Exposing the magic of design

Ds 77 Proceedings of the Design 2014 13th International Design Conference, 2014

Kybernetes, 2007

Purpose-The paper seeks to make a substantial contribution to the still controversial question of design foundations. Design/methodology/approach-A generic hypercyclic design process model is derived from basic notions of evolution and learning in different domains of knowing (and turns out to be not very different from existing ones). The second-order cybernetics and evolutionary thinking provide theoretical support. Findings-The paper presents a model of designerly knowledge production, which has the potential to serve as a genuine design research paradigm. It does not abandon the scientific or the hermeneutic or the arts & crafts paradigm but concludes that they have to be embedded into a design paradigm. "Design paradigm" means that "objects" are not essential, but are created in communication and language. Research limitations/implications-Foundations cannot be found in the axiomatic statements of the formal sciences, nor in the empirical approaches of the natural sciences, nor in the hermeneutic techniques of the humanities. Designing explores and creates the new; it deals with the fit of artefacts and their human, social and natural contexts. Therefore foundations for design (if they exist at all) have to be based on the generative character of designing, which can be seen as the very activity which made and still makes primates into humans. Practical implications-The hypercyclic model provides a cybernetic foundation (or rather substantiation) for design, which-at the same time-serves as a framework for design and design research practice. As long as the dynamic model is in action, i.e. stabilized in communication, it provides foundations; once it stops, they dissolve. The fluid circular phenomena of discourse and communication provide the only "eternal" essence of design. Originality/value-"Design objects" as well as "theory objects" are transient materializations or eigenvalues in these circular processes. Designing objects and designing theories are equivalent. "Problems" and "solutions" as well as "foundations" are objects of this kind. This contributes to a conceptual integration of the acting and reflecting disciplines.

KEER 2012 Proceedings

"Designers face the world’s complexity at an experiential level. We consider Making (synthesising and concretising) an essential activity of designers, prior to Thinking (analysing and abstracting), because only through experience – a result of acting in the world – we achieve meaning, funnelling human intentionality. Making enables designers to explore the unknown by trusting their senses and their kansei, exploring resistance and ambiguity and by tapping into their intuition (Sennett, 2008). Because “intuition begins with the sense that what is not yet could be” (Sennett, 2008, p. 201), it involves skills, as skills are our way to make sense of the world, transform it and to cater for ethics. In this paper we describe a one-day workshop that has been held during the CHItaly conference 2011 in Alghero, Italy. During that day, we explored how the integration of points of view, using intuition through skills can communicate and create a richer meaning. The assignment was to design an empowering/enabling tool that allows a person to begin to experience another person’s skill. To be able to design such a tool, designers had to go through several steps of documenting and reflecting upon their own and each other's skills. We reflect on the experience and explain how this approach can support the integration of points of view, which is considered to be formed by personal experience, by skills, and by kansei."

2019

We present a reflective practice where challenges of assembling, making sense of and drawing conclusions from co-created materials were addressed through a process of design synthesis that improved the clarity and meaning making during the interpretation process. In this paper, we illustrate our point by presenting a set of design research artifacts resulting from design synthesis: a manifesto, a scale model, a set of storyboards and illustrated characters. Inspired by the arts and creative practice in other disciplines such as film making, we adapted these methods as a means of transforming participants' contributions into inspirational resources for interactive design. This process encouraged the production of new creative and active forms of documentation and enabled us to handle interpretation in a way that embraced the inspirational and provisional nature of our creative and participatory processes. By doing so, we broaden the current practice of documentation in design and...

The process of designing a project begins at the preliminary stage of searching for a core idea that defines it. This paper turns its attention to the oscillation between reality and imagination, order and chaos, the narration, the wish, the time and the diachronic or a-chronic placement of the creator, which are central in this preliminary stage of formulating the core idea of the designing process.

In Proceedings of the 5th Nordic Design Research Conference (Nordes’13), 2013

The design research community has recently been very active in developing new types of methods, often called innovative methods, through experimentation and action research projects. The stream of innovative methods incorporates visual and creative components that are closer to a designer's genuine practices, aiming to support projection of users' own felt-experiences and their creativity. Innovative methods are in principle designed and re-designed in each project, while conventional methods aim to be easily reproducible and portable across situations. In this paper, we illustrate what learning is going on in the making process of the methods, rather than data collected by the methods. Our aim is to foreground the tangible benefits of innovative methods by discussing how the making process of innovative methods actually helps designers build contextual knowledge important for the design situation.

Design Issues, 2014

2019

The integration of design with the applied social sciences is relatively new. Design firms began experimenting with the social sciences in the early 1980s. The experiment was design-driven, with social scientists being brought in to serve the design process. The evolution of influence that the social sciences have had on the design process mirrors changes seen over time in the social sciences. For example, behaviorists believed that only observable behaviors could be studied scientifically. Ethnographic approaches to design research in practice today seem to have their roots in the behaviorist tradition. Later, the cognitive revolution of 1960s and 1970s moved the focus from behavior to the information- processing model of the mind. Much of the usability research within human computer interface design borrowed its theoretical framework from cognitive psychology. The social sciences were slower to suggest methodologies and tools that could help designers access the emotional experien...

Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, 2010

Current design models and frameworks describe various overlapping fragments of designing. However, little effort exists in consolidating these fragments into an integrated model. We propose a model of designing that integrates product and process facets of designing by combining activities, outcomes, requirements, and solutions. Validation of the model using video protocols of design sessions demonstrates that all the constructs are used naturally by designers but often not to the expected level, which hinders the variety and resulting novelty of the concepts developed in these sessions. To resolve this, a prescriptive framework for supporting design for variety and novelty is proposed and plans for its implementation are created.

A new approach to theory building employing comparative interpretation of subject outlines is described. Outlines profiling scientific disclosure, problem solving, and design thinking are among many subject outlines correlated to uncover recurring kinds of information and related modes of purposeful thought. Examples of their use in critical thinking, content analysis, generative, and instrumental thinking are described. The intent is to explain how A Theory of Design Thinking was developed and to illustrate different ways it can be applied. Purposeful selection of existing subject outlines, their comparative interpretation, and generalization resulted in an ontological framework, similar to an academic rubric, through which to guide purposeful thought and design thinking about any subject.