Artifact - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2014

This paper calls for a new way of understanding and using methods in human-centred design. Design researchers have recently been active in developing new types of methods aimed at greatly improving their empathic understanding of people’s holistic experience, and their design imagination. The strong motivation for a new methodology stems from critical reflection on scientific rationalisation of human-centred design, which attempts to pin down the design process and develop abstract user models. Despite this, the design community has shown a tendency to use a conventional, scientific rationalisation when applying a stream of new design methods. In this paper, I analyse misinterpretations of the new design methods, which I call ‘empathic design methods’, and seek a more constructive way of understanding and describing how they actually work, going beyond ‘method-recipe’ convention. By analysing design students’ learning diaries, I investigate what learning is going on in method-making processes and demonstrate how those processes help design students to gather contextual knowledge of a design project and to develop their empathic understanding of users.

This paper examines the project, Urban Animals and Us, as a journey - or foray - into the ‘terrain vague’ between people and (other) animals with whom we share urban space. Through three design experiments developed around speculative prototypes and co-design tools, we attempt to bring ’wild’ urban animals - like magpies and gulls into contact with the residents of a senior retirement home, to explore what new practices can arise between, otherwise, unconnected life-worlds. We expand the notion of companion species from philosopher of science Donna Haraway and begin to position the current project within a growing interest in animals in contemporary design research. Through analysis of the design experiments and the subsequent discussion, we argue, that a foray into interspecies relations, can inform the practical research agenda, and, help to re-articulate the dominant anthropocentricity of design research.

This paper compares and contrasts two approaches to the university architecture studio as a contribution to discussions around design-led research. The first is the sequence of undergraduate studios undertaken under John Hejduk (1929-2000) at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, the second, the postgraduate Urban Design Studio at Cornell University, Ithaca, as directed by Colin Rowe (1929-1999). Student work is used to illustrate studio character, project type, and the diversity of architectural-urban problems addressed, ranging from Hejduk’s Nine Square, Cube, and Juan Gris studios to Rowe’s grid and fragment studies, infill or completion problems, and overall field or city scale projects. The paper highlights important differences in scale and project type while at the same time revealing a shared pedagogical and philosophical belief in abstraction, autonomy, and formal exercises in contrast to studios which emphasise functional brief, site specific studies, structure or building systems. From this it is conjectured that the Hejduk and Rowe approaches constitute exemplary models of studio-based research in architecture.

As we move deeper and into a service economy, differentiation of service offerings occurring through the customer experience is becoming central to the success of service providers. The emerging discipline of service design must find new ways to orchestrate settings for customers that will result in favourable and memorable service experiences allowing for differentiation to take place.

Services are defined through their intangibility where customer’s efforts are deemed inseparable from creating favourable experiences. The temporal nature of services mean that time is an important dimension. These factors can be a challenge for the service designer.

Around the sacred, rituals and myths are created to concretize and comprehend its intangible nature. These socially driven constructions give structure to time and seasons, narratives to fundamentals truths and meaning, whilst alleviating anxiety though life changes and allowing for euphoric experiences.

This paper draws from the theory relating to sacred, mainly from the social sciences, but also through a ‘bricolage’ approach, which aggregates relevant and useful concepts from the humanities. It argues that service design can benefit from the operationalization of theory relating to the sacred as a way to create favourable experiences and value for service customers.

Commonly the term “experiment” is in the first place associated with science, systematic methods and strict principles for the sake of knowledge creation. Nonetheless, the term is widely used across the boundaries of science. The arts attribute artworks likewise as experimental – a usage that is often claimed to be metaphorical, since experiments in the arts (including design) lack the essential attributes that define a scientific experiment.

Currently, research in the fields of science studies and literary science has revised these established conceptions as well as the primacy of the scientific experiment. The philosophical approach of New Experimentalism relativizes the deductive conception of hypothesis-testing experiments and argues for a broader view. Studies in literary science and cross-disciplinary comparison between the arts reveal an age-long experimental tradition and also common characteristics of experimental work in these fields. Awareness of these developments is essential for design researchers, theoreticians and historians in order to position, theorize and argue for design experiments accordingly.

The essay suggests avoiding a narrow, one-sided view of experiments in design and design research and points to the potential of practice-led design research to reconcile the “two cultures” that shape the field.

Experiments take various forms, have various purposes, and generate various knowledge; depending on how, when and why they are integrated in a design research study with a programmatic approach. This is what we will argue for throughout this article using examples and experiences from our now finalized PhD studies. Reviewing the prevailing literature on research through design the overall argument is that design experiments play a core role both in conducting the research, in theory construction and in knowledge generation across the different design domains and methodological directions. However, we did not identify sources that explicitly discuss and operationalize roles and characteristics of design experiments in different stages of programmatic design research. The aim of this article is therefore to outline a (tentative) systematic account of roles and characteristics of design experiments. Building upon Schön’s definition of experiments in practice we propose adding to the prevailing understanding of experiments in research through design understanding and operationalizing design experiments 1) as initiators or drivers framing a research programme, 2) as ways to reflect on and mature the research programme serving as vehicles for theory construction and knowledge generation and finally 3) as a ‘designerly’ approach to the written knowledge dissemination and clarification of research contributions.

This paper discusses drawing and interior dwelling as enstasic methodological practices that reach potentials beyond those available to thinking prescribed by the written word. In discussing the means by which the short film Munted (Ings 2011) was drawn into being, it suggests that drawn approaches to the design of filmic narratives might enable the designer to reach in unique ways, into ideation and outwards into the communicative content and appearance of the text.

This paper offers a typology for understanding design fiction as a new approach in design research. The typology allows design researchers to explain design fictions according to 5 criteria: (1) “What if scenarios” as the basic constructional principle of design fiction; (2) the manifestation of critique; (3) design aims; (4) materializations and forms; and (5) the aesthetic of design fictions. The typology is premised on the idea that fiction may integrate with reality in many different ways in design experiments. The explanatory power of the typology is exemplified through the analyses of six case projects.