3.4 The Voice of the Practitioner-researcher
As part of my day job I had organised a workshop on the transferability of design knowing. We were in the process of rethinking our undergraduate programs and this was a topic we could no longer ignore. If we were going to integrate 21st-century skills like collaboration we needed to think about what expertise our students brought to a team project with anthropologists and psychologists. If we were going to be honest about the number of graduates who end up working in other fields we needed to educate graduates to understand what they had learned even if they never worked in fashion. If we were going to develop a vertical stream of courses for all students in design then we needed to be able to name the core attributes of design. Whichever way you looked at it the faculty needed a collective understanding of what it meant to call yourself a designer.
Halfway through the workshop it became clear that the problem wasn’t that we had no shared understanding; it was obvious that we struggled to have an explicit understanding. We could have filled up hundreds of sticky notes with the formal and technical skills we taught within our fields. But the brief to write down the tacit knowing we relied on to think and act like a designer (but not a typographer for example) … well, that was really hard.
This research is not concerned with addressing all the reservations mounted against design research, for to some extent it takes a position by simply asserting the value of designers working with their own value system. Yet research that seeks to make a contribution to design scholarship, and the academic discourse that surrounds design, needs to at least intend for the work to offer more than a practitioner’s account of his or her research practice.
One way to evaluate my research is to ask whether the design-oriented approach of the case study has influenced the kinds of insights the study has generated. In the introduction to this dissertation I began with the paradox that the scholarship of ‘design research’ often limits the role of the practitioner by undervaluing design as a research method. My decision to privilege the design projects as the primary method of this enquiry to some extent addresses this concern. Yet my point is also about how the practitioner’s perspective is often left unexamined, diminishing the capacity of the studio-based educator to offer a practitioner’s perspective of a designer’s expertise in a meta-level discourse about design praxis. These points seem important to return to if part of the rationale for this research is to equip educators for the conversations that need to happen in debates over the future of design education. If we are interested in redirecting the educational model from training for a specific field through mentoring best practices to being able to clearly signal and discuss the attributes of a designer across several platforms, then it is critical for design education that designers have strategies by which they can examine what they know and be able to share this with others.
If I had adopted a narrow practice-led approach, as I set out to advance when I began my research, its contribution would be more limited. My own mastery of visual communication would have advanced and the research would have proposed (but not necessarily articulated) the productive role ambiguity can play in visual communication. It is highly likely, however, that these nascent insights would have had little traction for a broader conversation about design practice or design research.
My approach to research has sought to work to a practitioner’s strengths as a way to engage the practitioner-researcher and the research audience. This was a core consideration of my research approach and depends on all the components of an integrated, multi-faceted research program. I believe that the analysis of the case study suggests that the approach does more than accommodate a designer’s expertise; it fosters an interrogation of design praxis that comes to embody the sensibilities of the practitioner. Specifically, the navigation of the research from multiple perspectives and the interest in pluralistic interpretations of the visualisations has led to a framing of design knowing that reflects the possibilities-driven nature of design practice. Lastly, the model revolves around discursive artefacts and a research framework that seek to amplify discussion. The capacity of the researcher and his or her artefacts to engage an audience in debate is central to how the practitioner assesses the transferability of the insights being shared. This emphasis on amplifying the back talk of creative practice is ultimately about establishing resonance for the research: building from small observations through to well-formed understandings. The extent to which my research approach succeeds in doing this while maintaining its design orientation is most evident in the conclusion that my new understandings could be forever in a state of becoming.
As much as my research seeks to engage and work with the designer’s expertise, I have also come to advocate for interventions that require the designer to step outside of his or her practice. This raises the question of whether the inclusion of the reflection-based interventions in any way diminishes the practitioner’s perspective or just allows it to be examined from multiple perspectives. My sense is that without the reflection-based commitment many of the practice observations would remain only partially understood, in turn limiting the potential for the practitioner’s perspective to enrich the design academy’s understandings of practice. I still think the qualitative contribution of even the reflection-based exercises rests on the design projects as the foundation of the reflection. If a practitioner were to develop the reflections in the absence of an examined practice, then the contribution of the design process and artefacts to disclose a practitioner’s knowing would be shut out and the defining perspective of the practitioner somewhat diminished.
The caveat to this position is to also acknowledge the labour-intensive nature of the multiple tiers of reflection. There have been many times that I’ve wanted to limit the scope of the research to the case study and to communication design. Also, many practitioners are drawn to dive in and explore the issues most directly related to their practice, so the traction of a practice-led project is more immediate and relevant. For these reasons my approach is predominantly relevant to educators specifically interested in contributing to discourse beyond their specific fields. Yet, at my institution, for example, that is an ever-increasing group of faculty as more transdisciplinary graduate programs are developed and foundation programs are reconceptualised.
Chapter Summary
In conclusion, I take the position that it is important for practitioners in the design academy to assert and defend the appropriateness of design research that, for example, does not seek certainty or even to privilege an analysis of how things are, or should be, in the world. Respecting the designer’s motivation to consider how the world might be can extend to consideration for how research is framed and shared with an audience. This allows the knowing of the research to be in constant conversation with the framing of research programs, and supports open speculation into the potential of the research outcomes (Morrison and Sevaldson 2010). This discursive space of negotiating research findings is what I mean when I refer to the knowing of practitioner research as moving toward an understanding, forever in a state of becoming. Given that designers are less motivated to engage in situations and/or content that cannot be changed (Krippendorf 2007, p72), it can be productive for the ideas disclosed by the research to remain open, to be suggestive of what can still be altered.
So far, I have argued that the designer-researcher can create critical discussion out of the possibilities proposed by research insights – as a strategy toward furthering his or her understanding of the practitioner’s orientation. Research can be understood as the intention to make a substantive contribution to the knowledge of that discipline. My research program does not accept that this requires a theoretically abstract or evidence-driven empiricist study, but nor do I take the position that this goal can be achieved through practice alone. This research program models an approach that calls for active interrogation and external consultation. The research process sought to make my design-led insights resonate with others by further disclosing the possibilities and limitations of how we currently understand practice. I am not interested in producing world-making artifacts; rather, my research approach seeks to offer constructive ways to review and critique customary practices, allowing the practitioner and the audience to see anew their perceived assumptions and understanding of design praxis (McLaughlin 2007).