Locating design phenomena: a methodological excursion

Abstract

An analysis is presented of a design meeting in which users and other stakeholders enter the design dialogue as ‘others’ who are talked about and spoken for in absentia, with particular attention paid to the circumstances in which these others are invoked. This lays an empirical foundation from which to premise a methodological discussion about researchers' practices of identifying design phenomena to analyse. In many analytical treatments, the circumstances in and through which phenomena (e.g. designers' actions) emerge tend to be stripped from those phenomena when they are treated as objects of analytical interest. This hides the actual work that designers are doing, work that is only recoverable through consideration of the circumstances in which design moves are made in interaction. Such analytic practices can be prone to generate an alien or ironic understanding of designers' work. This does not condemn such analytic approaches, but the point remains that there is much of importance that ‘falls through the cracks’ in such analytical treatments, particularly since a pivotal objective of many forms of design research is to account for design activity.