2.3 New Understandings of Practice
I wasn’t looking for hard evidence; I was just curious to see how someone might interpret a visual essay with no context setting from me. Every other day at work I got to observe how people read the proposition diagrams, but I wanted to see if, asked directly, someone might just find the visual essays confoundingly ambiguous or simply inaccessible. I gave my friend a copy of the last visual essay to consume, and left the room. Five minutes later I came back to hear her interpretation. It was a humbling experience.
She confidently began by talking about an architecture studio course she’d done and was relating the dots to people and density mapping. Her initial comments were so off track I felt that the openness had failed to meaningfully establish any connections between her ideas and mine. I was despondent. And yet… as she talked, her perspective shifted to an interior space and she began to read between the two pages, describing how the two “states” have to ultimately weave together. The more she said, her ideas not only began to reflect my own, but her comments also made me think of ideas I had glimpsed but not grasped while designing. I was drawn to how her vocabulary and way of seeing were influenced by her architectural practice. In this way, new metaphors for describing design thinking surfaced and with the fuzzy visual language affecting our verbal conversation new ideas were developed. Still… it wasn’t perfect. She didn’t reflect on what the content of the essay might mean for her practice. She didn’t even seem interested in how another person might read it. Next time I’ll have to work on how to frame the question.
Intuitively I recognise that the process of designing the visualisations is a productively challenging experience, therefore I have sought to better understand how and why the design process deepens my own enquiry and animates my conversations with my peers. I believe that if I can make more explicit the elements of my design experience, then I can offer other design practitioners who are interested in research a potential way to recreate a similar level of reflection.
In analysing how the visual language works, I have focused on how the disrupted process of designing a proposition diagram heightens the critico-discursive potential of creative practice (Rosenberg 2006). Or, to be more straightforward, my analysis proposes that the process of designing a proposition diagram offers a design-led strategy for framing a critical practice-led discussion. With this newfound understanding of the creative process I am able to consider the potential of manipulating the centrifugal/centripetal tension to create a similarly propositional approach to reflecting on practice. These insights have led to the emergence of ‘figuring’ as a visualisation practice and the central role negotiating plays in facilitating the reflective conversation of designing.
Fig. 8
Fig. 8
2.3.1 The Primary Outcomes
The Proposition Diagram
The combined visual communication practice that evolves out of the visual essays and visualisation studies uses a representational, diagrammatic visual language appropriated from the aesthetic of mapping and information design. Resonating with the ambitions of this research, the proposition diagram allows the designer to get his or her head around the forces at play, while the act of making a proposition provides a discursive space for the back talk of the reflective conversation with the situation.
In creating the proposition diagram I have developed an intentionally ambiguous visual language aimed at promoting a possibilities-driven approach to critical reflection. This notion of the proposition diagram as an instrument for proposing-to-evaluate is central to the visualising practice of figuring that the research case study advances. Working with the designer’s interest in co-evolution of the solution and problem, as I described in chapter 1.1.2, the drawing creates a future-oriented yet reflective process for the designer to propose into. This design-led approach deploys a designer’s expertise in speculating, by way of proposing solutions, as a strategy for reflecting on the subject of the visualisation. This is made manifest in visual essays I created that propose the nature of the design process or design thinking as a strategy for reflecting upon the sometimes tacit nature of designing. For the visualisation studies, this meant proposing future models for the institution’s curriculum, culture or structure as a way to reflect upon the often provisional, always contingent conditions and opportunities the educational context presents. Both cases build on the designer’s expertise to propose a solution in order to better understand a situation by using the propositional act of designing as a reflective tool.
Relevant to my thesis argument is the observation that the diagram’s utility is related to the visual and cognitive slippage from one drawing style to the next. Normally a practitioner would choose between the possibilities-driven agency of the proposition drawing and the reflective utility of the evaluative diagram. Yet, with the hybrid nature of the proposition diagram, the design experience resists any easy negotiation of the propositional push and reflective pull of creative practice.
Fig. 9
Fig. 9
The Speculation-led Reflective Practice of Figuring
As I was designing the poster I thought – this is too easy. I had become so used to designing the proposition diagrams and engaging in the process of struggling to figure out formally and intellectually what I wanted the essays or visualisations to say. I felt complacent designing the poster because I already knew what I wanted to communicate. The poster was for an exhibition and in one image I was attempting to conceptually summarise the outcomes of the case study. I had always considered my visualisations to offer the audience (and myself), a space for contemplation. Yet this was a poster and I had to be honest that most people would engage with it for less than a minute. I downplayed the discursive nature of the artefact and designed it for quick consumption. The process of designing the poster was familiar and reminded me of conventional graphic design. Still. I missed the gritty engagement of the proposition diagram.
When figuring a proposition diagram I often felt at sea, as though trying to find my way back to solid ground. I would feel I was conceptually (and perpetually) wrestling with multiple possible scenarios, while feeling the formal language was demanding me to be more decisive. With every move I would want to keep open the potential of what was almost within grasp, at the same time hoping that the next move would allow me to see more clearly what I didn’t know. I would sigh aloud, shake my head and then try and come at the questions the design was asking me from a different perspective. I was challenged, I was frustrated, but I was learning. This was figuring, and this is the experience I was missing.
This research posits that the measure of a model for critical engagement by a designer-researcher is whether it promotes a more intense observation and concrete reflection. Considering the research audience, my goal is to avoid theoretical frameworks or qualitative methods that might be counter-intuitive to the opportunistic designer. Thus, my interest in heightening the creative tension identified in the proposition diagram is motivated by the hunch that designers who are more naturally predisposed to proposing an idea than to thoughtful reflection-on-action may respond to this design-led approach. In chapter 1.1.2 I recognise that designers do not automatically stop to think about their actions over the course of a project. Moreoever, routine reflection-in-action is more likely to be concerned with evaluating the ‘appropriateness’ of a proposed solution concept or reflecting on what has been learnt from previous experiences (Schön 1987). However, recognising that designers are motivated by challenges, opportunities and possibilities (Krippendorf 2007), I am also interested in the relevance of inviting reflection by way of imagining potential solutions.
I have come to refer to reflection inflected with the designer’s impulse to speculate as ‘speculation-led reflection’. If speculate, as a synonym for reflect, can be defined as the capacity to think deeply about something, then in using the term I am also alluding to its second definition: to take a risk. In this way, speculation-led reflection can be understood as the designerly act of attempting to figure out and contemplate while also venturing out to playfully explore possibilities. The word ‘reflection’ evokes the centripetal impulse to make connections back to what we know, with the word ‘speculation’ more akin to the centrifugal desire to explore what we do not (yet) know, or what the dictionary would call conjecture (Random House 1987).
The notion of figuring seeks to exploit this by attempting to make this tension explicit. Essentially, the act of figuring seeks to maintain a state of becoming by extending the process of negotiating the push and pull these opposing forces provoke. This concept of becoming is further elaborated upon in chapter 4.3. As a practice, figuring calls for disturbing the already fragile balance by introducing elements into the process of designing that consciously draw the designer in two directions. If conventionally, in creative practice, the desire to deviate is moderated by the impulse to stabilise, then when a designer is figuring I would propose that this negotiation is intentionally disrupted by a call to wrestle with both impulses in the one move.
Fig. 10
Fig. 10
Negotiating the Space between Speculation and Reflection
I had just finished a PhD presentation where I reflected on the grounded theory exercise, an exercise that had challenged me to think of my ‘practice’ holistically. Until I had done the exercise I had understood my research to literally be the projects I had framed and proposed as visual essays. A juror jumped in to the discussion to describe how I had to stop ignoring the elephant in the room. He was adamant that the evolution of my professional communication design was key to understanding my research. Feeling like he had missed the point I turned to the other jurors, only to have them nod in confirmation. The material evidence of the grounded theory pin-up made it hard to ignore the role my workplace visualisation studies had had on my research, yet to acknowledge this was to also challenge my preconceptions of how research should be formally framed and disseminated.
As I listened to a second juror assert that the real relevance of the research lay in the new model of communication design the professional work modelled, I felt simultaneously exhausted and exonerated. I knew that if I were to draw out the insights the jury was repeating back to me, it would mean rethinking my whole thesis argument. But I also could see that the critics were reaffirming my long-held belief that there is much to be learned from everyday professional practice if examined through a critical framework.
Over the course of the research case study, visualising has come to represent a way of thinking with and through design – a generative space that is in a constant, recursive process of proposition and reflection. In addition to putting forth a new role for me and potentially other communication designers, this insight has led to a newfound appreciation for the negotiative nature of design practice. Even though theorists have credited designing as an act of “making continual adjustment and attunement…through the continual process of positing possibilities” (Dilnot 2004, p10), I have previously conceived of the negotiating-to-disclose-potential as having a limited function. The conversation between the theoretical discourse and my practice allowed me to more fully understand the capacity of design to negotiate the needs of the subject, the limits of the possible and transformative action (p11). Locating this insight in design literature, I was further able to perceive how central the idea of negotiation/mediation is to identifying the contribution of design for navigating the incommensurable.
The elusive design praxis subject of the visual essays and the dynamic institutional change subject of the visualisation studies require me as the designer-researcher to navigate unfamiliar territory. This positions the visualisations as a collective space for learning, the protracted space for reflection coming from the designer giving form to the not-yet-known material of the exploratory visualisation. In this way, the reflection-on-action of the proposition diagram has the potential to illuminate the designer’s tacitly understood ability to negotiate the space between reflection and speculation. In understanding a designer’s expertise to propose-a-solution-to-evaluate-a-situation, it becomes possible to consider how this might offer a strategy for driving the in-depth reflection of the practitioner-researcher.
In addition to the internal negotiation of designing, there is also the potential for inviting the research audience into the process of interpreting the visualisations for themselves. The insights into the process of figuring, revealed by the reflection-on-action, help me to see the democratic learning space the visualisations offer. This is because the emphasis on being unsettled is often about intentionally avoiding conclusions. This desire to not fix what the visualisations are communicating keeps open the possibility of different interpretations, so that through discussion the potential of unforeseen perspectives can be proposed and critiqued. The cognitive value of the visualisations is therefore wedded to their capacity to engage the audience to negotiate their own understanding of the visual essay’s subject or the visualisation’s academic proposition.
Fig. 11
Fig. 11