up front. The action-oriented methodological approach of the project allows the practitioner to adopt methods that are unique to design, while promoting Haseman’s respect for diving in and following hunches and Findeli’s caution to avoid confusing the importance of the research project with the project becoming “the central purpose of the research project” (p 111).

Consequently, in adopting Fallman’s term – design-oriented research – this research project asserts a commitment to research outcomes that transcend the practice experience to offer new ways of seeing and understanding design. This ambition does not diminish my allegiance to practice-led research but does challenge my base assumptions since it leads me to recognise the methodological contribution of other disciplines. This manifests in the project through an examination of the potential of complementary research activities that might be adapted to draw on a designer’s expertise while also introducing new discursive strategies to the research program.

Having said this, I want to clarify that my commitment to making a contribution beyond the situated projects that were undertaken does not simply equate to a desire to produce only propositional knowledge. Respecting that practice-led art and design research are often characterised as generating experiential knowing, this research project acknowledges the often tacit and sometimes ineffable type of knowing that comes from a designer’s experience of creating work. This research project respects that when it comes to the application of a practitioner’s knowing and future research, then tacit knowing is just as important as the knowing that can be explicitly communicated (Niedderer 2007, p12). In parallel, the reflective writing of this dissertation explains the discursive contribution of the anecdote when it comes to theorising my everyday experience as a designer researching my own practice (Gallop 2002).

Reflective Practice Discourse

As much as this research project is an investigation into design research, it is also an exploration of reflective practice. Donald Schön is the scholar who has most directly influenced this research, in part due to his interest in framing the practice of design through the lens of reflective practice (1987). Schön uses the term ‘designing’ in two senses: specifically, such as when observing the teaching and learning of the practice of designing within architecture; and more broadly, to account for the reflective conversation that is at the core of all forms of practice, whether that be teaching, counselling or nursing (1992). Similarly, he folds the idea of reflective practice into Dewey’s notion of ‘inquiry’, a practice seeking to “integrate thought and action, theory and practice, the academy and the everyday world” (1992, p123). In this way he describes how the practitioner-as-researcher might understand his or her role as “inquiry-enhancing” (p123).

The core concepts introduced by Schön that are relevant to this research project are touched on in this quote:

Through the unintended effects of action, the situation talks back. The practitioner, reflecting on this back talk, may find new meanings in the situation which lead him to a new reframing. (Schön 1983, p135)

First, I am interested in the idea that the designer is in conversation with the physical components with which he or she is designing: what Schön calls the reflective conversation with the materials of a situation. Second, I am interested in the broader idea that the designer is in reflective conversation with the situation, which opens up the idea that the designer is not just reflecting upon material, technical and physical decisions but also a broad range of social, environmental, cultural and conceptual concerns. Schön describes this reflective conversation as ‘back talk’; naming the often internalised and rarely verbalised series of hunches and responses, questions and decisions, that a designer mentally weighs up when making or contemplating a move. In attending to the resistances and opportunities the back talk discloses, the designer begins to assess the potential of different propositions. This ongoing evaluation of the situation from different perspectives introduces Schön’s notion of framing (1983). The capacity to frame problems or situations in unforeseen ways is how Schön characterises the designer’s expertise in imagining innovative solutions. In this research, these three key concepts play a significant role: the reflective conversation with the situation; the back talk of design practice; and the capacity to frame and reframe a situation so that it can be evaluated from multiple perspectives.

Also relevant to this research are the different modes of reflective practice that Schön identifies. This dissertation most directly references his framing of reflection-in-action as the kind of thinking a designer does on his or her feet. Although this process happens in the flow of practice, the reflection is still complex given that the practitioner is allowing him- or herself to experience “surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he finds uncertain or unique” (Schön 1983, p68). An important capacity of reflection-in-action is that it liberates the practitioner from working in a fixed procedural way, instead allowing him or her to reflect upon and respond to the specific conditions and potential of each situation. Reflection-on-action is the term Schön uses for the reflection that happens post an encounter. This can be characterised as a more consciously explicit act that requires practitioners to take the time to explore how and why they acted as they did. For designers wanting to identify their strengths and weaknesses, this tier of reflection allows them to establish an informed understanding of their own ideas, expertise and, ultimately, their practice.

In addition to Schön, my research draws on scholarship by John Mason in relation to the core idea of researching your own practice. I am specifically interested in Mason’s confidence that his “discipline of noticing” methodology could embrace subjectivity and uncertainty. He counters that the approach “provides a self-consistent way of working through which the practitioner can take responsibility for remaining in question rather than committing themselves to a single interpretation (2002, p202).” Although Mason is writing specifically about teachers researching their practice, his emphasis on the importance of the researcher having the flexibility to act immediately in response to new insights and the weight he places on accounting for how insights might resonate with others make for an approach that also suits that of the design practitioner.

In relation to design practice, my understanding of Schön’s work is further framed by the writings of Bryan Lawson (2004 and 2006) and Nigel Cross (2008). Of specific relevance is the way that Cross articulates the notion of “co-evolution” of the problem and solution. Related to Schön’s idea that the reflective conversation can lead to a reframing of the situation, the notion of co-evolution highlights the designer’s capacity to make a move into a situation as a strategy for understanding what he or she is dealing with. Distinct from a field where the first move may be to audit and assess, this ability allows a designer to be in a reflective conversation with the situation by proposing into an unfamiliar space. Recognising that it can be difficult to extricate the problem from the solution, Lawson and Kees Dorst (2009) use the term “design situation” as a way to acknowledge the total set of complex conditions and elements with which the designer is interacting. The capacity to make both a speculative and reflective move simultaneously is a central concept for this project.

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This project takes a performative, design-oriented approach to researching practitioner research. Curious about the ways that designing can stimulate learning (Downton 2003, Schön 1992) and contribute to meta-conversations about the domain of design, the visualisation case study provides a platform for exploring the provocative and discursive role that design might offer as a research method. By undertaking research through and into design, this project considers whether the practitioner-researcher’s unique perspective might present new ways of investigating and communicating the tacit and experiential knowing of design praxis. The reflective conversation that runs through my research program allows the local research experience of the visualisation case study to iteratively inform the more expansive conversation about design and design research. The new understandings that emerge from the research case study directly inform the conclusions of this research. Both the case study and the overall project conclude that if the designer-researcher is drawn into a prolonged engagement with negotiating the subject of his or her enquiry (be it a visual essay, visualisation study or the research program itself) time and space is created for deeper critical reflection and productive speculation.