2. The Case Study
In the beginning I just wanted the research to be visual – I was thinking about the design community and was focused on their visual literacy. Once the research began I jumped to the conclusion that the dissemination of design research would be driven by outcomes that engaged the audience in considering the potential – I’d stopped thinking about the form and I was now thinking about the content. Following a PhD presentation I now saw with great clarity that I wanted to work with the designer’s capacity to negotiate — I was no longer focused on the form or the content, as I was now motivated by the discussion.
Sometimes it felt like I didn’t know what I was doing; yet as new insights emerged and old perspectives were challenged I came to appreciate the exploratory and opportunistic approach I had followed. I may have implicitly already known how to design, yet these research experiences were teaching me to notice and then really ‘know’ what it meant to think and work like a designer. Every time I could articulate a new perspective on design I came a step closer to asserting how valid it might be to bring a designerly way of thinking to research.
This chapter introduces the design projects that ground this research. With practice being the dominant research methodology in this chapter, the act of designing documented here represents the ‘action’ component used to investigate the first two research questions of this PhD (chapter 1.3). Explicitly, the visual essays seek to interrogate notions of design praxis, providing a critically framed and contemplative space to examine my tacit understandings of designing. More indirectly, the different practice spaces allow me to explore, in a research context and through my professional practice, ways to align the research methodology with my expertise and motivations as a practitioner-educator. I am the sole researcher for this case study, with my studio-based research practice being the subject under investigation. By placing my own practice at the centre of the research I can explore the broader question of how a reflective practice approach might contribute to the scholarship that seeks to understand design praxis. As part of an atypical case study the visual essays and visualisation studies are not simply data sources to be analysed. The emphasis here is more on deep self-reflection and the discipline of noticing as a strategy for researching one’s practice. However, the intent of this chapter is not to account for the particulars of what the visualisation research projects disclose (about communication design), but to transcend that specific field of design to consider what the experience of undertaking the practice-led research case study reveals about the potential of a design-oriented approach to research. The visualisation case study is to be understood as part of a larger research project on design-oriented research.
The two-part process of reflecting on the act of designing and analysing the form and utility of the visualisations leads me to name the graphic language adopted for these projects ‘proposition diagrams’. From these highly situated, individual projects, I consider the discursive experience of designing proposition diagrams with respect to notions of negotiation and potential. Dilnot argues that:
Essentially design is nothing else but the encounter with realities (actualities, situations, circumstances, conditions or experiences) in terms of their transformative possibilities and potentialities. Design opens these possibilities through initiating a process of negotiation with the given which extends the boundaries of the previously possible (2005, p2).
On a local level the narrative in this chapter seeks to offer a practitioner’s perspective on this theoretical framing of design. The narrative discusses how the proposition diagrams are the product of the speculation-led reflective practice of figuring and goes on to reflect upon and articulate the negotiative act of designing. On a meta-level the attempts to translate, through text and image, the space between the speculative and reflective push and pull of creative practice also represent a way to enact Dilnot’s notion of designing. From this perspective the act of ‘designing’ a research program becomes a strategy by which one can explore what is possible with respect to practitioner-led research. The “negotiation and translation” of the practitioner’s insights into articulated perspectives offer a grounded example of the role “consensus, dialogue and interpretation” might play in design-oriented research (Dilnot 2004, p8).
To this end the chapter explores the outcomes of the case study with respect to the specific knowing generated and what these outcomes might teach us about practice. The chapter concludes with a visual narrative that discloses how the multiple-method approach has facilitated a discursive, reflective environment in which to negotiate and advance the research insights that have emerged.
2.1 Research and the Practitioner
Manzini (2008) makes an interesting case for why the discourse of design research should move on from discussing methods to emphasising results, arguing that if the contributions of design research are solid then presumably the methods adopted are too. The reason my research still chooses to stress the methodological orientation of the research is not so much to legitimate the approach, but more to acknowledge the unique contribution a design-led orientation to research can make. Jonas makes this point when he compares research about or research for design to research through design, arguing that the latter is the “only genuine [my italics] design research paradigm” that can advance the methodological practice of the discipline (2007, p187). This assertion lends support to the idea that we need to identify research characteristics that will align with the value system of design practice (Coyne 2004, Cross 2007, Scrivener 2004). In making this move, we need not be defensive about the fact that design-led research makes no claims to objectivity and can instead embrace the purchase of a subjective, situated grounding for research (Findeli 1999). Drawing on the future-oriented nature of design would allow design research to be led by what might become, as opposed to being wedded to theoretical accounts of what is (Rosenberg 2007).
2.1.1 Interrogating Practice
Cross presents a useful summary of disciplinary value systems that can be used to inform ways of framing design research. He characterises the sciences as being concerned with objectivity, rationality, neutrality, and a concern for ‘truth’. In comparison, the humanities value subjectivity, imagination, commitment, and a concern for ‘justice’, whereas design values practicality, ingenuity, empathy, and a concern for ‘appropriateness’ (Cross 2007, p18). These distinctions go some way toward explaining why a design-led approach might value practicality over objectivity and why a concern for appropriateness might trump the scientist’s dedication to truth. Indirectly, these associated values support the hunch that a practitioner’s insights and research experience would be distinct from those of the philosopher, psychologist or historian.
Realising the Potential of Practitioner Research
This research project seeks to explore the tension of how the practitioner-researcher might address the issue of explicating to others the knowing that emerges from a situated research experience. For with respect to my broad ambition to inform how the academy defines design and how that knowing will ultimately inform education, I agree with Friedman’s statement that “the ability to theorise design enables the designer to move from an endless succession of unique cases to broad explanatory principles that can help to solve many kinds of problems” (2003, p515). I can also agree with his claim that “it is not experience, but our interpretation and understanding of experience that leads to knowledge” (2003, p521). Yet, I imagine that the point of contention between Friedman’s and my expectations might be tied to the nature of the knowing that practitioner-led research can reveal. For these reasons, I value exploring this issue from the perspective of a practitioner.
This project’s starting point is that the reflection a designer brings to everyday practice does not offer the level of criticality the practitioner-researcher needs to meaningfully corroborate his or her insights (McLaughlin 2006). So, even though the project recognises the potential of the perspective the designer-researcher can bring to researching practice, it also asserts that additional reflection is required to translate and legitimate the experiential knowledge of the designer. Ultimately, the contribution the designer (or any practitioner for that matter) makes to academic discourse will depend on his or her capacity to reflect upon and communicate a way of thinking and making that he or she might only tacitly understand. An objective of this research was to consider an approach to research that would address the motivations and expertise of the practitioner and the opportunities and limitations of design practice. This is a distinctly different approach to Friedman’s analysis of why design needs to build theory. Where he chooses to critique and assert the importance of theory, I am empathetic to the position of the practitioner and seek to frame the potential of research for that audience. To do this, I decided that it was essential that I undertake this research through an embedded approach to enquiry that would reveal the background practices of designing that a designer can at times struggle to identify and articulate.
The call for in-depth reflection depends on strategies by which the practitioner-researcher can more critically interrogate his or her practice as well as discuss and shape his or her observations through debate with others. The integrity of this research project in particular, and the design-oriented approach in general, are accommodated by these two moves by addressing how the researcher reflects while designing and considering how the designer can reflect upon the research as it emerges.
First, the reflections-in-action that are already embodied in everyday designing needed to be intensified. In the case study, I address this by creating visualisations. I set out in section two of this chapter the ways in which the visual language adopted for the visualisations calls for greater reflective engagement by the researcher. In addition, the visual essays use the content of the essay itself as a forum to directly explore the praxis of design and, in turn, work with the potential of non-verbal communication for addressing tacit knowledge.
Second, my emphasis on a discursive methodology calls for an elevated commitment to “postspective” noticing (Mason 2002) or Schön’s reflection-on-action. To do this, my research program customised a number of research practices from outside the design field. I have previously characterised these activities as reflection-based interventions since they intentionally disrupt the somewhat introspective design experience and call for a different level of critical reflection. In addressing the issue of situation-specific knowing, the research approach modelled here calls for activities whereby the designer as researcher steps outside of his or her practice experience. This is particularly relevant given that the research seeks to contribute to what Jonas would call research about design (2007), and what Frayling called research into design (1993). If the research is to operate at the nexus between research into and through design, then the practitioner must examine the practice experience from outside if he or she hopes to refine and communicate the knowing in a way that transcends the specifics of not just that particular context but also the sub-field of design.
Consequently, my research program works with my own expertise as a designer developing a multi-faceted approach that uses the designer’s ability to tackle situations from multiple perspectives (Dorst and Lawson 2009). Yet, mindful of the desire for the research to be about more than just advancing my own practice, the program is both structured to generate work across speculative and applied practice spaces. In this way I have tried to ensure that the research program aim to engage various different stakeholders, thereby broadening the context by which the potential insights can be discussed and evaluated.
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Given that the underlying ambition of this research is for designers to make a distinct and valuable contribution to our understandings of practice, it was not an option to import wholesale various methods incommensurate with the values and expertise of the designer. Therefore, the inclusion of research activities from fields external to design requires consideration of how and in what ways the approaches can be adapted to embed the qualities of a design-led approach.
The idea of borrowing or adapting methods from other disciplines is not novel. What is of interest for this research is how the findings of the visualisation case study play a significant role in disclosing how reflection might be intensified in a design context. The knowing disclosed by the design-oriented research experience points to why and how, as a designer and as a researcher, it might be possible to build a multi-faceted research program. In accounting for the knowing that emerges from the primary artefact of the case study (the proposition diagram), the next section reveals how the interrogation of my practice through design and discussion has led to a newfound understanding of the design practice.