Design as Research by Birkhäuser

Gesche Joost Katharina Bredies Michelle Christensen Florian Conradi Andreas Unteidig (Eds.)

Board of International Research in Design, BIRD

Advisory Board: Lena Berglin Cees de Bont Elena Caratti Michal Eitan Bill Gaver Orit Halpern Denisa Kera Keith Russell Doreen Toutikian Michael Wolf John Wood

16 international authors address these four different aspects in the form of personal statements, and 19 researchers share their reflections based on their experience of having carried out a practice-based PhD. This book investigates the status quo of things in the multi-faceted and constantly evolving field of design research, and outlines the elementary issues faced by researchers. The compendium is a survey of a fast-growing field and, at the same time, provides pointers for personal orientation. With statements from: Uta Brandes. Rachel Cooper, Clive Dilnot, Michael Erlhoff, Alain Findeli, Bill Gaver, Ranulph Glanville, Matthias Held, Wolfgang Jonas, Klaus Krippendorff, Claudia Mareis, Mike Press, Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders, Arne Scheuermann, Cameron Tonkinwise, Brigitte Wolf

www.birkhauser.com

ISBN 978-3-0356-0919-6

Design as Research

Are there differences between design practice and the practice of design research? What alliances between text and artefact are possible in the search for new knowledge? How does design research translate and transform theories and methods from other disciplines? Is design research moving towards becoming a formal discipline and, if so, would this really be an advantage?

Design as Research

G. Joost / K. Bredies / M. Christensen / F. Conradi A. Unteidig (Eds.)

Members: Michelle Christensen Michael Erlhoff Wolfgang Jonas Gesche Joost Claudia Mareis Ralf Michel Marc Pfaff

Board of International Research in Design, BIRD

Positions, Arguments, Perspectives

CONTENTS Foreword BIRD

007

Gesche Joost

Design / Research Introduction 012 Katharina Bredies

Where Are We Going? An Aspirational Map

017

Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders

The Resourceful Social Expert: Defining the Future Craft of Design R esearch

022

Mike Press

The Myth of the Design Androgyne

028

Alain Findeli

Doing Research: Design Research in the Context of the ‘Practice Turn’

035

Claudia Mareis

Project-Grounded Responses: Design / Research

042

Introduction

060

Text / Object Andreas Unteidig

Communication in Design Research

064

Brigitte Wolf

Text vs. Artefact in Design Research? A Strange Question!

070

Wolfgang Jonas

Nothing Fixed: An Essay on Fluidity in Design Research

077

Uta Brandes

Everyday Homeopathy in Practice-C hanging Design Research

083

Cameron Tonkinwise

Project-Grounded Responses: Text / Object

004 DESIGN AS RESEARCH

091

Visual Stances

107

Borrowing / Stealing Introduction 128 Florian Conradi

Design Research – No Boundaries

131

Rachel Cooper

Theories and Methods in Design Research – Why We Should Discuss C oncrete Projects

137

Arne Scheuermann

In Praise of Theft: ‘The Play with Borrowing vs. Stealing from other Fields’ … Or, the Problem of Design Research

143

Clive Dilnot

Design Prepositions

153

Ranulph Glanville

Project-Grounded Responses: Borrowing / Stealing

166

Discipline / Indiscipline Introduction 182 Michelle Christensen

Transdisciplinary Research through D esign – Shifting Paradigms as an O pportunity

186

Matthias Held

Indiscipline 193 William Gaver

Design, an Undisciplinable Profession

197

Klaus Krippendorff

Between Possibility and Discipline or: Design Research as Provocation to the Faint-Hearted 207 Michael Erlhoff

Project-Grounded Responses: Discipline / Indiscipline

212

Authors 227 Responders 235

CONTENTS 005

THE RESOURCEFUL SOCIAL EXPERT: DEFINING THE FUTURE CRAFT OF DESIGN RESEARCH Mike Press

Design and research are indivisible. Today’s designers – especially those who work in service, product, environmental or interaction design – are users and creators of knowledge, transferring that knowledge to (and creating it with) users, clients and co-creators. Perhaps twenty years ago when we were still in the process of defining design research, then debates over the relationship between theory and practice, academia and the professional domain, had some relevance. No longer. The trick, therefore, is to create and define models of design research practice that work across ‘professional’ and ‘academic’ spheres, that acknowledge there are hybrid practices within design that create knowledge in diverse ways, arising from different contexts. These models also have to be constantly fluid and adaptable. We may have moved on considerably in twenty years, but we remain in a state of beta. And we always will. One aspect of our practice that we perhaps have not shifted away from as much as we might is an approach to research that is self-centred and self-obsessed, inwardly directed and egotistical. We find elements of this in both of our ‘worlds’ – academia and professional practice. In short, it’s anti-social. This is a culture of research and practice that has no place in the twenty first century (to be honest, it should not have had a place in any century). It is time to move on and be radical in our practices and ambitions. My argument is to reframe design research around the notion of social expertise, and indeed of social knowledge: knowledge that is open, shared, created collaboratively and co-operatively. At times it is created in universities, other times outside it, and very often involving partners that span professional domains. It is knowledge that is democratic, that involves all kinds of people in its creation and meets their wider needs. It is part of our collective commons.

Defining the Social Expert Antonio Stradivari was the Steve Jobs of his age: a hectoring obsessive, who ruled his Cremona violin workshop with a ruthless vision of perfectionism. The craftsmen he employed were chained to their workbenches: they really were. When not

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crafting the finest violins and cellos the world has ever seen, the apprentices would sleep on bags of straw under their bench. It is a model of autocratic leadership that many have emulated since; but you do wonder why they bother. When the 93-year-old Stradivari died in 1737, the quality of his workshop’s musical instruments died with him. Despite the best efforts of his sons and master craftsmen to maintain the preeminent quality and reputation of the Stradivari name, the instruments they turned out were not a patch on those that had preceded them. Great efforts were made to analyse the pattern of the original instruments, the materials, even the precise formulation of the varnish, in a vain attempt to create a design template that could replicate his original genius. But these efforts fell flat, in every sense of the word. According to Richard Sennett in his book The Craftsman,1 the dramatic collapse in quality can be attributed to Stradivari’s very style of professional expertise. Antonio Stradivari, Sennett argues, was an antisocial expert. Antisocial expertise is driven by a competitive zeal which occludes the notion of co-operation, holding up world class excellence as the one goal, and based on a strict sense of hierarchy. The antisocial expert lacks essential skills required to ensure that the good work they do can live on after them; their unique expertise is held within the firewall of their own tacit knowledge. As Sennett explains: ‘There is an inherent inequality of knowledge and skill between expert and non-expert. Antisocial expertise emphasizes the sheer fact of invidious comparison. One obvious consequence of emphasizing inequality is the humiliation and resentment this expert can arouse in others; a more subtle consequence is to make the expert himself or herself feel embattled’.2 Sennett contrasts this with sociable expertise, making the case that ‘A wellcrafted institution will favour the sociable expert; the isolated expert sends a warning signal that the organization is in trouble’3. Sociable expertise is the very essence of craftsmanship – a concept elaborated and explored so expertly by Sennett. The social expert relies on good work and transparent practices for the basis of their authority. Driven by a desire to improve one’s own work, ‘the sociable experts tend to be good at explaining and giving advice to their customers. The sociable expert, that is, is comfortable with mentoring, the modern echo of medieval in loco parentis’.4 Sennett’s sociable craftsman ‘conducts a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking’5 and is in many senses crafting knowledge transfer. Karen Yair in Crafting Capital has described this ‘craft thinking’ which ‘enables innovation by working with – rather than against – the restrictions of a given situation. In this analysis, craft thinking applies both to engineering and to team working: Sennett describes the craftsperson as a ‘sociable expert’, able to facilitate innovation by stretching the competencies of others within reasonable parameters’.6 This is precisely the model of design research and practice relevant for our age – an age of open design, ever-evolving collaborative partnerships between crea-

THE RESOURCEFUL SOCIAL EXPERT: DEFINING THE FUTURE CRAFT OF DESIGN R ESEARCH 023

tive microbusinesses, social design, user-centredness, knowledge transfer, empowerment and inclusivity. Let us pull out three key arguments in favour of this as a useful and usable model of design research.

Co-designing with Consumers First, the rise of open design and innovation, linked to technologies that provide ‘consumers’ with potential to become creative ‘prosumers’ requires that designers need to shift to encouraging more creative and designerly self-reliance in others. Charles Leadbeater, in Production by the Masses, argues that professionals (designers, for example) ‘should educate us towards self-help and self-reliance as much as possible. Modern society trains us to be workers and consumers. Postindustrial institutions should train us for self-management and self-assessment’.7 Both the opportunity and the challenge here is for designers to see their priorities increasingly in terms of constructing robust systems of scaffolding within which people feel confident and enabled to design and construct new futures for themselves. It is an opportunity in the sense that it represents an ambitious and highly relevant ‘new frontier’ in design. It is a challenge in that it runs counter to the ego-oriented view of design in which designers are ‘gods’ of new universes of their own making.

Designing Public Services Second, the design of new forms of public services demands a wholly new form of design practice, the success of which relies critically on the social expert model. In recent insightful research into the future of the UK design consultancy industry, Cooper, Evans and Williams set out a number of likely future business models for design. One they entitle SIG (Special Interest Group) Niche Network and describe it thus: ‘“Facebook” social network approach: essentially a C2B2C (consumer to business to consumer) model. The structure involves co-design / participation between design communities and special interest groups regional hubs. The designer’s role is as facilitator and mediator. Fees would be based on scale of contribution and would be reliant on “long tail” economics, outsourcing production and distribution. High public sector engagement such as the re-design of services. Other clients would include subgroups, empowered communities, and local authorities’.8 This would appear to describe much of the work undertaken by consultancies such as Engine, Taylor Haig, Snook, The Young Foundation and others. The design researcher as social expert is clearly essential for such work.

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Construction of Social Problems Third, and intimately linked to the above argument, design provides the potential for people not just to co-design services, but to construct social problems. As such it offers potential to enable new forms of participatory democracy. The danger of service design for public services is that it becomes incorporated within the institutional paradigm that it has the potential to challenge, and thus becomes just another technocratic tool of the public sector. Simon Blyth and Lucy Kimbell have provided a vital analysis that comes out of service design practice, but which suggests a significant shift of emphasis: ‘Rather than claiming to solve social problems, we want to argue for the relevance and value of Design in actively, critically and reflexively contributing to their construction … We want to invite designers to make this more clearly part of their practice. We think there are things about Design that make it particularly good at doing this, although the positioning of design-as- problem-solving tends to have ignored them’.9 Again, this helps us in defining the challenges and practices of a design researcher as social expert working in this field.

Resourceful Social Expertise These three zones of new design practice – co-creative prosumption, design for public services, and the construction of social problems – will be critical for our future and design wholly new models of design research. He may have crafted damned fine fiddles, but I have severe doubts that Antonio Stradivari would have been particularly good at facilitating workshops for co-designing new long-term care services for those with dementia. But I may be wrong; he may have had more than one string to his bow. But these zones in some cases lay far beyond the familiar and comfortable territories of design. That some designers have succeeded, in some cases spectacularly well, in rising to the challenges, suggests that we need to identify the essential characteristics of leadership that can ensure success. My ‘feeling’ for this (in the absence of any actual data) is that a critical requirement is resourcefulness. Emily Campbell makes the following points with regard to resourcefulness and design: ‘Resourcefulness is ingenuity: the ability to think on your feet; the ability to adapt one solution to another problem; the ability to make something out of little or nothing. But resourcefulness is also the confidence that comes with knowledge: having a skill or a range of skills at your disposal; knowing enough to make a wise choice; having analogous experience; having connections to draw on and knowing how to collaborate. This knowledge feeds the ingenuity, and vice versa’.10

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2 3 4 5 6 7

Findeli, A. (1999), ‘Introduction’ to the special issue of Design Issues on design research, XV, 2, 1–3; Findeli, A. (2003), ‘Theorie und Praxis: Eine neue Einheit. Ein funktionstüchtiges Modell für die Designforschung’, hfg forum, 18, 70–80; Findeli, A., (2005a), ‘Die projektgeleitete Forschung: eine Methode der Designforschung’, in Michel, R. (Ed.), Erstes Designforschungssymposium, Zurich, SwissDesignNetwork, 2005, pp.40–51; Findeli, A. and Bousbaci, R. (2005b), ‘L’éclipse de l’objet dans les théories du projet en design’, The Design Journal, VIII, 3, 35–49; Findeli, A. (2006), ‘Qu’appelle-t-on ‘théorie’ en design? Réflexions sur l’enseignement et la recherche en design’, in Flamand, B. (Ed.), Le design. Essai sur les théories et les pratiques, Paris, éd. IFM, 77–98 ; Findeli, A. and Coste, A. (2007), ‘De la recherche-création à la r echerche-projet: un cadre théorique et méthodologique pour la recherche architecturale’, Lieux Communs, 10, 139–61; Findeli, A. et al. (2008), ‘Research Through Design and Transdisciplinarity: A Tentative Contribution to the Methodology of Design Research’, in Minder, B. (Ed.), Focused – Current design research projects and methods, Berne, SDN, 67–94; Findeli, A. (2010), ‘Searching for Design Research Questions. A conceptual Clarification’, in Rosan Chow, Wolfgang Jonas and Gesche Joost (Eds.), Questions, Hypotheses and Conjectures, Berlin, iUniverse, 286–303. Sorry for self-quoting. Darke, J.: ‘The Primary Generator and the Design Process’, Design Studies, 1, 1, 36–44. First published in 1978 in lttelson, W. H., Albanese, C., and Rogers, W. R. (Eds.) EDRA9 Proceedings, University of Arizona, 1979. Dewey, J.: The Quest for Certainty, N.Y., Minton, Balch & Co, 1929. Findeli, A. and Bousbaci, R.: ‘L’éclipse de l’objet dans les théories du projet en design’, The Design Journal, VIII, 3, 2005, p. 35–49. Scharmer, O.: Theory U, San Francisco, Berret-Koehler, 2009. Ibid., p. 7 Findeli, A. et al.: ‘Research Through Design and Transdisciplinarity: A Tentative Contribution to the Methodology of Design Research’, in Minder, B. (Ed.), Focused – Current design research projects and methods, Berne, SDN, 2008, p. 67–94. Findeli, A.: ‘The Bauhaus Project: An Archetype for Design Education in the New Millenium’, The Structurist, 39/40, 1999–2000, p. 36–43.

References The nature of the editors’ brief (‘contribute a personal stance’) explains the following, seemingly complacent, list of references. This essay turned out to be a welcome opportunity to do some housekeeping in past material and to find out if I could construct a thread that would give it some coherence. Darke, J. (1979). ‘The Primary Generator and the Design Process’, Design Studies, 1, 1, 36–44. First published in 1978 in lttelson, W. H., Albanese, C., and Rogers, W. R. (Eds.) EDRA9 Proceedings, University of Arizona. Dewey, J. (1929), The Quest for Certainty, N.Y., Minton, Balch & Co. Findeli, A. (1999), ‘Introduction’ to the special issue of Design Issues on design research, XV, 2, 1–3. Findeli, A. (1999–2000), ‘The Bauhaus Project: An Archetype for Design Education in the New Millenium’, The Structurist, 39/40, 36–43. Findeli, A. (2003), ‘Theorie und Praxis: Eine neue Einheit. Ein funktionstüchtiges Modell für die Designforschung’, hfg forum, 18, 70–80. Findeli, A., (2005a), ‘Die projektgeleitete Forschung: eine Methode der Designforschung’, in Michel, R. (Ed.), Erstes Designforschungssymposium, Zurich, SwissDesignNetwork, 2005, pp.40–51. Findeli, A. and Bousbaci, R. (2005b), ‘L’éclipse de l’objet dans les théories du projet en design’, The Design Journal, VIII, 3, 35–49. Findeli, A. (2006), ‘Qu’appelle-t-on ‘théorie’ en design? Réflexions sur l’enseignement et la recherche en design’, in Flamand, B. (Ed.), Le design. Essai sur les théories et les pratiques, Paris, éd. IFM, 77–98. Findeli, A. and Coste, A. (2007), ‘De la recherche-création à la recherche-projet: un cadre théorique et méthodologique pour la recherche architecturale’, Lieux Communs, 10, 139–61. Findeli, A. et al. (2008), ‘Research Through Design and Transdisciplinarity: A Tentative Contribution to the Methodology of Design Research’, in Minder, B. (Ed.), Focused – Current design research projects and methods, Berne, SDN, 67–94. Findeli, A. (2010), ‘Searching for Design Research Questions. A conceptual Clarification’, in Rosan Chow, Wolfgang Jonas and Gesche Joost (Eds.), Questions, Hypotheses and Conjectures, Berlin, iUniverse, 286–303. Scharmer, O. (2009), Theory U, San Francisco, Berret-Koehler.

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DOING RESEARCH: DESIGN RESEARCH IN THE CONTEXT OF THE ‘PRACTICE TURN’ Claudia Mareis

Design research is currently going through a remarkable upward trend. Since fundamental systematic efforts towards a scientific foundation of design began with the design methods movement in the 1960s, one has been able to observe design research taking shape as a practice-based research model in the course of numerous educational reforms at art schools and universities up through today. In this model, research object and method seem to merge seamlessly. In fact, primarily a practice-based research through design is preferred, one that also involves – aside from a complex new definition and negotiation of research actors and methods – a distinct discourse of the praxeological.1 This brings practice-based design research closer, at least superficially, to more recent approaches in social and cultural sciences that have devoted themselves to the research of practice theory against the backdrop of the so-called ‘practice turn’. Comparable to these approaches, the practice-based design research is also profoundly concerned with the reciprocal relationship of practice and theory construction as well as seeks new ways of understanding knowledge production in research, in the mode of design-practical action. However, design research also arises from a discourse tradition that differs in conceptual terms from the genesis of other practice-theoretical approaches. Thus, the question arises as to how practice-based design research is informed by fundamental postulates and premises in the cultural and social sciences that generally form the basis of the approaches of practice theory. This question will be explored here in a simultaneously theoretical and historical discussion that localises practice-based design research.

Practice Theories: Material Agents and Knowledge Cultures The diagnosis of the practice turn2 was launched in the social and cultural sciences. This happened in the context of (socio-)constructivist science and technology studies as practiced in the 1980s by researchers, like Bruno Latour, Steven Woolgar or Karin Knorr Cetina.3 In addition, works from French sociology and cultural theory, such as Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice or Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, paved the way for a scientific acknowledgement of practice theories in the 1970s and 1980s.4 In this context, sociologist Donald Schön’s study, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (1983), should be emphasised

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with regards to design.5 Here, Schön explains the significance of practical, experience-based knowledge against the backdrop of contemporary social debates on knowledge and technology. Referring to Michael Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowing, Schön directs the attention to the implicit knowledge of the practice that oftentimes manifests itself not in words but in action and practical doing.6 Schön’s study on trained specialists – who generated valuable insights into this practice, either in the context of or when exercising their practical activity – would form the important theoretical groundwork for practice-based design research over the following decades. The numerous works that have accumulated under the guiding concept of the practice turn in recent years represent the attempt to better understand the heterogeneous field of practice research by concentrating on and systematising practice theories, while developing a profound comprehension of the complex dimension that is practice. Although both the research field as well as the approaches for this enterprise have proven to be quite varied, there still seems to be a common set of interests and questions that interconnect practice theories. Theodore Schatzki, who edited The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (2001) with Karin Knorr Cetina and Eike von Savigny, explains the common interest as follows: ‘A central core … of practice theorists conceives of practices as embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity centrally organised around shared practical understanding’.7 To Andreas Reckwitz, practice theory represents a subcategory of social and cultural theory, which neither understands the social – as opposed to many common theories – as a mental feature nor locates in discourses and interactions, but which rather understands the practices themselves as the central location and mode of the production and passing on of social and cultural meaning.8 In addition to focusing on material objects, technical apparatuses and instruments, such a practice-theoretical analysis also looks at bodies, spaces and routines with(in) which their practice is actually realised and implemented: ‘A practice is thus a routinized way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the world is understood’.9 Particularly pertinent examples of practice-theoretical approaches can be found, as mentioned before, in the science and technology studies. These studies fostered such approaches in order to better describe and identify the far-reaching material dimension of knowledge and production of knowledge mostly neglected in science theory. It is precisely this dimension of a materiality of knowledge that currently attracts the interest of many design researchers. For example, in Designerly Ways of Knowing (2006), Nigel Cross refers to a design-specific knowledge that was not only materialised and embodied in design processes but also in their products.10 As the sociologist John Law puts it, knowledge always takes on a material shape, whether in ‘conversations, conference presentations, in articles, preprints, patents, or even in the embodiment through competent scientists and technologists’.11 This perspective entails as a further consequence – at least for the science and technology studies – that not only human but also non-human material actors and

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entities be considered to determine the action. This viewpoint is prominently represented in the actor-network theory developed and propagated by Bruno Latour, Madeleine Akrich, John Law and others in the context of lab and technique studies.12 Karen Bardad’s post-humanistic approach of agential realism essentially shares the view that the capacity to act is not restricted to human actors.13 Theodore Schatzki puts this in a nutshell: ‘Practice theory also joins a variety of “materialist” approaches in highlighting how bundled activities interweave with ordered constellations of non-human entities’.14 The possibilities of design and shaping of such materialand practice-based knowledge production that connects human and non-human actors hence seem correspondingly far-reaching and consequential. This also implies that a practice-theoretical approach to scientific and design practice as presented here is designed inter- and multidisciplinarily per se: research is not understood as a delineated place of knowledge production or knowledge but as a hybrid formation of multiple practices and cultures of knowledge.15 With regard to design research, one can observe various knowledge practices and cultures that are mutually influenced and shaped by aesthetic, technical, social or economic deliberations and concepts. At this point, the reference to the concept of culture with regard to knowledge production is key: on one hand, with the expression of ‘knowledge culture’ introduced by the sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina, attention is drawn to the concrete practices of knowledge production, and on the other hand, the fundamentally cultural dimension of knowledge is emphasised. According to Knorr Cetina, linking the concept of culture enhances the concept of knowledge and practice in several respects: culture points, firstly, ‘to the fractures in unity and uniformity of practice’, secondly, to the ‘thicket of a wide variety of patterns that overlap and accumulate in life-world contexts’ and, thirdly, the cultural concept adds a ‘sensibility to symbols and meanings’ to the concept of knowledge and practice.16 Knowledge cultures thus differ from each other in many ways: they do not only exhibit different, partly also contingent formations of practice and practices, but they differ in their evaluation and historical perpetuation as well. In the following, the goal is to question and illustrate how, from a historical perspective, specific knowledge cultures in design were formed, and which practice-theory models were able to establish themselves in this process of becoming a discipline.

Unfolding Between Practice and Theory17 The aforementioned aspects and interests holding together and advancing practice theories are currently also intensely discussed in practice-based design research: Which role does materialised or embodied knowledge play in the design processes? How can designers’ practical competences be identified as genuine methods of

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PROJECT-GROUNDED RESPONSES: DESIGN / RESEARCH What made the design practice in your PhD project qualify as research practice – what did you do differently than if you would ‘just’ design?

Undertaking my PhD through practice-based research enabled the ability to conceive and position the thinking, theorising and implementation of projects through a series of themes leading to designed outcomes. Through developing ‘fields of enquiry’, practice-based research allows for the emergence of new modes leading to the establishment of innovative design processes and methodologies in solving issues of material thinking and production. This opportunity for design led experimentation augments practice-based research informed through the tactile procedures of design and making. Practice-based research differs greatly from professional designed work for it avails the constraints of delivering projects that rely on existing processes of knowledge for their real-world implementation. Whilst practical knowledge is brought into practice-based research it nevertheless is ‘freed’ from the expectations of client and manufacturer. Research by practice offers the foundations in which combinations of design innovation, material research and making can begin a rethinking of how space and spaces, objects and technologies can function differently and be more sustainable within our societies and urban built environments. Benedict Anderson, Professor of Spatial Design (University of Technology Sydney) Dissertation: The Architectural Flaw, 2005. Royal Melbourne University of Technology (RMIT)

This question needs to be flipped, as it was the nature of research and knowledge that was transformed through the lens of design practice rather than working to qualify practice as research. My design practice prior to undertaking a PhD was conducted as a mode of enquiry regarding the concept of ‘interior’ through material, spatial and temporal productions. The PhD was taken up as an opportunity to foreground this on-going experimentation and to engage with a community of practice addressing design and research. I think that it is important to note here that my PhD was through practice – design as a verb; i.e. designing and hence generated research through designing. This has different nuances to ‘design’ as a noun and as noted below, I am not a designer of artefacts.

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The mode of PhD I enrolled in at RMIT was / still is one that emphasised the PhD as part of one’s on-going practice – as situated in the practice. Thinking through doing was valued. This did not require a separation from practice, as projects are already understood as laboratories for experimentation. However the PhD became a critical space that enabled (demanded) a focus on research aspects of my practice that otherwise get overshadowed in the midst of demands such as budgets, deadlines and marketing. Perhaps the question is better posed as: ‘what made your creative practice research qualify as a PhD, i.e. a significant contribution to knowledge?’ This expectation required me to work through several concepts that are intricate to knowledge and knowing, for example ‘context’ and the aim to fill gaps as a way of making a contribution. The effect of design as a discipline moving into areas of research and knowledge heightens contemporary critiques of knowledge. Dominant concepts of knowing through research are based on a scientific paradigm and in particular an analytical model – an activity of self-knowing where cognition is foregrounded. In the disciplines of interior design and art, where my research is situated, the idea of the scientific paradigm that confirms the value of research as one of repetition by others to achieve the same outcome is neither a useful measure nor orientation in attending to subjectivities and production of the ‘new’. Hence many questions about the definition of research and underpinning givens such as evidence, truth and value needed to be rethought and transformed from assuming they ‘just’ are. Suzie Attiwill, Deputy Dean, Learning & Teaching; Associate Professor of Interior Design (School of rchitecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne) A Dissertation: ?interior, practices of interiorization, interior designs, 2012. School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University

The simple answer is a shift in ‘purpose’ – why and where design happens. My BA degree is in orthodox product design; my foundation and methods are therefore based on the design of objects developed within the normative constraints of materials, manufacture and commerce etc. The purpose of these objects (and design) being orientated towards the consumer in the context of everyday life. My motivations shifted during an MA in Design Products at the Royal College Art as I became more interested in questioning the systems and paradigms that direct the design industry rather than simply becoming a part of it. The shift from design to design research did not happen overnight nor was it particularly conscious, I simply embraced the opportunity, provided by an open-minded and revolutionary course, to experiment with design practice and the purpose of its objects.

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Between completing my MA and beginning the PhD I was employed both as a design researcher in academia and as a designer working for large corporate clients. Whilst my approach remained relatively constant in these posts, the expectations were completely different. In the commercial sector I found it virtually impossible to be critical (the message has to be optimistic), or too conceptual (the market is extremely conservative). Essentially, for a number of reasons, there is little scope for the designer to forge completely new paths, or to consider the implications of a particular technology. My PhD began by examining these reasons, and the complex systems that constrain and influence product (and technological evolution). The practical element built on this to first explore new constraints and goals and then develop products within and for them – the purpose being to question and expand the role of design (and technology) rather than simply exploit it. James Auger, Associate Professor (M-ITI) Dissertation: Why Robot? Speculative design, the domestication of technology and the considered future, 2012. Royal College of Art

The design practice in my PhD thesis is qualified as scientific research due to its systematic reflection from a feminist point of view. In this context, design is neither a service nor a production site of marketable products. It is regarded as socio-political practice that currently produces results that are either gender stereo type or gender blind. In order to establish a gender sensitive design research and practice, I develop a design methodology that follows Donald Schön’s concept of the ‘Reflective Practitioner’.1 Blaming scientific rationality for the serious divorce between science and research on the one hand side and practice on the other, he describes the relationship between theoretical knowledge and action in professional practice as a ‘process of reflection-in-action’ where thinking and doing are closely interlinked. He claims that this process is ‘central to the art’ by which practitioners sometimes deal well with situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, value conflict’,2 that makes them to ‘researchers in the practice context’.3 In this concept, research and practice are not separated spaces any more. Consequently, the intention of my design methodology is to make designers to power aware and gender sensitive practitioners in research as well as to power critical and gender sensitised researchers in practice. In this context, the design practice plays a double role: On the one hand I use the dimensions of human-centred design as basic reference points for my theoretical and methodological reflections, interconnecting them with corresponding feminist epistemologies and gender theories. On the other hand, I use the design projects as case studies to evaluate the whole process from information, ideation to use according to feminist criteria like gender equality, social justice, empowerment and plurality. Aiming at establishing design as a gender sensitive applied science or a gen-

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der reflected scientific practice, doing design becomes inevitably a part of doing gender research. Sandra Buchmüller, Research Associate (University of Bremen) Dissertation: Gender powers Design – Design powers Gender. A draft of a power critical and gender informed design methodology (Original German Title: Geschlecht macht G estaltung – Gestaltung macht Geschlecht. Der Entwurf einer machtkritischen und geschlechterinformierten Designmethodologie), 2015. Berlin University of the Arts (UdK)

My PhD thesis explores the emergence of temporary urban interventions and practices, as the phenomenon of informal occupation of unused or neglected urban space, as well as the implications that this process has on the urban structure in which they take place. Within this topic I analyse relations between temporary urban interventions and the social, economic and political development of the area in which they occur. My thesis focuses on the phenomenon of temporary urban interventions as an instrument of informal planning in the context of managing the city resources on a micro-scale. It is important to emphasise that this is a dynamic field and not an instrument in the conventional sense of the word, and that these types of interventions, see spatial resources as a testing ground for the reorganisation of the city at the micro-level. Also, they are explained as the direct practice of civil society actors, who adopt new models of programming and spatial acting with the aim of redefining the urban structure at micro-extent. Temporary urban interventions encouraged by citizen participation emerged as new kinds of local initiatives during the economic crisis, as modern, creative and effective approaches to solving social, economic and spatial problems. I’m currently focusing on initiatives requiring space, as well as spaces that are desperately empty. In 2013, my research project ‘The Map of Action’ showed that in the last few years there was a marked rise in interest amongst civil initiatives in the local context to put unused urban resources to work with the intention of participating in urban development. Guided by the idea of the right to the city and taking the opportunity to improve everyday life, they now employ short-term tactics to change conditions of life in the city. The challenge lies in turning them into long-term strategies without exploiting them for neo-liberal purposes. The idea to do the PhD research about the informal occupation of urban spaces came from the practice I’ve been using for years. I was struggling with linking academic research and knowledge and my community activism. Academia provides access to information, and through participatory action research one can get more information from ‘the field’ and get a better perspective on topics that should be changed and improved. Also, participatory action research can be seen as a method of direct education, by generating new knowledge from real-life experiences. There is no need to see a contradiction in being politically active in solving a problem while at the same time being scholarly engaged in researching that prob-

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Text / Object

INTRODUCTION Andreas Unteidig

Design research projects often move in-between textual and thingly forms in the processes of generating, discussing and conveying knowledge. As design research moves from being a professional practice predominantly concerned with the materiality of our life-worlds towards a distinct field of academic research, questions about possible relationships between textual (written) and non-textual (objects, processes, etc.) artefacts arise. In regards to communicating design research findings, we are confronted with our field’s very own character as an in-between: Just as presenting research findings solely in the shape of a designed object will, in many cases, not satisfy broader academic standards, it is often challenging, abridging and at times impossible to adequately communicate design knowledge in a traditional paper or book format. Hence questions of how to merge the written word as the standard form of academic communication with the potentiality and epistemic qualities of material or processual entities and constellations arise. The creation and reflective handling of artefacts are defining competencies of designers. The significance of the particular relationship between designers and the artificial is thus at the core of the discussions revolving around practice-based design research as a knowledge-generating discipline: It is inherently concerned with the understanding, making and remaking of the artificial, be it material or immaterial; it interacts with the designed and designable aspects of our life-worlds. This dialogue with the artificial assumes epistemological qualities beyond the spoken or written word, of material forms, processes and systems that are or can be ‘made’. Notions such as research-through-design furthermore illustrate the central claim that there is knowledge to be generated from the very act of creating, doing, from externalising mental conceptualisations, giving them substance and shape, and from observing how these externalisations interact with the world. Against this backdrop, this chapter focuses on questions about epistemic qualities of non-textual artefacts and their relationship to written text as the predominant medium for generating, reflecting on and conveying knowledge in the academic landscape in general and delivering PhD-research in particular: Which text-object relationships are accepted, practiced, possible and desirable in producing and communicating design research results, and which are not? How do these relationships differ in regards to communication within or beyond the community? Is written text the inevitable ending point of design research processes in order to adhere to scientific standards of describing, explaining, contextualising, validating or falsifying knowledge within a wider scientific community? Should design research aim for situations in which text is of equal significance to objects or processes, and

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how should the two then be weighted in the communication of findings and claims to knowledge? Can we think of scenarios in which material forms, crafted experiences or curated social processes play the leading role, utilising their epistemic properties to create new modes of interacting with knowledge? And what, in comparison to other academic fields, is so special about design knowledge; what makes us ask these questions? The collected texts in this part of the book quite consensually suggest, albeit by showcasing profoundly different argumentations, that both textual and non-textual artefacts indeed need to be taken into consideration in distinctive roles and in different dimensions of a research process: While the properties of written text provide obvious and well-established values, the ambiguity of prototypes, experiments, interventions or design situations are often seen to offer an original quality that is inherently and particularly attributed to design research, often attached to ideas about the field’s unique ability to manoeuvre within spaces of vagueness and between different modes of gathering, generating and conveying knowledge. The following texts feature a diverse range of positions that contribute to the qualification, critique and differentiation of these and other claims regarding design research’s specific qualities of knowledge. In her essay, Brigitte Wolf applies a design management perspective for looking at the status quo of how text and artefacts are being used in different instances of design research. In doing so, she underlines that any possible answer to the questions posed will present itself differently, depending on the parameters (e.g., modes, audiences) considered. Consequently, her essay delivers reflections that she delineates both for different relationships of design and research (about, for, with) as well as for various contextual settings in which design research outcomes are being communicated. For this, her text looks at various framings of text-object relationships as means of communicating design research knowledge: within academia, towards the market and ultimately for conveying new knowledge to users of designed artefacts and experiences, especially in regards to the initiation of behavioural change. While describing design’s unique propositions as inherently material and pointing out many facets of design research that would be unthinkable without the involvement of objects, her text underlines the importance of written text for the conveyance of knowledge to others. Wolfgang Jonas, on the other hand, argues against a hard dichotomy of textual and non-textual expressions. He points out the value of grey-zones in which the decision about media and formats of designerly ways to generate and conduct knowledge moves between the extremes of written text and the material artefact. According to Jonas, it is the role of design to imagine futures, to understand itself as a science that transforms rather than describes, and to further develop its own, at times non-conventional, paths. He pinpoints the dangers of submitting too willingly to the constraints of the established academic landscape, which undermines design’s particular ability to productively work with uncertainty and to unfold this

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Dirk Baecker5 (my translation) gives a systems-theoretical definition, which stresses design’s core competence of bridging knowledge gaps and thus makes it relevant for a wide variety of subject matters: Design as a practice of not-knowing may be read in reference to diverse interfaces, but the interfaces between technology, body, psyche and communication are probably dominant. If these ‘worlds’, each described by a more or less elaborate knowledge, are brought into a relationship of difference, this knowledge disappears and makes room for experiments, which are the experiments of design. … Not to take anything for granted here any more, but to see potential for dissolution and recombination everywhere, becomes the playground of a design that eventually reaches into pedagogy, therapy and medicine.

My own tentative definition of design and design research (given in a seminar 2013), builds on this: Design creates life-world situations in future contexts. In doing so it is confronted with the fundamental problems of control (irreducible complexity), of prediction (ignorance of evolutionary emerging futures) and of incompatible systems and domains of knowing. The problems show up as causality gaps between physical, psychological and communicative systems and between the stages of the evolutionary development. Design research examines the possibilities of bridging these gaps in the medium of design projects (research through design), and thereby creates new knowledge.

This supposed chaos of ‘everything will sort a bit’, if one looks at the triads of subject areas that have been suggested for design through history. It mainly boils down to the beautiful / the true / the good (Plato). Authors

Subject matters / areas of interest

Plato

The beautiful (τὸ καλὸν)

The true (τὸ ἀληθές)

The good (τὸ ἀγαθόν)

Vitruvius

The beautiful (Venustas)

The solid (Firmitas)

The useful (Utilitas)

Immanuel Kant

Judgement

Reason

Moral

David Pye (1978)

The beautiful

The efficient

The useful

Bruce Archer (1979)

Products

Process

People

Nigel Cross (2001)

Phenomenology study of the form and configuration of artefacts, the 1920s

Praxiology study of the practices and processes of design, the 1960s

Epistemology study of designerly ways of knowing, the 2000s

Alain Findeli (2008)

Aesthetics

Logic

Ethics

Wolfgang Jonas

Forms

Processes

Knowledges

Table: Triads of subject matters.6 The questions of what – how – why seem to relate to the 3 phases.

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So: What? Design research focuses – legitimately and without contradiction – on virtually everything. Which raises some problems. Regarding the question of text vs. artefact in design research there is no definite answer yet.

How? Understanding Design Research How is the person you’re observing doing what they are doing? Does it require effort? Do they appear rushed? Pained? Does the activity or situation appear to be impacting the user’s state of being either positively or negatively? Use descriptive phrases packed with adjectives.7

So how do design researchers do what they do? Which rules and patters can be identified? A spontaneous answer, very simple again, is that they proceed in extremely different ways. Examples cover the range from the strictly scientific experiment to artistic production / action / intervention. A closer look will reveal common patterns here as well. To become more explicit, here are some examples of how design research projects are conducted: a) • Philosophers deal with the essence of design and the cognitive processes when designing. • Cultural scientists explore the conceptual and discourse history of design and develop interpretations about the self-concept of the community. • Social scientists analyse communicative dynamics in design teams by means of interviews or observation or protocol studies. • Neuro-scientists try to analyse the brain processes in creative situations by means of imaging techniques. b) • Material scientists try in laboratory tests to develop a particularly recycling-friendly material for mass-produced everyday disposable products. • Software developers and HCI specialists optimise a safety- relevant user interface by means of cognitive psychological tests. • Marketing specialists design a campaign for a new consumer product based on statistics from survey data and findings of neuro-marketing.

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c) • Design researchers organise and run a ‘real laboratory’ in the form of a living room on the market square in order to gain insights in terms of needs and consequent design strategies for the urban area. • Social designers develop a participatory research program in an urban problem area to generate information possible and desirable transformation processes in the neighbourhood. • Design researchers construct useless objects and observe the users’ processes of appropriation to gain new insights into the logic of user interfaces.

d) • A group of artists intervenes provocatively at the general meeting of a bank and tries in this way to encourage rethinking processes. The list could go on endlessly. It is probably clear that a, b, c and d represent the four categories of research ABOUT / FOR / THROUGH / AS design, which distinguish design approaches not regarding subject matters (what) but regarding the researcher’s / observer’s stance towards the subject matter (how). For details see Grand and Jonas:8

ABOUT: Insights about the nature and the functioning of design.

FOR: Knowledge for the improvement of design products and design processes.

THROUGH: Knowledge gained through the medium of designing. AS: Design practice as a gain in knowledge.

The last and most basic category leads back to the above-mentioned process pattern, which is the common basis of all processes. It is the cybernetic cycle of ex periential learning (See Figure 2 on page 115), grounded in Deweyan pragmatism, as described by David Kolb.9 It divides easily into an inductive and deductive semicircle, or – and this is interesting in our context – into an inductive / abductive / deductive three-part cycle. Further methodological studies, process models and concrete designerly tools, building on this basis, can be found in Jonas and Chow 2010.10 I have deliberately used the abstract, somewhat old-fashioned notion of cybernetics11 in order to distinguish the scientific modes ABOUT and FOR (C1) from the designerly modes THROUGH and AS (C2). In the scientific mode, the researcher

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pretends to be not involved, to act as disembodied Cartesian observer. In the designerly mode one reflects on the physical, intentional, emotional involvement of the observer / designer in the process. And exactly at this point, it becomes obvious that the simple dualist distinction makes no sense: Science has to become aware of and reflect upon its involvement (mode 2, mode 3, transdisciplinarity, …), whereas design research must integrate other knowledge cultures and mirror their standards. So the similarities are more connective and productive than the differences. The question of priority (scientific or designerly research) as answered quite explicitly by Glanville, seems irrelevant. So: How? Text vs. artefact in design research? The basic pragmatist cycle of experiential learning, which is the common pattern of design and research processes, suggests an important role of artefacts in design research.

Why? Interpreting Design Research Why is the person you’re observing doing what they are doing, and in the particular way that they are doing it? This step usually requires that you make informed guesses regarding motivation and emotions. Step out on a limb in order to project meaning into the situation that you have been observing. This step will reveal assumptions that you should test with users, and often uncovers unexpected realisations about a particular situation.12

So why is the design community doing research like crazy? What are the driving forces? What are the motives behind it? What are the possible prospects? My quick and simple response: the motives are sometimes trivial, the prospects are exciting. There are external constraints (like in the UK or, later, in Switzerland) to doing research; there is the growing competition in the higher education system; there are requirements in professional collaborations, which cannot be met by traditional skills but require research competence. More important are the intrinsic motivations: the growing personal desire to do research and the growing insight that design has the potential to contribute to the solution of relevant transdisciplinary problems to a far greater extent than before. One consequence of these external and internal constraints are tendencies of adaptation to the academic cultures, the dressing and disciplining of design. The above-mentioned special quality that Dirk Baecker has emphasised, the expertise in dealing with ‘not knowing’ at the intersection of established disciplines, will be seriously endangered. And this is happening at a time when exactly these integrative, projective and transformative competences with regard to societal transformation13 are in demand as never before.14 We should not dismiss the sometimes naive missionary character of the profession (‘we are the world saviours’, ‘we are the holistic thinkers’, …) in favour of the sup-

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Gesche Joost

108 VISUAL STANCES

Elizabeth ÂSanders

Figure 1: The landscape of design practice and design research as it looked in 2006. This map helps to show the relationships between the design research approaches that were being used in practice. From Sanders, 2006. Figure 2: The evolving landscape of design practice and design research in 2008. Note the proliferation of new methods in the design-led portion of the map. From Sanders, 2008.

VISUAL STANCESâ&#x20AC;&#x201A; 109

Arne Scheuermann

VISUAL STANCES 119

Clive Dilnot

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opening the impenetrability of design to understanding. The design thinker / researcher is a ‘thief’ because he or she has no choice: the keys are not obvious; they do not announce themselves in advance. No compilation holds them in neat order. They are found, usually, in part by accident. One stumbles across them in a flash of insight. One mis-interprets, deliberately. All disciplines are equal in their potential capacity to yield surprising perspectives. Surprising, because the discovery of design is precisely that. One is stalking a territory. Discovery is the ethic here, because discovery is the bringing to light, or better to articulacy, of hitherto unforeseen or un-conceptualised moments. This justifies the work. But for this reason there is no method, no bibliography, for theft. Theft happens in the process of curiosity. It is the latter that provides the essential drive. One wishes to understand; to make a language. So theft is transitive. One seeks to speak design. The impossibility of so doing is merely the task never to be overcome. The clue however lies in Simon’s line: ‘Design, like science, is a tool for understanding as well as for acting’. This means: design is already a tool of understanding. It thus contains, as understanding, the means of its own comprehension. The adequacy of research is ‘merely’ to become as intelligent as that which is addressed. This task is translation. It requires its own exegesis. In the end of course both ‘borrowing’ and ‘stealing’ are radically inexact metaphors. Neither gets at what is required. The only value of this short paper is if it has cast doubt (once again) on the objective inadequacy of ‘borrowing’. ‘Stealing’ is even less adequate as a metaphor, yet, oddly, it reveals certain necessities about the intellectual process of becoming adequate to design.

1 2

Adorno, T., ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’, in Henry Pickford, trans. Critical Models (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) p. 99. Originally given by Bonsiepe as a contribution to the symposium ‘design beyond Design … ‘ in honor of Jan van Toorn, held at the Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, November 1997. The full text is available at http://www.guibonsiepe.com/pdffiles/virtues.pdf. Krauss, R.: ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, in Hal Foster (Ed.) The Anti-Aesthetic (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983) p. 36.

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Ranulph Glanville Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.

Samuel Johnson, quoted in a Hewlett Packard advertisement. Abstract: Architecture is positioned as a type of design, and design is characterised as a verb (rather than a noun), a way of acting carried out by a designer / actor, which is circular and conversational in form. The relationship between design and research is explored, particularly with an eye to doctoral study: research is seen as designed and even as a design activity, and the activity of researching is indicated as re-searching. It is argued that research in design should not be based on the import of theory from outside the subject, but should examine the design activity to construct an appropriate theory built from design: imported theories should only be used where the import can be shown to be sensitive and relevant. Although research in architecture has a long tradition, it uses, in the main, imported approaches that do not help architects do architecture. What is needed is a form of research coming out of architecture itself, producing knowledge that will help architects act. This is distinguished as ‘knowledge for’ (action) in contrast to the academically more traditional ‘knowledge of’ (what is). An example (from the doctoral programme at RMIT University) is recounted of a doctoral study that was turned round by the move from studying to make knowledge of to knowledge for. A brief survey locates knowledge for in an epistemological framework that reflects other research into design. The notion of unthinkability is considered in relation to doctoral research in architecture, in the light of the proposal that design research is concerned with knowledge for. The paper concludes with a refrain in which the relationship between design and research is posed as a series of questions awaiting serious examination. Keywords: circle (circularity), design(er), knowledge of, knowledge for, noun/ verb, practice, reflection, research, understanding, unthinkable, wandering

Introduction: Architecture and Design The theme of this conference2 concerns architecture: but almost all of the research that has been done which is in any sense relevant to the conference theme has been done under the name of design. For me, the difference between architecture and design is not significant in terms of the conference theme, and I shall use both words. This usage is further necessitated by the lack of a verb based on the word

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architecture for the activity architects carry out (there is no verb, to architect): the word we use is design. Where I use the word design, therefore, I use it to refer to the central activity architects undertake – unless the context or my explicit statement indicates otherwise. However, the word design in English can be both a noun and a verb. Design, as used in this paper, is generally intended as a verb. It is the creative act at the centre of the activities, including architecture, of design professionals. It is a circular process by which the new is brought into being, the outcome of which (a design object: design as noun) evades logical description until after the event.3 The circularity of process typically involves making proposals, examining them (often being surprised at what is found) and then returning to remake the proposal. This process is perhaps most typically found in the act of sketching. The process is circular insofar as it rotates, complementarily, between making and criticising phases such as drawing and viewing, saying and listening; the path followed is thus a circle, but, given that there is change in what is made and what is criticised, some prefer to think of what is produced as following a spiral. The trace of its history is indeed a spiral: but the form remains a circle. The circular activity in which we talk and listen is a ‘conversation’. Conversation as a means of communication was studied by the great cybernetician Gordon Pask, who remarked already in 1969 that architecture is a conversational activity. Pask’s studies of conversation remove us from the tyranny of coded and determined meanings, and linear causality. They allow exchanges based on the uniqueness of each participant’s understanding (thus making novelty a given). Based on Pask’s (1969) work, I have explained more fully on a number of occasions how the process of designing may be understood as a conversation and how this allows the creation of novelty, which can then be post-rationalised into some sort of narrative, linear, logical causality (e.g. Glanville, 2003). The conversational partners may be other people or me / us alternating between figuratively talking and listening. Most of us are familiar with how we draw something and, coming back later (which may be no more than the next instant), see in it something quite other than we intended. This is conversation at work. I will not extend the argument here, other than to point out that it allows for error, rejecting work and restarting – important features of design as actually done. There is a metaphor I have used to communicate the experience this view of design leads to. It is wandering. Design is like wandering in the countryside with some vague idea of going somewhere while not really knowing exactly where you are going, making repeated decisions over which path to follow (or cutting across the countryside, to make your own path) (Glanville, 1978, 1988). This repeating action is at the heart of the circular process. After some time, you find yourself in a sunny glade, or perhaps sitting on a tree stump, and know not only that you have arrived (and, therefore, that you have achieved an end hitherto unknown), but also that you have found something that makes sense of your wanderings and from where your

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path begins to make sense to you even though most of the time you were rather lost – scarcely knowing where you were going. The trust involved in the wandering (believing that you will arrive), the sense of arrival (recognition), and the ability to, after arrival, make sense of the path you took all contribute to a successful wander. The experience of designing is, I believe, like this. This view of design does not exclude purpose. In almost all design there are functional requirements that have to be satisfied. Very often, in architecture, these functional requirements can be accommodated, at a simple level, without much difficulty. Room sequences can be assembled and services provided in a sensible manner. These requirements are important to design, but are not what is central. The simple assembly of such elements is not generally what gives a project its architectural quality. Architects (and other designers) need to deal with functional requirements, of course, but need to do more: and it is in the more that the extra quality that is architecture can be found, and which quality we create through design process. Purpose is assumed. There is one final important feature of design that I must mention. Design-asverb indicates an action which must be carried out by an actor. The actor element has the two roles described above (using several alternative terms) to communicate the sense of these roles: proposing and examining, marking and viewing, saying and listening. These words are all active: the actor is doing something. The quality of the role of this actor is quite different from the role of the traditional scientific observer, who touches so lightly on what (s)he observes that his / her actions are thought to make no difference. The actor in design, in both roles, is actively involved, creating change. This involved action is one reason design has not been seen as a properly academic subject, in an age where academic has come to be synonymous with scientific. Design as used in this paper, then, is a verb indicating a circular conversational process that leads to the creation of the new. Design is used for this activity in architecture. I take design to be the essential area of architectural activity.

Design and Research There has long been a confusion concerning design and research. At one level, the confusion can be seen in practitioners’ claims that their practice is research. I do not believe that practice, by itself, constitutes research: the words are not synonyms. That is not to say that practice cannot become research: the programme I am particularly associated with at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, is firmly and foundationally based in practice (Glanville and van Schaik, 2003).4 Note, however, it is based in and not solely constituted of practice. What makes the difference is the other essential component, reflection – the element that turns search into research.5

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At another level, the confusion is seen in how research has, itself, become e ntwined in the scarcely questioned convention that science and research are synonymous, which is accurate neither as a depiction of science as an approach and activity nor in the proposed synonymity. Only scientific research need be scientific. In other fields, a scientific approach may sometimes help, but different approaches will also be appropriate. Science represents one way of researching: there were ways of researching in the academic world before the modern concept of science was developed, and other scholarly approaches continue to generate good research. It is therefore important to consider what relationship design and research might have. Research itself is not a neutral activity. It is an activity that is undertaken by human beings with the aid of various tools (here I consider methods as tools). (Scientific) Research may have developed the approach that admits treating the observer of the behaviour observed to occur in an experiment in such a way that the observer touches what is going on so lightly that this touch can be ignored, but this is only one possibility. And the point remains that this approach did not just happen, but was created by humans. No matter how impersonal the method, it did not fall out of the skies. It was made by people. And it was refined by people: the activity of research was (and still is) designed. Equally importantly, what is done in research is designed. Not only are (for instance) experiments, even the most straightforward experiments of classical physics, designed. Whoever just observed, rather than composing a situation in which there could be an outcome of the sort they were looking for; whoever just placed elements in this situation without adjusting them to get some desired result; and whoever did not modify and change the set up of their experiment, occasionally capitalising on an accident or unexpected outcome to explore something quite different than they had intended initially? What is done in research (e.g. experiments) is designed. The resulting knowledge is composed to become integral with other knowledge both at the level of public knowledge and theory, and within the mind of each of us, as we compose together our understandings. Our new understandings cannot just be bolted onto what we currently think and know: each new understanding, and each instance of understanding, changes us and changes the body of what we know, albeit usually by miniscule amounts. This is why I use the word compose (put together).6 In this manner we make our world picture, a picture that is composed (or designed) by us. The iterative nature of this activity was recognised nearly forty years ago by Karl Popper in his grand attempt to explain how science works (Popper, 1969): a means of progressing that is circular and designerly. Thus, the activity of research itself is the outcome of a design process, it is modified by design, the experiments that it often uses are designed and the users using them work as designers do. It uses methods, also designed in a vast social act. Finally the outcomes are designed to form public knowledge and theory and, by

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each of us individually, to compose the understandings that constitute our individual worlds. Research is, in this analysis, thoroughly designed; it is at all levels the outcome of designing. The reciprocal question is whether design is research. I have answered this in relation to practice, above. More generally, researching is not the same as searching. Much so called research carried out by designers is searching: re-searching indicates the activity implies more than just searching – a searching that delves deep and revisits the original searching. It is this re-consideration, the reflective element that, for instance, Schön (1983) has brought to our attention as a central aspect of designing, where searching is converted into re-searching. Thus, not all design is researched (although perhaps it should be): but all research is designed. I have argued this point at greater length and using further arguments in Glanville (1999).

How (and What) to Research The history of design research has been liberally peppered with approaches imported from other fields, many of which have been of dubious value and some of which have been positively damaging. An important question concerns the appropriateness of approach (Glanville, 2004): an approach brought in to direct our studies of designing may have little or no connection with designing as an activity: thus it will be inappropriate. While it is possible to learn from other approaches and thus enrich a subject, there is always the danger that an imported approach may totally distort the subject to which it is applied. For instance, the hard science approach of early design methods totally rejected (and hid from our attention) the activity that designers perform. We were in danger of losing a significant way 7 of solving problems and creating the new as what designers did was forced into another (and essentially unsympathetic) mould. This realisation is perhaps best expressed in the radical and brave volte face performed by one of the early gurus of the design methods approach, J. Christopher Jones, whose work is now based extensively in the random and the poetic. One example may suffice. The populist architectural theorist, Charles Jencks, has brought a number of different approaches to architecture. Amongst the bestknown are semiology, deconstruction, post-modernism, and, recently, chaos theory. These approaches have been enthusiastically taken on board by architects, and have strongly influenced8 the appearance of current, avant garde designs. Jencks has used his own recent enthusiasm for chaos theory as a sort of (substitute for a) design method in creating his own garden. The result is a garden made of objects that are hardly designed at all. Rather, they constitute an assemblage of totemic

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PROJECT-GROUNDED RESPONSES: BORROWING / STEALING How did theories and methods from other disciplines inform your PhD – were they used on their disciplinary terms, translated in to design relevant approaches, or surpassed altogether, creating something else entirely?

Practice by research is inherently multi-disciplinary; in other words it doesn’t exclude other ‘non-aligned’ practices but includes their attributes, rethinks and filters their processes and reapplies these to the specificity of the research question. Research by nature is exploratory; it neither borrows nor steals from other disciplines but seeks to understand other practices to develop new ways of thinking into designing and making. To undertake practice-based research is to engage in how design and practice share similarities whether it be architecture, urban design, interactive systems, textile performance and wearable computation to name a few. PhD by research promotes the inquiry to engage with other forms of practice can influence the direction of the research being undertaken. Research by practice requires the ability to experiment and willingness to transfer knowledge gained to derive new concepts for spatial / theoretical intelligence. My own incorporation of methods and processes from aligned and nonaligned design disciplines come not through their transference but through the ability to transition their core modes of operation. Research by practice is conducted within real-world issues; it seeks material connections through material thinking and interrogates theoretical and philosophical positions fundamental for innovation. Benedict Anderson, Professor of Spatial Design (University of Technology Sydney) Dissertation: The Architectural Flaw, 2005. Royal Melbourne University of Technology (RMIT)

This is an interesting question as many disciplines intersected with my PhD through practice. In designing exhibitions, I work with artists, craftspeople, designers, architects, art administrators, writers, graphic designers, lighting technicians, video producers etc. And interior design as a discipline is one that works with many disciplines – much like an art director or producer. Prior to commencing a PhD, fellow curators referred to me as a spatial curator – as my practice was distinctive from the art historian as curator model. The conjunction of curatorial practice and exhibition making inflected by interior design practice produced a different exhibition practice through a focus on arrangements,

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sightlines, juxtapositions, activating spatial and material relations, movement of viewers, haptic as well as optic encounters. A motivation in doing the PhD was to engage with the work of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze specifically to follow the thread through his writings that dismissed interior and interiority as enclosure and given subjectivity. Concepts such as space and subjectivity have strong theoretical, philosophical implications that produce ways of seeing the world. The PhD was an opportunity to think through this in practice and to enable a trajectory within the discipline that opened up to other ideas than the current dominant phenomenological underpinning. Interior design as a practice of making relations where subjectivity, aesthetics and temporality are critical concerns highlights the value of engaging philosophical ideas to intervene and transform practice. In respect to these pursuits, I was often confronted with critiques of borrowing and stealing. However what also became apparent was the relation between knowledge and ownership. As a counterpoint, Deleuze had a particular style in his engagement with the work of others that encourages one to experiment with ideas in pursuit of the new; where a crafting of relations with others becomes important as an ethical consideration and distinct from a demonstration of expertise. This is thinking through doing: a philosophy about how one does, rather than a philosophy about what there is. My PhD, as a doctor of philosophy, became a philosophy defined through the practice of interior design; this is different to a theorisation of interior design practice. Suzie Attiwill, Deputy Dean, Learning & Teaching; Associate Professor of Interior Design (School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne) Dissertation: ?interior, practices of interiorization, interior designs, 2012. School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University

I borrowed heavily from other disciplines – mostly through translation into design relevant approaches. Initially I was very inspired by the science of ecology (the study of organisms at ‘home’), using theories of niche, adaptation, and habitat to draw an analogy between natural evolution and the evolution of artefacts. Domestication (artificial selection) became a particularly poignant theme as it exemplified the necessary changes (in terms of form, function, and interactions), an organism (or a technological artefact) needs to make in order to survive in the domestic habitat. This was helpful in better understanding how an emerging technology could potentially be domesticated. The core theme of the thesis was an analysis and explanation of speculative design methods – specifically the development and manipulation of the relationship between the audience and an artefact. I focused on how to best exploit the narrative

PROJECT-GROUNDED RESPONSES: BORROWING / STEALING 167

Gesche Joost Katharina Bredies Michelle Christensen Florian Conradi Andreas Unteidig (Eds.)

Board of International Research in Design, BIRD

Advisory Board: Lena Berglin Cees de Bont Elena Caratti Michal Eitan Bill Gaver Orit Halpern Denisa Kera Keith Russell Doreen Toutikian Michael Wolf John Wood

www.birkhauser.com

ISBN 978-3-0356-0919-6

Design as Research

G. Joost / K. Bredies / M. Christensen / F. Conradi A. Unteidig (Eds.)

Members: Michelle Christensen Michael Erlhoff Wolfgang Jonas Gesche Joost Claudia Mareis Ralf Michel Marc Pfaff

Board of International Research in Design, BIRD

Positions, Arguments, Perspectives