Shared Conversations Across Design

Abstract

Introduction Design is an ubiquitous part of human life, from mundane, day-to-day activities to the most sophisticated concerns of society. Yet it is generally studied from specific disciplinary viewpoints, where a field develops strongly focused academic traditions to meet the needs of that field. For example, engineering design research places significant emphasis on prescribing how complex design processes should be carried out;1, 2 architectural research is greatly concerned with the creation of design ideas;3, 4 product designers are concerned with generating and meeting customer needs;5 fashion designers are interested in the cultural context of their products.6 This characterization of different interests in different fields is neither rigid nor exclusive—there is significant overlap between the interests of particular fields. Nevertheless, it draws attention to a fragmented picture of design as a whole. This paper is concerned with the experience of being a designer and doing design, regardless of the discipline in which the designer works. We want to draw a rich picture of what it means to be a designer by comparing design practices across projects and design domains. Previous researchers have more often aimed to establish general criteria by which core concepts in design research and theory-making can be related to designing and designs.7, 8 They have compared design activities in order to define the general principles across all of design. Other work does not always set out explicitly to be generic but does so by implication when careful analysis of design instances leads to general principles of design, as in the general paradigm of the reflective practitioner, which was derived from a detailed study of conceptual design in architecture.9 By contrast, our aim is to consider the patterns of behavior that designers display across a variety of fields. Here we may find that while professional concerns, such as the need to meet customer requirements or general market trends, are often the same, their manifestations can be very different. Thus, we have developed a research method that brings to design research the benefits of phenomenological analysis, emphasizing comparison of personal experience rather than trying to describe truths that are independent of any person. As described in a previous paper,10 we ran a series of