Immodest Proposals: Research Through Design and Knowledge

Visual Communication, 2010

Mark Roxburgh’s research over the past decade has focused on the evolving conceptualization, discourse and development of research methodologies for design. This has lead him to question the historical pattern of design whereby the methods and epistemologies of other disciplines are used without addressing the differences between them and design. Design is a complex activity enmeshed in many aspects of our lives. In his article in Design Issues (1992), ‘Prometheus of the Everyday: The Ecology of the Artificial and the Designer’s Responsibility’, Manzini foregrounds the relational nature of this complexity by conceiving design (the artificial) as having an ecology. Roxburgh has written about these matters but his critique has conformed to the conventions of academic publishing and he has found articulating aspects of such complexity constrained by the limits of written language. Increasingly, in design, visualization is used to map complex relationships between things, ideas and actions. In this essentially visual essay, Roxburgh is attempting to graphically identify and explore the relationships of some of these concepts in a manner that echoes these trends and his own research practice. He is aware that sketches of complex phenomena, through a process of interpretation and abstraction, become somewhat reductive. The moments he draws on in crafting the depictions of his views are presented episodically rather than chronologically. Roxburgh sketches out three key historical conceptions of design and the ramifications they have had on our perceptions and practice of it. He depicts these conceptions as being drawn from traditions outside of design and suggests that an alternative strategy may lie within design itself. This strategy calls for an engagement with what he calls the aesthetics of research. He suggests that it is imperative that design encompasses an aesthetic engagement with the world at all levels, and most importantly at the point of design research and conception, for our experience of design is fundamentally aesthetic. He is aware that there is an apparent irony in his use of non design theories to frame aspects of his view but this is a necessary strategy to critique the ontological assumptions inherent within the conceptions of design that he characterizes (one could even say ‘caricatures’). Roxburgh takes the position that there is nothing essentially given about design consciousness. Rather, the characterizations of design consciousness that he outlines all carry (usually implicit) ontological assumptions that may be inappropriate and/or limit design practice. The depiction of design that he offers is based instead on an alternative ontology. While this cannot be empirically verified (no ontology can), he proposes it as a way of extending and critiquing usual conceptions of design practice. No doubt this in turn will be found to have shortcomings of its own.

This paper examines at close quarters the role of fictions in design, in order to push forward the scope and influence of critical discourses in design. It aims to raise a cross-disciplinary debate around the redefinition of the design profession and also around the practices of curating and reflecting on design. Main theoretical reference has been " The practice of Everyday Life " by French sociologist Michel de Certeau. Certeau's work has influenced the thinking of three authors that were relevant to further elaborate this study: the combination between material culture, design history and gender studies by Judy Attfield; the theory on relational aesthetics developed by Nicholas Bourriaud and the thinking of Jacques Rancière, specially his notion of dissent as form of political subjectivity that can create new modes of sensing. In order to test its arguments the paper establishes two scenarios, where negotiations between reality and fiction take place: the home and the museum. On the one hand, representative examples of critical design are examined and put in dialogue with the theoretical positions. On the other hand, the paper examines the transformations that happen in the museum's space, when displaying critical design becomes a kind of rehearsal for alternative ways of living. Two exhibitions were analysed: Wouldn't it be nice... Wishful Thinking in Art and Design (Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich, 2008) and Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft (V&A, London, 2008). The final part of the paper discusses how such positions in design play a critical role in society, by setting up micro-situations of dissent (disagreement), and in doing so they generate new forms of sensing and making sense in contemporary living. Conclusions will point at the potential of these design fictions (understood as projections) and frictions (considered as irritations) in order to re-fabulate the commonplace.

This began as a chapter called “Artereality: rethinking craft in a knowledge economy” in Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century, edited by Steven Henry Madoff, MIT 2009. It was a kind of manifesto for the interdisciplinary projects, research and pedagogy we were supporting in Stanford Humanities Lab. Since Jefrey (Schnapp) and I wrote the piece in 2007-8, I have worked with Stanford’s d.school (Hasso Plattner Institute of Design) and realize that what we were talking about, and what we named “artereality”, is what also gets called design thinking. Typically explored in relation to business process and the pursuit of creative innovation, design thinking as artereality also ofers a model for revitalized practice-based arts and humanities in the contemporary academy that sees fit to challenge isolated disciplinary silos.

Cet article étudie le rôle du designer dans la culture matérielle et visuelle et comment les designers sont devenus des créateurs de mythes sur la scène culturelle contem-poraine. Dans un monde saturé d'objets de design, les designers ne traitent pas seu-lement la forme et la fonctionnalité, mais le marché exige qu'ils injectent du sens et de l'expérience dans leurs dispositifs. Ce texte propose des analyses sémantiques qui s'appliquent à des séances photos de magazine de design ou à installations ou objets de design récents, et montre le changement de rôle du designer. Dans la première partie, je présente la situation actuelle dans la culture visuelle avec de solides références et je continue avec des exemples actuels, avant d'analyser l'industrie du design d'un point de vue sémantique. Enfin, je parle du changement dans l'industrie et la politique des objets faits à la main, du vide causé par les représentations et de la façon dont les designers remplissent ce vide à l'aide de significations et de récits, à travers les exemples de deux dispositifs du designer français Philippe Starck. This paper investigates the role of designer in material and visual culture and how designers became myth-makers in todays culture scene. In a saturated world of objects of design that is present, designers do not deal with only form and functionality but market asks for meaning and experience factor at their makings. This text showcases semantic readings from design magazine photo-shootings to recent actual design objects and installations and how the shift in designer's role brought up. In the first part I introduce the current setting in visual culture with strong references and continue with actual samples of work and investigate the design industry from the perspective of semantics. Finally I talk about the shift in the industry and politics of the manmade objects, the void caused by the representations and how designers fill this void in the object via meaning and stories, through references and semantic readings of two designs by French designer Philippe Starck.

FORMakademisk, 2013

Juxtaposing the nature of design and the foundations of research in the traditional science and humanities disciplines puts their differences into sharp relief. The comparison highlights the key characteristics of design – its creative and experiential nature – which any design research must take into account, as well as the theoretical foundations of research. The aim of this article is to develop an understanding of the ontological, epistemological and methodological issues of design research, and to offer a framework that can embrace equally the notions of creativity and experiential knowledge, and of academic rigour. Furthermore,the potential roles of the design process and artefact within research are examined within this theoretical framework, which suggests that design processes and artefacts can – if appropriately framed – play an important partin the research process, facilitating an approach commensurate with the aims ofdesign enquiry. A case study of the Niedderer’s own w...

Design Issues, 2017

The Research Through Design (RTD) conference is a new, experimental dissemination platform to support design practitionerresearchers. Founded in 2013, RTD was established as a biennial conference series with RTD 2015, held in Cambridge, UK (March 25-27, 2015). 1 This special issue brings together a set of perspectives from those who attended the RTD 2015 conference, offering new experiential insight about what it means to practice, disseminate, and understand design-led inquiry within academic communities and beyond. "Research through design" has been used for over 20 years within the design community as a distinct term to describe practice-based inquiry that generates transferrable knowledge. The term has gained traction in many diverse fields of design, from fashion, for example, to human-computer interaction (HCI). Arguably, research through design is not a formal methodological approach with a particular epistemological basis. Instead, it is a foundational concept for approaching inquiry through the practice of design; and as a concept it has been subjected to multiple articulations and interpretations both by individuals and by institutions. In 1993 Sir Christopher Frayling, in dialogue with Bruce Archer and others in the design research studio at the Royal College of Art, articulated a core conceptual tension fueling discussion on the subject: that "research practice" has historically been associated with the scientific method and with "words not deeds," which Frayling suggested might be antithetical to what design practitioners do. 2 Distinctions made between different design research approaches-for example, the "into, through, and for" practice model put forward by Frayling and the "about, for, and through" practice model put forward by Archer 3-have since been contested and critiqued. Some commentators when making sense of research through design have drawn distinctions between the nature of design research practice in the different working cultures of academia and industry and in different working contexts. 4 Others have investigated the different forms of knowledge that design and its artifacts can generate and transfer. 5 As academic

2014

Design exploration research refers to various interaction design research practices that explore tensions issued from the interplay of science, technology, culture and society. Most of them explicitly trigger discussions and debates in the audience, for instance "critical design", which raised the interest of members of design research communities. However its generalization suffers from a lack of shareable methodology. This paper aims at clarifying it practically and theoretically. We claim that these practices trigger people's reactions using a specific narrative strategy which provoke an "uncanny feeling". By producing "uncanny enough" artefacts that embed a subtle entanglement of familiarity and unfamiliarity, designers can elicit responses from viewers. First, a review of literature on critical design texts presents the "uncanny balance" as being a recurrent design principle for the creation of these artefacts. We then present an exemplary case study produced by one of the authors, exploring communication technology-called Dog&Bone. Using classical rhetoric, we present a theoretical overview of the project. The outcome consists of a conceptual framework based on the narrative dimension of the uncanny plus the rhetorical dimension (composed of three elements: legitimacy, emotions, argumentation). We conclude that Design is a form of communication between designers and their audience.

Architecture and Behavior Magazine

History is not neutral. It is the site of a power struggle between competing social and cultural groups who wish to see their own version of historical events become the accepted everyday version, the better to validate their own position in the hierarchy of social relationships we call society. This essay is largely about the recent history of design theory, and places the events that have happened since the 1960's into a social, political, economic and ideological context. This for several reasons. First, it is a history that has never been told from quite this point of view - a point of view which critically apprehends the education of professional designers and the role they inadvertently play in practice to support asymmetrical relationships of power and resource distribution. But there is another reason for writing this history. I hope to clarify some of the misunderstandings and misconceptions which have recently developed within design theory itself. Postmodernism is either embraced or vilified by members of the design community, but few seem to be fully aware of its deeper ideological significance and emancipatory potential. The meaning and social role of design have been contested since distinctions were first made between architecture and building, between art and craft, between design and manufacture. These distinctions express a struggle which continues down to the present to shape the thing we call "design" and express deeper social distinctions which operate on the basis of class, gender and ethnicity. The design disciplines have historically enjoyed the privilege of a social distinction which allowed them special status within the wider field of social relations mediated by the division of labour. They particularly enjoy the mythology that they contribute to the overall public good by virtue of their "purity" with respect to politics and ideology. This mythology is reinforced by recent theories of postmodernism which are prevalent in design practice, which express an essentially conservative ideology which seeks to sustain existing social hierarchies. In architecture for instance, postmodern design theorists have developed structures of understanding which reinstate design practice as a depoliticized sub-category of fine art production, which takes as its sine qua non the building-as-beautiful-object, founded upon what are reputed to be universally accepted aesthetic norms. In so doing they have at the same time divorced form from its social, cultural and political roots, and have presented it as a value free commodity, the embodiment of the postmodern conception of the "free-floating-signifier" to be bartered and traded in an ever-escalating attempt to transform the use value of buildings into the exchange value of speculative, designed environment. In this process, notions of how the shaping of the built environment might reflect and reproduce asymmetrical arrangements of power which benefit these theorists themselves have been entirely elided from the theoretical discourse. These theories are paradoxically represented as value-free, while at the same time their ideological roots have been masked in logical mystifications which inhibit critical interrogation. They have played a crucial part in bringing about the abandonment of scientific rationality as a mediating factor of architectural design, and their ideology now stands as the dominant belief system to a whole new generation of design students. Yet postmodern theory has been applied in the design disciplines in a partial and selective manner calculated to prescribe the ways in which the professional designer might operate as a public intellectual. Its proponents in the design professions seek to preserve a sacrosanct domain of professional expertise, based upon normative theories of aesthetics, through which the designer might exercise control over what stands for quality in the built environment. At the same time that this has been happening in architecture proper, a similar process has been occurring in the domain of Environmental Design. Environmental Design (as embodied in organizations such as the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA), together with its Australasian and European affiliates (PAPER and IAPS) was originally conceived around the need to ground design in a rational methodology, and to eliminate the apparent arbitrariness of formalism. While not denying the legitimacy of formalism per se, Environmental Design has been viewed as a rationalist supplement to traditional conceptions of design, seeking the integration of Environment/Behavior information systems into the everyday knowledge base of the design professions. This model has worked with reasonable efficiency until recently, when, with the advent of Postmodernism and Deconstructivism in design, a new form of radical expressionism appeared, undermining the veracity of all forms of rationalism save those dedicated to the ethic of efficiency, performativity and maximum short term economic return. In response to this tendency, many environmental designers have themselves repudiated the principles of Postmodernism seeing it as the affirmation of irrationality in the designed world (Harris and Lipman, 1989, 68). In what follows, I will show how and why postmodernism has been conservatively taken up by designers, and will suggest an alternative model of the designer as public intellectual. This model will move beyond the selectivity and partiality of existing postmodern theories of design, and will take seriously many of the precepts of postmodern philosophy to re-insert the social and political into the theoretical discourse of design practice, design education and environmental design research. 2. WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM? Most recent critical authors (Debord, 1968; Bell, 1973; Mandel, 1975; Lyotard, 1984; Harvey, 1989) agree that the last twenty years have ushered in a set of unique social, cultural, industrial and political circumstances commonly called "postmodern". This is variously understood to imply a radical departure from what is termed Modernism, which is itself taken to be an aspect of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment Project - the application of instrumental rationality to the social world, ushered in by the industrial revolution, and transforming permanently the pre-industrial feudal society which had dominated life for the preceding two thousand years. According to Enlightenment philosophers, rationalism was to liberate humankind from the servitude of inherited privilege, and to ensure that resources were socially distributed according to individual ability (Ward, 1991). Postmodern critics maintain that any social emancipation has been at the cost of a decrease in the quality of life brought about by precisely that modernist rationality which promised freedom. The "progress" normally associated with Modernism and science is partial. Hayter (1982, 16-17) notes that a very large proportion of the world's population is significantly worse off now than before the Enlightenment with 16% of the population receiving 63% of the world's income, and the rest doomed to dependency. At the same time, within the industrial nations, the number of middle income earners is contracting, with a minority moving up the economic ladder and the vast majority moving down. (Parenti, 1988, 10-11; Harrington, 1984, 149) Furthermore, the situation is getting progressively worse, and this is true both nationally, as well as internationally. Modernism, with its scientific rationality has, according to writers like Lyotard, acted as a kind of cultural imperialism for which "progress" operates as a code word for oppression. One of the significant aspects of Postmodernism, then, is relationship to this process. Modernism in design has a rather different meaning, usually being applied to a style of building which occurred during that period following the Russian revolution of 1917 and including as its primary influence the work in the 1920's and 1930's emanating from the Bauhaus (Blake, 1974). Postmodernism, in this more restricted sense is seen as a repudiation of many of the principles of this style, and the ideology which produced it (centralized socialist programs, factory housing production, an abandonment of ornament, etc). Wolfe, along with others notes that the high ideals of architectural Modernism, based originally upon the principle of universal worker housing have been an abysmal failure. (Wolfe 1981; Jencks, 1984, 1987; Venturi, 1977), and other postmodern design theorists have suggested that Modernism, with its emphasis upon principles of universal emancipation, is dead. Jencks, particularly, has rather dramatically pin-pointed the death of Modernism , "at 3.32 p.m. on the 15th July 1972" when the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis, Missouri (a prize-winning design based upon Corbusian principles) was demolished as unliv¬able. In fact, the failure of Pruitt-Igoe has been recently shown to result not from design deficiencies arising from modernist principles, so much as from a dearth of capital financing, and a severe cutback of the maintenance programs of the St. Louis Housing Authority (Bristol, 1991, 163). For Jencks and Venturi, Postmodernism is a new formal style of architecture in which playfulness, and ornament have been reinstated. The style is characterized by a separation of form from content and by giving preference to the former over the latter. It is characteristic of such critics that they perceive the built environment as stripped of its social, political and economic reality, and see its social failure as a failure of form

She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics and Innovation, 2017

The article explores the " what " and the " how " of design research. It discusses the epistemological assumptions of design and design research—the conception of true knowledge that underpins the quest to advance design knowledge through research. The article also examines the media and methods of doing design research—that is, the " how " of such research. As it developed over the past century, the design field has drawn extensively on three pivotal but often tacitly deployed epistemologies: the Platonic-Aristotelian, the pragmatic, and the postmodern. Platonic episte-mology is latent in many commonplace design instruction texts. Pragmatic epistemology underscores the industrial-arts ethos of design. Postmodern epistemologies dominate in university programs—especially graduate and Ph.D. programs. The article considers how these competing epistemologies understand the role of imagination in the act of creation. The article then considers the role of explanation in the carrying out of research in creative design and arts fields. It addresses whether, and to what degree, design research ought to rely on explanatory words as its principal medium of research, or whether it is valid to substitute artifactual creation for intellectual explanation in the research process.