3.2 Speculation, Reflection and the Process of Negotiation

The research interventions of design-oriented research

In chapter 1.5.1 I outline three categories of research activity – designing, framing and writing – and chapter 2.5 touches on why my research program draws on a range of different research activities to ensure the research topic is explored from multiple perspectives. This section more closely examines these categories of research, identifying the individual contribution each presents for interrogating design practice.

For a research project to commit to a design-oriented approach, it is important that: the questions emerge from practice; the practitioner-educator is understood to be the primary audience; and the theoretical positions are always informed by design experiences. Complementing this privileging of design, reflection-based strategies also play a critical role in helping the researcher to generate interpretations of the design experience. Findeli underscores the necessary step in project-grounded research to step back from the practice experience “in order to carry out the ‘conversational’ activity necessary both for validation and communication” (1999, p111).

The grounded theory diagrams of this chapter illustrate the potential designing can play in even this late phase of interpreting and making sense of the research. Yet, even though this research values the integration of several modes in the one activity (such as diagram that includes a short text, or the visual/verbal interaction of a presentation), I found it constructive to somewhat artificially distinguish between the reflection-based exercises and the design projects. This conceptual framework allowed me to recognise that, in part, it was the conversation between the framing and writing exercises and my design work that differentiates this research from the professional practice of a reflective designer.

This section documents how a research program can amplify the creative tension between the performative and qualitative approaches to enquiry. The designing-based activities allow for a propositional, possibilities-driven approach to exploring a research topic and noticing insights that may resonate with other practitioners. The writing-based methods call for an explicit vocabulary and clear analysis by which to articulate and share the practice insights. The framing-based activities deploy multi-modal strategies for negotiating the conceptual frame by which the insights could be presented to invite discussion. Together, these three approaches promote a creative and rigorous process for research.

3.2.1 Designing, Writing, Framing

For this design-oriented approach to research, the conversations between the design and writing exercises are central. The design-inflected action research cycle ensures that all the research activities are regularly in conversation with each other. This is distinctly different from research approaches that frame a theoretical position first and then produce design work in response, or undertake the design work and then write up an exegesis in response. The cyclical interactions of the project grant a particular kind of momentum whereby, at the end of each phase, the practitioner is motivated to either make more work in response to the discussion or discuss the work recently made. In this way, the design-oriented approach presented within this research does not simply operate from the middle ground between designing and writing, but from a position where the integrated activities ensure a multi-modal way of framing and refining the thesis.

The following paragraphs extrapolate from my research experience to propose ways in which the interventions of design-oriented research can shape a multi-faceted research program. This framework is based on reflections of my experience. Consistent with this thesis I recognise that other practitioner-researchers are likely to interpret the potential of this case study differently. Yet, as a designer I am compelled to at least put forth a proposal of how a design-oriented research set of methods might be framed – if only so other practitioner-researchers can consider how they might reframe things in relation to their own experience and understandings. Specifically, I propose how the designing, writing, framing approaches serve different research objectives when it comes to insight generation, negotiating discussion, perspective shifting, corroborating the research and forming new understandings of practice.

Proposing into the unknown: visual essays and visualisation studies

The design research projects provided the central activity for topic interrogation. Often the substance of what the research contributes is shaped by the ‘discuss’ and ‘reflect’ phase of the research cycle. Yet, the iterative process of always returning to generate further work is how the design work maintains its ongoing conversation with the researcher and the research audience. Although I continue to recognise design practice as more propositional an activity than framing or writing, my objective is to push it to be a more critically reflective experience than that often afforded by professional practice. My model of design-oriented research proposes the merits of the designer creating a more reflective practice experience by heightening the everyday negotiations of practice. In attending to the granular decisions of each design move, the back talk between the design experience and the designer-researcher will be more apparent and provide the researcher with a way in to noticing the more tacit understandings of practice. Design-oriented research seeks to promote a discursive engagement with the design projects, therefore valuing the researcher producing work in multiple contexts. The potential of working in more than one practice space supports feedback from different audiences and provides comparative contexts by which to evaluate the possibilities and limitations of the designs.

Visualising a research argument: dissemination diagrams

The visual dissemination of design-oriented research presents a design space that is the visual equivalent of dissertation writing. The objective of the dissemination diagram, inserted throughout this document, is to visually represent the key ideas of this thesis. Given that this activity happens late in the research process, it is less exploratory and more focused on explicating the research than furthering the interrogation. However, the process of visually articulating the research outcomes can complement the written exercise, as it provides an alternative mode or perspective by which to clarify the substantive contribution of the research. A distinctly different experience to the crafting of a linear argument, the diagrams call for teasing out a series of key points. The process of designing diagrams that seek to pin down and explain (distinct from the process of a proposition diagram) requires the practitioner-researcher to have a keen understanding of the topic, while productively exposing fissures in the thesis being articulated. The multi-modal negotiation of integrating text and image into the dissemination material can further challenge the researcher to see the thesis from multiple perspectives, while signposting – rather than prescribing – a way for the audience to read the dissemination artefact.

Sketching a Discussion: blog writing

The significance of a research blog depends on how a designer constructs his or her research program. The blog can provide an excellent tool for reconciling activities across multiple practice spaces and directing the insights generated by different research activities. This capacity to survey a whole project supports an ongoing negotiation of the research project’s internal coherence: an essential role when managing a multi-faceted research program. In addition, the sketch-like informality of the space can make the researcher comfortable with beginning to work through ill-formed theoretical propositions by just beginning to write. Akin to imagining a design solution before fully comprehending the situation, a blog entry presents a way to dive in and critique the proposition through the process of writing. Often the speculation-led approach to reflecting will disclose a greater understanding of the provisional insights, even if the experience calls for the researcher to back away from – or opportunistically revise – his or her original proposition. The blog can represent the first move to externally verifying the research observations by listening to the conversations between the designer and the design projects and tentatively proposing how the designer might begin to make concrete the insights disclosed by the projects.

Fixing a vocabulary: academic papers

The process and objective of academic writing presents an invaluable method for explicating the ideas that emerge from research. However, with respect to practitioner-led research, the intellectual challenge of building a consistent theoretical argument is further complicated by the need to translate an experiential studio-based experience into written words and extrapolating how the situated experience may be generalised so as to be relevant to others. Even though early phases of writing can be propositional and expansive, the contribution from the final draft seems predominantly about fixing a vocabulary in order to make more concrete observations of the design research experience. The integrated activity of situating the research in relation to the literature introduces the practitioner to theoretical frameworks that support the act of naming research insights. The designer’s writing, the domain’s literature, and the provisional frameworks proposed by the practitioner, can all be understood as the written equivalent of diagrams: helping the researcher to draw, stake out the research topic, and temporarily pin down his or her ideas long enough to share them with others.

The meta-conversation: dissertation writing

Dissertation writing is an activity that explicitly asks the practitioner to survey the landscape of his or her research project: the design projects, the methods adopted, the insights shared and the contribution the new perspectives propose for others. This exhaustive and comprehensive activity consistently pushes the researcher to develop a concise language by which to pin down the research argument and, as importantly, the research narrative. More than just descriptions of the project experience, design-oriented research challenges the researcher to theoretically translate and corroborate his or her practice-led insights to ensure they reveal more than the specifics of the design situation. In contrast to the other research interventions, the final draft of a dissertation may seem the most challenging activity given its more singular, centripetal pull towards fixing. Yet the various iterations of the dissertation can be acknowledged for the critical role they play in attending to the conversation with the research situation and exploring ways to ultimately structure the research project.

Framing the discursive space: research presentations

Echoing the critique culture of studio practice, the opportunity to present work to others was a familiar discursive exercise. Yet the discipline of preparing a structured presentation for formal review to critics, or at research conferences to a room of peers, requires a deeper commitment to the process of reflecting on and framing the narrative of the research. In a research context the presentations are central to the process of testing and refining the resonance of the designer’s research insights for others. For design-oriented research, the key to maximising the presentation space is to ensure that the performance of the presentation structures the discursive space. The goal is twofold: to frame a narrative for the research that establishes a clear way into discussing the insights, while simultaneously not prescribing the outcomes in a way that shuts down the opportunity for the audience to provide unforeseen observations or contest the interpretation of the insights. The practitioner’s individual expertise, whether it be animation, interaction design or 3D modelling, will shape his or her potential to harness the multi-modal nature of this discursive space. The objective is to weave design and writing-based material together into a conceptual framework that engages the audience to contemplate and contribute to the formation of the research insights.

Framing the Not-yet-known: Grounded diagrams

The discipline of noticing and grounded theory allows a theoretical position to emerge in response to the evidence that surfaces. The discipline of noticing places more emphasis on the experience than the data – and in this way seems a particularly relevant method for making tacit beliefs more explicit. The design-led appropriation of this strategy (beginning with a studio pin-up and culminating in the grounded diagrams of this chapter) requires the designer-as-researcher to attend to the overly familiar by objectively coding his or her work, then sorting the insights that emerge into different categories. The iterative process of sorting and resorting a body of work into different categories (for example, by formal language, context produced, conceptual orientation, media) promotes a close examination of the design work. The grounded theory challenge to repeatedly reframe how the practice is classified (until a point of saturation is reached) calls on the practitioner to cast aside already established frames and to objectively see the work anew. The strategy presents a way for the researcher to step outside of his or her practice to see whether the experientially and theoretically driven insights are taking into account what the project work is really revealing, or whether they are simply disclosing what the practitioner set out to make evident.

Assessing the Terrain: Diagnostic diagrams

Quick initial sketches present a useful tool for assessing content at different phases of a research practice. Essentially operating as a conventional diagram, the diagnostic diagram presents a quick visual tool with which a researcher can provisionally fix elements within the project, as a way to get his or her head around the forces at play. The emphasis on diagnosis weights the experience toward attempts to audit or classify material to assess what they may reveal about the terrain being examined. This tool may be as immediate as a diagram sketched in a notebook to frame relationships between elements of the project, or a more elaborate exercise aimed at producing a comprehensive map or table of patterns the research is disclosing. The designer’s expertise in understanding the provisional elements of the diagram ensures that this process is one that can be in constant negotiation, allowing new ways of seeing the material to be revealed over time.

Proposing the Solution: Final project briefs

It seems counter-intuitive to suggest that practitioner-researchers could begin by conceiving of final projects for a research project before they have a thorough understanding of the literature and precedents in the domain they are researching. And yet the act of projecting into the space at the end of the research, by writing up a brief for a final design project, can be a productive framing exercise. By offering a different orientation to the framing activities that examine the work already done, the exercise of investing in defining the scope, audience and objectives of a design brief can reward the practitioner with a greater understanding of the domain being interrogated. Antithetical to the idea of beginning a research project by exhaustively reading the relevant literature, this exercise draws on a designer’s expertise at becoming informed about a situation by way of proposing a potential solution. Although it is a predominantly analytical written exercise, the conceptual frame being proposed ensures that the emphasis is on speculating where the research might go, in turn disclosing to the researcher the steps required to get there.

3.2.2 Manipulating the Push and Pull of Creative Practice

The communication design orientation of the case study focuses on the built-in slippage embodied in the disrupted visual language of the proposition diagram. However, what this research project can learn from ‘figuring’ extends beyond the graphic language of the practice spaces. The reflective research methods of the case study also help to make apparent the extent to which the agency of figuring lies in the discursive potential of a design process interested in temporarily-fixing-while-still-imagining. My analysis of the artefacts has led me to see how the value of fixing lies more in the process than the outcome, which in turn led me to realise that it might be a misguided ambition to fix an understanding of the design process, design thinking or how designers practice.

Further reflection into how I have navigated the case study design projects, with respect to the overall research program, has confirmed for me that research-through-design can be productively enhanced by complementary research-into-design methods. The observation that turned around my original hunch was that this adoption of non-design strategies can be done with full respect for the attributes a practitioner brings to the research experience – not just literally by creating design artefacts, but by working with the way a designer acts and thinks. This designerly engagement revealed the ways in which speculation-led reflection can be suited to enquiry where the primary motivation is to work toward an understanding, as opposed to determining a fixed understanding. This ability to make knowledge secure while embracing the uncertainty of knowing reiterates the designer’s and the artefact’s potential to maintain a discursive state.

The insights the case study reveals about design practice have allowed me to further extrapolate from the research experience to tentatively theorise about the potential of design-oriented research. In making explicit how the figuring of the proposition diagram worked, I put forward the theoretical proposition that troubling the creative tension of designing opens up a productive space for speculation-led reflection. I am interested in whether such an idea is transferable beyond the context of the proposition diagram. In parallel, the task of abstracting the situated experience of the visualisations has led me to notice the internal and verbal negotiations associated with various design acts. With these observations I ask what might come from taking the local, case study idea of speculation-led reflection and applying it to the negotiations of design-oriented research.

Linking these two ideas, I have become conscious of how, experientially, the act of negotiating the reflective conversations of research often seems cognitively similar to the challenge of figuring a proposition diagram. Schön would account for this idea of seeing similarities between a new situation and a previous one as the way the reflective practitioner mines the repertoire of prior experiences to assess how to make his or her next move (1983). In grafting much of the same vocabulary and conceptual framework used for figuring onto design-oriented research, I have come to see that writing can be equated to diagramming, and that the speculative orientation of the design projects can be equated to the proposition drawing.

At first pass I simply theorised that the writing symbolised the centripetal pull and the designing countered with the centrifugal push. It was only in beginning to sort the research activities into various different classifications – the grounded diagrams of this chapter – that I came to acknowledge that some of the research interventions resist this binary classification. In noting the activities on a continuum that positioned the more propositional and design-led writing at one end and the highly reflective, more analytical writing at the other, I realised that the activities clustered to the middle of the continuum were also the more discursive. Upon closer examination I also observed that these activities not only produced the most explicit moments for advancing my own knowing and substantiating the knowing I shared with others, they were also primarily multi-modal activities. These are the exercises I classify here as ‘framing’ activities. Just like the internal negotiation of the proposition diagram, the experience of conceiving and delivering a research presentation, for example, requires negotiating a range of cognitive and material moves. Just as in one presentation, the exercise might require the research-in-progress to be framed and reframed as a verbal narrative, a list of bullet points, a few diagnostic diagrams and a series of open-ended questions. Navigating these different activities requires a cognitive crosschecking of the frames against each other that troubles the process of researching, much as negotiating the elements of the proposition diagram does. Backing away from my earlier idea that the tension of design-oriented research was troubled by designing and writing, I can see the specific function of the more multi-modal encounters. This led me to see the framing activities as more accurately mirroring the protracted negotiation of figuring, in turn allowing me to tentatively propose a conceptual framework for design-oriented research.

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The version of figuring teased out by the case study experience is made manifest through the reflective experience of designing with a drawing strategy that requires the designer to confidently assert what he or she does not yet know. Comparably, design-oriented research is driven by the incongruous act of the researcher attempting to externalise the tacitly understood insights that he or she is in the process of understanding. When it comes to the design projects, this is about integrating the proposition sketch’s speculative agency to put forward a new idea with the diagram’s capacity to temporarily fix these as-yet-unresolved ideas. The research equivalent is to understand that the framing exercises call on the researcher to temporarily fix an understanding of the insights, while simultaneously inviting discussion on what the research might disclose. In echoing the way that the proposition diagram amplifies the investigation of the idea being explored, the negotiation of a multi-faceted research program proposes a similar disruption to the normal design process by sustaining the designer-researcher’s attention to the reflections generated by the experiences.

In considering the transferability of the knowing disclosed by the case study, with respect to how we might begin to understand a practitioner approach to researching design, I find it useful to examine the holes in the argument. As one example, the proposition diagram stresses the challenge of simultaneously negotiating the push and pull of practice, yet even though the research program juggles multiple research activities and perspectives, this is not necessarily done in one move. The process of working through how the act of figuring and researching might be similar has led me to recognise how figuring, as a strategy, turns up the volume on the chatter of reflective practice. This observation led me to ask whether the utility of both approaches might rest with the capacity to amplify back talk.