2.2 The Speculation-led Reflective Practice of Figuring

This section documents the visual essays and visualisation studies that comprise the major design projects of the case study (and subsequently the PhD). The design work is complemented by short summaries of each practice space that serve as extended captions to contextualise the projects. This section is an excerpt from the full case study, which is documented on the research website.

A Design-oriented Research Case Study

At the centre of the case study is the practice of ‘figuring’. Figuring is the name I have adopted for a designerly way of drawing, emphasising how the visualisations operate as performative research artefacts. The theoretical basis for figuring loosely builds on Rosenberg’s characterisation that the “fragile balance” of creative practice comes from negotiating the centripetal and centrifugal forces at play. Adapting Bakhtin’s idea, Rosenberg describes the centripetal impulse as the pull toward what we know, to draw connections with established practices, as opposed to the centrifugal impulse that is motivated to explore the unknown, to deviate from the normal and seek new possibilities. Rosenberg (2000) argues that the push and pull of designing is negotiated by the “creative tension” that comes from this “pull to originality”.

In the case study, I have used the practice of figuring to explore a new form of drawing that seeks to intentionally disrupt the designer-researcher’s creative process. I have called this the proposition diagram, which I have employed strategically to sustain the period of speculative reflection. The term refers to the coming together of two modes of drawing that Lawson describes as being at the heart of the design process: the diagram and the proposition sketch (2004, p45). This visual language integrates the diagram’s reflective ability to provisionally fix certain elements so the designer can navigate complex moving pieces, with the proposition drawing’s speculative capacity to put forth possible ideas for a situation the designer is still exploring. The following design projects showcase the visual language deployed in the proposition diagram. Meanwhile, the various research essays and professional visualisation studies represent different kinds of engagement with this reflective drawing tool. The full case study further elaborates the characteristics of the visual language and details the facility of the proposition diagram for the designer-researcher seeking to contribute to an understanding of the process and knowing of design practice.

The context for the visual essays is a research conversation framed by an investigation of design praxis, whereas the context for the visualisation studies is a professional conversation framed by an exploration of design education. However, at first the visualisation studies were simply responding to developments at work and are only retrospectively understood in relation to this project. It soon appeared, however, that the utility of the professional graphics aligns directly with the agency of the visual essays. Both visualisations primarily work to critically and creatively advance the designer and his or her peers’ understanding of the subject being visualised, whether it be an abstract exploration of design thinking or an applied negotiation of curricular changes.

2.2.1 The Projects

Visual Essay #1: Designing a space for speculation

This visual essay directly refers to a situated engagement with design praxis and seeks to share with other practitioners how we evaluated and refined the creative process we adopted with clients.

Working from the idea that the realm of design is about possibilities, this first visual essay considers what this means when it comes to getting the practice community interested in the outcomes of research. Could the objective of sharing practitioner-research be about enabling possibilities in another’s practice rather than accounting for what happened in a case study format? Interested in rethinking the challenge of transferability as it related to situated, design-led research, the idea is that the localised knowledge from a particular situation could be understood as transferable by interrogating and visualising the more tacitly understood process behind the project artefacts. If the artefacts are presented as secondary and summarised conclusions are avoided, the text could directly speak to the potential of the research for others.

The extended 12-page visual essay was designed for a peer-reviewed, yet professionally oriented journal published by the Australian Graphic Design Association.

Visual Essay #2: “The design process: three perspectives”

This visual essay arises from a collaboration between a designer and theorist and seeks to visualise different perspectives of the design process.

The essay was designed as part of the conference paper ‘Designing Design Schools’ I co-authored with a design theorist (Grocott and Marshall 2005). The visual essay and paper were questioning whether design as a propositional, inquisitive practice could be deployed to inform the way design schools are envisioned and led. The practice of design being explored is one that discloses the complexity of a specific situation in order to deal with the technological, cultural and political issues at play.

Developing multiple conceptions of the design process allowed my colleague and myself to explore how designing might operate as a meta-process. The different perspectives put forth drew attention to the different design attributes required to work with the different orientations to designing, while also leading us to conclude that design’s transformative ability to negotiate complex, dynamic systems will be dependent upon being able to synthesise a diversity of qualities we associate with practice.

The essay was designed as an integrated part of the paper and submitted as part of the peer review process. The visual essay was also presented to the community of design educators at the Envisioning Design conference (2005).

Visual Essay #3: “Negotiating lights on / lights off”

This visual essay pulls back from the specifics of the process of designing and seeks to present an abstract visualisation of design thinking.

Distinct from the earlier objective to disseminate design research, this last visual essay was motivated to see whether a visual essay could emulate for the reader the designerly experience of wanting to dive in and make sense of unfamiliar terrain. In this way I sought to create a design artefact that could be described as asking carefully crafted questions, rather than solving problems (Dunne and Raby 2001). Beginning with a research paper titled ‘The Reservoir’, the essay sought to simultaneously notice and reflect upon Rosenberg’s idea of the centripetal/centrifugal tension of practice (2000). Examining Rosenberg’s idea through the lens of design thinking, the essay uses diagrams and text to question how the designer might integrate strategic and poetic approaches to thinking through a situation.

The visual essay was commissioned for a critically framed, practice-oriented design journal The National Grid (2006).

Visual Essays

In the visual essay practice space I designed and disseminated three different essays over a period of three years. These research-led visual essays present a body of work that seeks to visualise how designers think through the process of designing. Each essay explores and proposes a different conceptual frame by which to visualise the process of designing. The visual essays offer a vehicle for attempting to figure a few key ideas. The adopted visual language promotes an experiential practice space where I can, in the flow of designing, examine how I act out my designerly knowing.

As a practitioner-researcher, the visual essays presented a useful form for closely examining how I design, while allowing me to intentionally elicit multiple interpretations of the design experience being visualised. This was a deliberate strategy for initiating a discussion with the audience about design praxis. Not interested in rationalising or prescribing the design process, the visual essays aim to open up a space for critical reflection and debate, moving the researcher and the audience toward a newfound understanding of design. The visual essays come to focus on potential over outcomes: they survey the unfamiliar rather than communicate what is already known, and invite alternative interpretations that challenge the perspectives people hold.

As a communication design strategy, this approach calls for active self-reflection and speculative interpretation from designing through to dissemination. Thinking as much from an educator’s perspective as from a designer’s, I see the role of the visual essays as facilitating learning environments that will be conducive to the sorts of teaching and learning a designer experiences when in reflective-conversation-with-the-situation. In this way, the visual essays provide a space for learning through critiques, research presentations and publishing, by which the designer-researcher and his or her audience can engage in reciprocal reflection-in-action to assess and re-evaluate their base understandings of design (Schön 1992, p136). In this way, the research experience is designed to help the researcher and his or her audience discover how they already see things and to confront them with surprises that trigger new observations and the motivation to share their insights.

Visualisation Study #1: Curricular studies

The first series of visualisations introduces a chronological sequence of diagrams and charts that assess, speculate and communicate ideas for future curriculum initiatives.

The initial diagrams in the series represent my first foray, in a professional context, to visually exploring ideas I was wrestling with pedagogically. They were private diagrams not intended to be shared with others; I simply valued how they helped me think through and compare competing ideas. However, I quickly found myself tentatively sharing them with immediate colleagues. The utility of the diagrams seemed to lie in being able to explore ideas by putting propositions out into the world that were too complex or political to write up. The series documents curricular ideas developed over a period of years, therefore illustrating how once the ideas became more fixed, the diagrams became more like conventional information design.

Visualisation Study #2: Cultural studies

The second set of visualisations brings together a disparate collection of drawings that sought to initially imagine then promote a more integrated, inquiry-led academic culture for the School.

The series serves to illustrate how over a period of years different visual languages were explored and evaluated – from illustrated photography to cluster diagrams. There is the comparison of a diagram completed in the first week and the same graphic essentially revised many times over as the language became more consistent and the objective of the diagram moved from metaphorical and speculative to a real proposition being communicated. The series also shows a promotional poster that directly appropriates from one of the visual essays. Perhaps most significant is the design process diagram. It considers the value and legitimacy of using design (not just communication design) to negotiate the comprehensive project of imagining a new design school.

Visualisation Study #3: Organisational studies

The third and final set of visualisations most explicitly embraces the potential of the proposition diagram, as the graphics seek to speculate and reflect upon possible organisational structures.

The initial diagrams share the modest ambition of simply helping me get my head around the conditions or variables of the situation. The diagrams begin to propose new ways of seeing the institution. In the second phase, there was a level of mindfulness with regard to how I used this speculative space of diagramming. These visualisations, emboldened by the insights from the visual essay research, did not have a brief to communicate what would be, but instead to imagine what could be. As I became more comfortable with the understanding that these diagrams did not have to fix, but to propose, the more wildly speculative they became. The thoroughly considered and consultative process of developing this last sequence of diagrams further asserted how the diagrams were more than a quick-and-dirty sketch in both form and spirit.

Visualisation Studies

The visualisation studies documented for this project represent a sample of the diagrams, charts and maps I have designed over a five-year period in my role as the Dean of Academic Initiatives at an independent urban design school going through a radical rethinking of its mission. The diagrams embody the institution’s interest in recognising and enacting the meta-agency of design in the process of redefining the future of design education. For the purposes of this dissertation, a select number of visualisations have been curated into three studies that respectively explore institutional change: curricular, cultural and organisational.

Everyday professional practice includes many conventional diagrams, but for this case study the research ‘project’ work has been edited to single out the speculatively reflective visualisations, as they are the diagrams most directly in conversation with the visual essays. Specifically, these are the visualisations that deploy the proposition diagram and shape my understanding of the nature and practice of ‘figuring’.

By using diagrams in this applied workspace, the act of visualising sought to support the following objectives. First, for the designer to be able to critically imagine, through visually speculating and proposing, possible futures for the design school. Second, to provide an accessible platform for sharing material propositions of verbal discussions with colleagues for critique and evaluation. This is a distinctly different social transaction from emailing a white paper around for review and comment. And third, to cultivate a design-led environment where the predominantly practice-based community can engage in the discursive process of designing by speculating upon the potential disclosed by the diagrams-in-conversation-with-the-situation.