2 Tactics
This book is about research through design, research by design, about
practice-based, practice-led, and constructive design research and similar
terms that refer to research where designing and making are a foundational
aspect of the research process (cf. Joost et al. 2016; Koskinen et al. 2011).
There are differences between these notions, but for the present purpose,
what is more important is how they share an orientation toward designing
and making as central to how the research process unfolds, and thus to
what constitutes the core ways of finding out new things. For instance, the
term “research through design” was initially proposed by Sir Christopher
Frayling (1993) as one of three used to describe different relations between
research and design, but has since been interpreted in various ways, as well
as become the name of a specific research community and conference series.
Consequently the precise meaning of the term has been equally mobile.1
While these research formats driven by design in many ways are just
another member of the family of different ways of doing design, they are
also different in that they to a significant degree are defined by an orientation
toward creating new knowledge. Asking researchers who have
done a practice-based PhD in design about the differences between practice
and research, Katharina Bredies notes that “the deep reflection, the profound
engagement with methodology, and the need for a highly structured
approach is often radically new to PhD students in design in the early stages
of their research. Likewise, the role that artefacts play in a research process
is often entirely different: they do not need to function, but rather to provide
explanatory power and serve as theoretical considerations in their own
right” (Bredies 2016, 15).
There are several reasons behind the increasing importance of research
in (and through) design. One key reason is that, as design problems become
10  Chapter 2
increasingly complex, the need for new knowledge in practice has become
a more pressing issue. In the context of changing architectural practice,
Michael Hensel and Fredrik Nilsson comment that “practice-orientation
in research entails, among other insights, the realization that reskilling
and thinking outside the established bounds is increasingly necessary to
solve contemporary complex design problems at the pace of practice. …
There are two important factors that more than others seem to drive the
need for research in architecture and contribute to the changes of architectural
practice we currently experience, and which seem to influence
practices of all kinds: the increasing complexity of architectural projects and
the digital technologies and their rapid development” (Hensel and Nilsson
2016, xvi).
Reasons for changes in design with respect to research, however, can also
be found within its institutional contexts and higher education. Whether
one likes it or not, design education is increasingly treated, interpreted,
planned, and evaluated as one of many different subjects in the university
apparatus—and the history of design research in many ways reflects this (cf.
Cooper 2016). Aspects ranging from curricula and pedagogics to the ways
each discipline articulates itself and its “knowledge production”2
are being
compared across subjects, with funding being allocated based on performance.
Thus, as much as we want the workings of research through design
to be meaningful to design and designing, it would be naive to think that
our institutional contexts and phenomena such as “academization” do not
influence what questions are being asked, and how, in our field as they are
in others.
Given how prevailing academic orientations tend to value theory over
practice, what the notion of “theory” actually refers to in a domain inherently
driven by practice, therefore, becomes quite important. If design in
this context and condition does not even make a claim to theory development,
then the old notion of design as a strictly applied art will take on a
whole new meaning. Of course, many other matters of concern are also
involved, such as what qualifies as a solid disciplinary foundation in the
academic context in question, what qualifies as research, what forms of
knowledge are privileged, and so on, but reducing theory in design to only
a matter of applying more fundamental ideas developed elsewhere would
be completely against the field’s development since the 1950s.
Tactics 11
Thus we have at least two reasons to take a better look at theory development
in the context of research through design. First, we need to articulate
and advance the way we understand theory in the context of design practices,
a matter of increasing importance in light of the increasing external
pressures and influences on design education. Second, while it is evident
that research through design has real merit, both academically and professionally,
and that it continuously gains traction as a research orientation,
there are few, if any, detailed accounts of how this research actually develops
its theory. While certainly exciting, it is also somewhat problematic
that we are developing a consensus that something works while still not
being able to articulate quite how. This book cannot hope to resolve such
issues, but it is an attempt to engage with them head-on to learn something
about what is at stake.
Anecdotal Evidence
Looking into what issues pertaining to theory emerge in this kind of design
research, let’s start with an example in which relations between theory and
practice appear, at least from the outside, to be somewhat obscured and
even weak. This anecdote stems from experiences and observations made
in situations such as project and paper reviews, PhD thesis defenses, and
similar situations of taking a step back and evaluating design research. Here
I will use the PhD thesis as an example, since it illustrates well what examining
a more complete piece of design research can be like. The story may
go something like this:
In the account of a design research process of a PhD thesis, there is a
rich body of theory in the early parts of the narrative. In the stages leading
up to initial problem formulations and design conceptualization, one finds
ample references to particular and developed theories, in many cases not
from just one area but from many. In fact, one might wonder, when looking
at the picture presented, how all these different theoretical orientations
will be joined without serious conflict. Overall consistency seems hard to
obtain, to say the least. Then, at some point, acts of design seem to take
over, and the narrative puts aside the more theoretical concerns to deal
with processes of making, leading up to a final description of the actual
design output (be that this output is a still an open-ended process, a collection
of things, or something else). A thesis of this sort will rarely return
12  Chapter 2
to the initial theories in the later stages. One might see a few references
back to certain concepts presented earlier, but in general the overall process
seems to have left that behind, leaving the reader with a rather vague idea
of what actually happened to the complex theoretical foundation that was
first proposed.
A typical response to this situation might be to think that it demonstrates
an inconsistent, and in many cases therefore also superficial, relation
to theory—especially if compared to how such matters are handled in
other areas of academic work. With respect to issues of theory development
in artistic and experimental design research, this also seems to indicate a
weak connection between theory and practice, not only because of neglect
but sometimes also because of explicit intent. Consider, for instance, the
following remark by Bill Gaver: “More fundamentally, I am suggesting that,
however valuable generalized theories may be, their role is limited to inspiration
and annotation. It is the artifacts we create that are the definite facts
of research through design” (Gaver 2012, 945).
Seen from the perspective of theory development being one of the primary
objectives of research, concerns have been raised more generally in
design, as here by Ken Friedman:
One of the deep problems in design research is the failure to develop grounded
theory out of practice. Instead, designers often confuse practice with research. Instead
of developing theory from practice through articulation and inductive inquiry,
some designers simply argue that practice is research and practice-based research is,
in itself, a form of theory construction. Design theory is not identical with the tacit
knowledge of design practice. (Friedman 2003, 519)
Whether Friedman’s analysis of the situation of theory-practice relations in
design holds or not, an unsettling aspect of the whole thing is that some
of the people who make these kinds of (seemingly problematic) accounts,
and thus exemplify this relation to theory, are successful design researchers,
who may have a significant influence on others’ research. True, it will
not suffice to say it is simply “implicit” or “tacit,” but to assume that they
do not quite know what they are doing with theory does not necessarily
appear as the only alternative interpretation, perhaps not even the most
likely. Further, since research through design often aims toward the conceptual,
it often directly addresses issues related to interpretation, categories,
values, and so on, making the assumption that the relation between theory
and practice is simply weak even more problematic. And so what if this
Tactics 13
initial reaction of ours, even if in just a few of these cases, is completely
misleading? What if we do not see what theoretical contributions are actually
there because we are looking for the wrong kind of closure?
A starting point for this investigation is the idea that maybe it is not
primarily the relation to theory per se that is the key problem in examples
such as the foregoing anecdote, but instead some kind of structural mismatch
between the character of the theories used and what design researchers
use them for—and as a consequence, issues related to what we expect
the theoretical impact and feedback to be like. In many ways, it is about
exploring a notion of theory development close to Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari’s idea about philosophy: “Concepts are not waiting for us readymade,
like heavenly bodies. There is no heaven for concepts. They must be
invented, fabricated, or rather created and would be nothing without their
creator’s signature” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 5). To begin this inquiry,
let us look at how theory is currently handled, and what tactics are in place
to address it.
Three Tactics
In numbers, design research might be a relatively small area, but in terms of
scope it is certainly not, as it ranges from art and design history to engineering
and technology development—but importantly also from the analytic
to the artistic. Throughout design’s, and thus design research’s, history, this
scope has caused a range of tensions between the technical-rational, on the
one hand, and the artistic, on the other. In many places that came to define
what industrial design is, such tensions have been very present. Consider
HfG Ulm, for instance, and the following remarks by Tomás Maldonado
(headmaster) and Horst Rittel (professor in design methods):
Although my own cultural orientation was strongly marked at that time by Neopositivism
… the presence of Adorno in Frankfurt represented for me, as it were,
a contradictory intellectual stimulus. … “The useless is eroded, aesthetically inadequate.
But the merely useful lays waste the world,” he once said to me in an attempt
to cool my enthusiasm for the industrial culture of usefulness. … These and other
reflections in the spirit of Adorno, and later also Habermas, led me to examine the
relationship between industrial culture and the culture industry, and to undertake
a critical investigation of the role played by “design” in between these two realities.
(Maldonado 1991, 223)
14  Chapter 2
In retrospect, it becomes apparent that the HfG’s [Ulm] most durable legacy was
the endemic internal strife that kept the institution going. It is widely believed
that the HfG was destroyed by the “policy conflict” between “designers” and
“theorists.” The truth is the exact opposite. The HfG stayed alive just so long as it
remained a hotbed of discord. (Rittel 1991, 118)
Or, as in the remarks by Andrea Branzi:
In Ulm’s case there has been the comic misunderstanding of treating designers as
scientists, simply because they were talking about science. In reality, that hill was
home to a group of extraordinary artists who, in the guise of inflexible scientists,
were looking for beauty, that beauty so necessary to human life and so fragile and
difficult to define and defend. (Branzi 1988, 42)
In design research, related historical tensions can, for instance, be
seen between advocates of a “design science” versus ones who favored a
“design discipline” (Cross 2001), not to mention in the significant difficulties
encountered in resolving basic discrepancies between what is valued
in professional, artistic, and scientific academic contexts (cf. Biggs and
Karlsson 2010).
To make practical delimitations possible, this inquiry is located within
the more specific context of what has been referred to as “research through
design,” “constructive design research,” and similar terms (Joost et al. 2016;
Koskinen et al. 2011), and domains such as industrial, product, interaction,
or service design. The kinds of design theory discussed here therefore
primarily concern questions related to basic concepts and structures tied to
artistic foundations in design, and to the articulation of what it is that we
think and do as we (indeed “we,” as design is typically a collaborative activity)
design. Examples of such basic concepts might, for instance, be form,
material, function, use, user, and so on, but also concepts we use to explain
how we structure design activities and their outputs, such as product or
project, and the logic they bring to the structure of the creative process.
I also want to place the discussion in the context of such design research
because it so clearly bears traces of both art and science and therefore has
to deal with the difficult conflicts arising from being in-between. From a
research point of view, positioning oneself closer to either art or science
would be easier, relatively speaking, but here we are looking for trouble,
so conflicting views are something we’re interested in. In what follows, I
briefly introduce three different ways of addressing theory versus practice
in design research, here called parallels, sequencing, and intermediaries.
Tactics 15
Parallels
The first and perhaps most obvious approach to the gap between theory
and practice is to acknowledge its existence but to build bridges across this
divide. To put it bluntly, this approach approximates trying to avoid the
problem and instead rely on existing research frameworks to create an overall
structure, keeping a clear distinction between the designing/making on
one side and more theoretical accounts on the other. However, in practice
this is still complicated to do, and one should not underestimate the effectiveness
of this approach. I will call this tactic parallels, as it keeps the two
domains parallel and largely independent from each other.
In its most straightforward form, the approach starts with an existing
design practice and then adds a reflective layer on top of it, often in retrospect.
It can, for instance, be seen in cases where a designer has been
involved in a series of artistic or other development projects, building a set
of works that is later used as a basis for a research project, such as doing
a PhD thesis. The designer then aims to make the transition from artistic
practice to research through elaborate reflection and theorization of these
works. To simplify, what we get from this structure is in many ways a design
practice combined with a research framework borrowed from (most often)
the humanities or social sciences.
While this may result in interesting ideas and other relevant results,
such parallels do not necessarily imply any significant changes to the way
the actual designing happens. More importantly, however, this approach
does not relate to theory as something addressed and potentially produced
within the design practice as such. Rather, it largely relates to theory as
something external. In a sense, what parallels do is to address the division
of labor between designer and design theorist by bringing the two
roles together in one overall project, but they do not necessarily challenge
the division of the subject matter that such disciplinary habits enforce. Or,
in other words, the research process tends to take on the character of the
designer articulating and theorizing her own design work as if she were an
(almost) external observer. Let us consider an example, how Maarit Mäkelä
articulates her “retroactive approach”:
I have written the main chapters only after the visual work process has ended, giving
a retrospective glance at my artistic work process as an artist-researcher and placing
my actions into the context of feminist theories. The speaker in my thesis is therefore
the artist-researcher, who is reviewing her intuitive work process in retrospect.
16  Chapter 2
… During the research process, the artist-designer reviews her artistic work process
and the created artifacts from a retrospective viewpoint and creates a dialogue between
her observations and interpretations on the one hand, and research literature
on the other. (Mäkelä 2006, 176)
This example comes from artistic research, and while the approach may
seem straightforward, it is still far from trivial to articulate its workings
and contributions. Indeed, it is in many ways unfair to reduce Mäkelä’s
approach to a matter of keeping things parallel, as it is an elaborate account
of how art and research interact and together create something she compares
to a hermeneutical circle. At the same time, it is important to distinguish
between the primary topic of this book—that is, design theory
in general, and design’s conceptual foundations in particular—and other,
related, but also very different discussions in artistic research concerning
what (kinds of) knowledge this research aims at articulating as it deals with
issues related to nonconceptual content and experience. Consider the following
statement by Henk Borgdorff:
We can justifiably speak of artistic research (“research in the arts”) when that artistic
practice is not only the result of the research, but also its methodological vehicle,
when the research unfolds in and through the acts of creating and performing. …
This is not to say that viewpoints in art criticism, social and political theory or technology
play no part in artistic research. As a rule they do play a part. The discourses
about art, social context and the materiality of the medium are in fact partially
constitutive of artistic practices and products. The distinctiveness of artistic research,
nevertheless, derives from the paramount place that artistic practice occupies as the
subject, method, context and outcome of the research. Methodological pluralism—
the view that various approaches deriving from the humanities, social sciences, or
science and technology may play a part in artistic research—should be regarded as
complementary to the principle that the research takes place in and through the
creation of art. (Borgdorff 2010, 46)
This gives us a different perspective on the reasons for keeping different
parts of the research effort parallel to each other: while they speak to
each other, they also remain separate because they are oriented toward
fundamentally different forms of knowledge. With respect to such questions,
design research may position itself almost anywhere on a spectrum
between the artistic and the analytic, and so the relevance of the chosen
position therefore depends highly on what the research in question aims
to achieve. Obviously, all research acknowledges that there is a critical relation
between methodology and what knowledge one may obtain, and in
Tactics 17
design research—with its span from art to science—this becomes particularly
important, as it is sometimes hard to see precisely where on such a
spectrum one is positioned and how that may differ from where others
stand.
Consider, for instance, the differences between the earlier remark by
Friedman and the statement by Borgdorff. Friedman states that “instead
of developing theory from practice through articulation and inductive
inquiry, some designers simply argue that practice is research and practicebased
research is, in itself, a form of theory construction. Design theory
is not identical with the tacit knowledge of design practice” (2003, 519).
In contrast, Borgdorff states that “the distinctiveness of artistic research,
nevertheless, derives from the paramount place that artistic practice occupies
as the subject, method, context and outcome of the research” (2010,
46). Perhaps some of the differences can be traced to one of them focusing
on theory, the other on research more generally, but it is nevertheless
clear that while both of them seem to talk about practice and its relation
to research, either they are not talking about the same kinds of practice
(Borgdorff addresses artistic ones, while Friedman refers to the importance
of inductive principles, hence likely advocating more analytical ones), or
there is some confusion as to what kind of methodology is associated with
what forms of knowledge.
There are many areas in which such uncertainty about what it is that we
actually speak of is highly present in design research. Consider aesthetics,
for instance. On a most general level, most of us would probably agree on
some notion related to expressions and experience, likely using historically
important ideas such as beauty or the sublime as reference points. But at
some point, perspectives would start to diverge. Design researchers oriented
toward history and the humanities would typically take off in directions
related to art discourse, what art and artistic expression are and how they
operate—and what it is to experience them. Researchers oriented toward
the behavioral sciences would turn to psychology and sociology and what
people experience in the encounter with things, aiming toward theories of
human experience and how it structures the world as perceived. Looking
in still another direction, the design researcher working with experimental
design examples to investigate new materials, forms, and expressions
might use the term “aesthetics” to describe the way these new things present
themselves. As when saying, “What do you think about the aesthetics
18  Chapter 2
of this?” as a way of addressing the structure of, or basic reasons behind,
their expressions. In many ways, this is all fine—as long as we understand
that all these questions and answers are bound to their particular contexts,
their particular methodological worldviews, and for the most part have
little bearing on the knowledge generated in other such worldviews. This is
not to say they exist in isolation or in a vacuum, but only that you cannot
replace the artistic methodology of a given inquiry with an analytical one
and expect to be answering the same questions, and vice versa.
Unless we understand that design research operates in a space between
art and science, and this space actually affords considerable diversity, it is
unlikely that we will be able to see that what we refer to as theory depends
highly on what parts of this spectrum we want our theories to speak about.
Indeed, it is crucial that we do not bring the evaluation criteria from one
part of the spectrum to the results from another, as doing so will not necessarily
tell us anything of interest and importance. Still, there are reasons
for thinking about certain approaches to relations between design practice
and design theory as a matter of parallels, and how certain aspects of
research happen after making—though the two, in cases such as Mäkelä’s,
have been arranged in an unfolding circular pattern. Although such projects
may range from the simplistic to the highly complex, we can think of
their basic structure as matter of parallels, as they tend to leave the artistic/
design practice fairly intact and the layer of theoretical articulation separate
from it.
Sequencing
The next tactic shares many similarities with the first one, with one fundamental
difference: whereas parallels keep making and theorizing separate,
the one I call sequencing explicitly aims to bring them together. In particular,
it aims to make theoretical notions influence designing in sometimes
fundamental ways.
Typically, the theories that we apply to making are not themselves from
the domain of design but from somewhere else. Significant examples of
introducing theoretical frameworks into design come from areas such as
psychology and sociology, from which theories for understanding and
describing human perception and action were brought into the development
of approaches such as user-centered design. There are also numerous
examples of how philosophical positions have been introduced to
Tactics 19
conceptually ground experimental design practices. Let us take a brief look
at some examples.
Design has a long history of borrowing conceptual as well as practical
frameworks from the medical and behavioral sciences. Ranging from
ergonomics to theories about attention and memory, there is a rich set of
concepts, criteria, and contexts to build on when designing things for an
intended user group and for evaluating to what extent they actually meet
the users’ needs. In Scandinavia, an early example is the Swedish Hemmens
Forskningsinstitut (Home Research Institute), which was founded in 1944
to study and improve living standards in general, and women’s working
conditions in the home in particular.3
The HFI’s approach was inspired by methods that had previously been
used to improve workplace efficiency in industrial contexts. Research
projects at the HFI ranged from calculating the optimal proportions of
kitchens to minimize unnecessary movement, to studying work effort and
different practices of preparing food. The institute’s findings and recommendations
played an important part in transforming Sweden’s standard
of living from among the poorest in Europe in the 1930s to one of the
highest. The HFI’s program also illustrates how user-centered design in
Scandinavia has its origins not only in the design work more typically
included in design history, but also in methodologies coming out of political
efforts to change society through design. In that sense, the HFI is
a precursor to contemporary socially and politically engaged design (cf.
Ericsson and Mazé 2011).
Turning to contemporary research through design, we find approaches
related to this early research on design and everyday things in, for instance,
design research building on ideas from experimental psychology. Several
design research environments have developed approaches based on the use
of systematic laboratory experiments to close the gap between theory and
design experimentation (e.g., Overbeeke, Wensveen, and Hummels 2006;
Stappers 2007; Koskinen et al. 2011). For instance, the connection between
theory and experiment in such projects can be developed through controlled
studies of specific design variables in tests with human subjects. This
structure of the research process allows design researchers to make significant
use of certain theories throughout the design process while at same
time keeping a space open for design experimentation. Using a highly iterative
research process, more developed relations between theory and design
Figures 2.1, 2.2
Photographs of archive materials: reports from Hemmens Forskningsinstitut (HFI), published
in 1947. The first (2.1) comes from a study of kitchens and cooking practices, documenting
the experimental setup for measuring work effort when preparing dough at different
workbench heights (Bergström, Boalt, and Lindgren 1947). The second (2.2) comes from a
study of the design and ergonomics of different kinds of knives, showing prototypes made
in modeling clay that were used for testing (the next iteration of prototypes was then made
in wood) (Carlgren, Nyberg, and Holme 1947). Thus two key aspects of user-centered design
methodology can already be seen here: tests with users to obtain both qualitative and quantitative
data, and iterative prototyping, where the fidelity and material quality of the prototype
increase over time.
Figures 2.1, 2.2 (continued)
22  Chapter 2
can evolve as the understanding of how the different design variables will
have an impact on the test situation grows deeper.
Such basic methodology is sometimes combined with, for example, a
philosophical framing that sets the basic conceptual orientations for the
design process. An interesting example of such an approach is work on
“embodied interaction” by scholars such as Kees Overbeeke and colleagues
in Eindhoven, in which notions from the phenomenology of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty and the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson were used
to form a design research agenda explored through a methodology combining
design making and experimental psychology (see also Dourish
2001).4
An example that works with a different kind of theoretical basis, and
philosophy rather than psychology, is Pelle Ehn’s (1989) use of Wittgenstein’s
notion of “language-games” to articulate what prototyping a new
(design) practice could be like, and how it works from a conceptual point
of view. In these projects from the early days of Scandinavian participatory
design, a key issue was how professionals could bring their expertise
into the design situation when their knowledge is hard or even impossible
to articulate in forms that could have an impact on the design decisions
made during development. Instead of getting stuck in issues of representation,
Ehn shifts the issue into participation and the problem of language
into a question of how shared language is first established through
language-games:
If designers and users share the same form of life it should be possible to overcome
the gap between the different language-games. It should at least in principle be possible
to develop the practice of design so that there is enough family resemblance
between a specific language-game of design and the language-games the design
of the computer artefact is intervening in. A mediation should be possible. (Ehn
1989, 116)
The result was a new kind of collaborative design, where prototypes are not
only prototypes of technical objects but the very building blocks used to
create new and shared language, in a sense moving toward prototyping a
shared “form of life.” Thus the process combined the use of philosophical
notions to open up issues in new directions, and the concrete interpretation
of these new directions through collaborative making.
Needless to say, this tactic I am calling “sequencing” has produced significant
results in design research, and as it will continue to do so, it will
Tactics 23
remain a most important part of our repertoire. Still, trying to look critically
at what this tactic brings, we need to ask if there are questions in design
that such an approach might have difficulties getting at. One such domain
seems to be issues pertaining to design’s own foundations. For instance,
there are few, if any, examples of how this tactic allows us to address and
critically examine issues pertaining to the artistic foundations that still
somehow also govern the designs developed. In a sense, while the psychological
theories allow us to examine certain specific design variables, the
project as a whole still depends on a design ability to craft something that
makes sense as a whole and can be experienced as such. While the theories
can be used to account for such wholes in more sweeping terms, it is difficult
to get to the specific issues that the actual designing needs to resolve (cf.
Djajadiningrat, Overbeeke, and Wensveen 2002). Similarly, while notions
such as language-games provide a different foundation for how we relate to
each other in and through making, they say little about the making as such;
and even after decades of participatory design, we still struggle to make
more precise accounts of, for example, the particularity of the expressions
of these prototypes beyond ideas about how “unfinished” things encourage
elaboration and discussion in ways that “finished” designs do not. Indeed,
such “aesthetics of the social” remain a largely unresolved matter in design
research.
Thus there seem to be limits to what aspects of design that sequencing
speaks about, and these limits stem from what areas the theories originally
engaged with. While this is not surprising, what is perhaps more important
is that this also suggests a deeper issue, namely, that what we see here
are basically various forms of applying theory with little chance of making
the transition to actually developing radically new theory. Another indication
that this might be the case is that design research only rarely develops
new contributions to the basic theories it engages with—which in turn suggests
that this does not automatically mean we are moving forward when
it comes to questions about how to initiate a kind of “basic” research in
design (as distinct from an “applied” one) that addresses design’s own foundational
issues. However, this is just speculation on my part. Given the
efforts currently going into design research conducted along these lines,
results may well suggest that this indeed offers a way forward for design
theory also in a more foundational sense.
24  Chapter 2
Intermediaries
The third tactic of interest to us here, which I will call intermediaries, aims
directly at the tension between the general and the particular. Addressing
questions about what kind of knowledge is needed, and produced, in
design, scholars have attempted to articulate theories at different levels of
abstraction so as to move them closer to practice. A historically important
illustration is Christopher Alexander’s (1979) pattern languages, which were
intended to structure and support collaborative planning and development
of housing and cities, and how this idea was later adapted in areas such as
computer programming and interaction design (e.g., Löwgren 2007). This
is related to what has been argued to represent a kind of intermediate-level
knowledge in design research, that is, something that is “more abstracted
than particular instances, without aspiring to be at the scope of generalized
theories,” as Kia Höök and Jonas Löwgren put it (2012, 23).
One of the most successful examples of how to orient oneself toward
more intermediate levels of theoretical abstraction—although never really
framed in this way—is the idea of specific form-languages, as in the instantiations
of a particular design semantics or semiotics. There have been
various versions of the idea that design decisions regarding form and functionality
can be understood as a kind of language based on parts and rules
for how they combine. In Swedish industrial design, the work of Rune
Monö gives us an informative illustration: “The product’s message is formulated
in a ‘language’ that we see, hear or feel. This language consists of
signs. Signs are the subject of semiotics. Within product semiotics, these
signs consist of forms, colors, sounds and so on—in other words, elements
that we usually associate with aesthetics” (Monö 1997, 21). Monö’s book
Design for Product Understanding (1997) is in many ways an instantiation—in
the form of an explicitly laid-out form-language—of the idea of product
form as something structured like language. As expressed by Klaus Krippendorff
and Reinhart Butter: “Just as a journalist creates informative messages
from a vocabulary of terms, so could a designer be thought of as having a
repertoire of forms at his disposal with which he creates arrangements that
can be understood as a whole in their essential parts and that are usable by
a receiver because of this communicated understanding” (Krippendorff and
Butter 1984, 5).
What is interesting in Monö’s remark is how he suggests that issues traditionally
understood as a matter of aesthetics can be addressed in terms
Tactics 25
of semiotics. Besides being a highly functional hands-on approach in a
context aiming for the design of useful products, this is also an explicit
answer to the complex question we briefly touched on earlier, namely, what
designers talk about when they talk about “aesthetics.” At that point, I suggested
that a designer/researcher who is primarily engaged in making, and
in the exploration of form, might use the term to quite simply refer to the
way a certain thing presents itself, its expressions. And in many ways, this
is precisely what Monö does here: explaining what we talk about when we
discuss what and how a thing presents itself to a user. What is also important
to note is that this form-language is tied to a particular kind of design
(although it might become widely spread), to a certain aesthetics, if you
wish. Thus it sits somewhere between the particular and the more general;
it is more widely applicable than a given design (or family of designs), yet
more constrained and context dependent than we would expect from a
more general theory of aesthetics.
As such, it addresses a basic tension that design theory cannot escape:
the issue of the particular versus the universal. Erik Stolterman described
this as follows (see also Nelson and Stolterman 2012):
Within the scientific project, the focus is on regularities, mechanisms, patterns,
relationships, and correlations with the attempt to formulate them as knowledge,
preferably in the form of theories. The intention is to form theories that constitute
knowledge that is valid and true at all times and everywhere. …
… In contrast to the scientific focus on the universal and the existing, design
deals with the specific, intentional and non-existing. Interestingly enough, dealing
with design complexity involves almost fundamentally opposite goals and preconditions
as does the scientific approach. This is especially true when it comes to the
notion of universality. In design practice, the goal is all about creating something
non-universal. It is about creating something in the world with a specific purpose,
for a specific situation, for a specific client and user, with specific functions and
characteristics, and done within a limited time and with limited resources. Design is
about the unique, the particular, or even the ultimate particular. (Stolterman 2008,
58–59)
Taking a step back, this points to a basic difference in what we need theories
in experimental design for compared to many other areas of research:
whereas others look toward the universal for support and stability, design
needs theories that support conceptualizing, articulating, making, communicating,
collaboratively creating, and so on, something new and particular.
Elsewhere I tried to describe this as a difference between aiming for abstract
images of the actual versus creating concrete images of the potential.
26  Chapter 2
Moving On
The previous sections have presented an overview of three established and
in many ways highly successful ways of addressing different aspects of theory
in design research engaged in making and experimenting. I have also,
however, argued that there are matters that these approaches struggle with.
As we move on and look for other alternatives and options, I would like to
point to two further aspects of the research associated with these tactics.
And (un)fortunately, they both relate to characteristics we typically do not
want theories to have: temporality and contextuality.
If we start with the implications of context, it comes from the tension
between the general and the particular. The tension between design’s
general orientation toward the particular and how theory aims to speak
about the general is a foundational problem. We have seen different ways
of addressing this tension, for instance, by developing situated accounts
that do the job of theory in a certain situation but do not have the reach
beyond the particular that we traditionally look for in theory development.
Thus, one of the aspects of design theory that we might have to
consider more carefully is to what extent we are dealing with situated
knowledge, and what that means for how we understand the reach and
scope of our doings.
The issue of situated knowledge is a complex topic in itself (cf. Haraway
1988); still, many of the questions asked here are quite basic. For instance,
how do we balance the general reach of a term against its effectiveness and
relevance in a specific context? Consider the problem of how we may easily
end up with definitions of foundational terms such as “form” that do
not transfer outside a particular context, thus making critical inquiry across
such contexts more or less impossible, as there is little chance of talking
about the same thing. Or, equally unproductive, that we end up with general
notions that fail to address practice. Consider, for instance, how most
academic discussions of what design in general is seem to have little or no
impact on how actual designing happens and is communicated.
Obviously, that theories have properties related to reach and explanatory
scope is an issue in all areas of research, but in our case, this is a foundational
problem because of the tension between the particular and the
universal. Perhaps this is not a matter we should seek to resolve in the sense
of seeking to dissolve it, but rather something that calls for a more explicit
Tactics 27
articulation of the tensions between the particular and the general. I turn
to this issue in the next chapter.
Another aspect that calls for more attention in the three tactics I have
discussed is how our responses to difficult matters all seem to result in temporal
solutions. While some of this can be understood as a consequence of
how designing is an unfolding process, there is something important about
how temporality matters here—ranging from the anecdotal example in the
beginning of the chapter to the various forms of turn taking between making
and theorizing discussed above.
It is difficult to define what design is,5
but there are shared features
among the family of definitions offered. In particular, definitions frequently
refer to design’s orientation toward the future, toward the currently
nonexistent; what John Chris Jones expressed in his definition of design
as “the initiation of change in man-made things” (Jones 1992, 6) or what
Herbert Simon stated as “courses of action aimed at changing existing situations
into preferred ones” (Simon 1996, 112). Thus, to make things even
more complex for the prospect of theorizing within experimental practice,
the basic tension increases further as we add another seemingly contradictory
relationship: the one between inductive processes aiming to uncover
what remains constant and stable, and design’s general orientation toward
change (cf. Nelson and Stolterman 2012).
The concern for change seems to drive designers toward methods:
whatever the field may lack in terms of theory development, it certainly
compensates for when it comes to methods. In terms of basic character,
methods more obviously support processes of change, as they explicitly
relate to the temporal and the unfolding, whereas theory traditionally
builds on the stable and the constant. Another way, perhaps, of interpreting
this situation is that methods offer a different relation between question
and answer, between problem and solution, compared to the typical
orientation of theories. Whereas we tend to want theories to rest firmly
on the answering side of the equation, we are more comfortable having
methods primarily engaged in the questioning part. And since designing,
at least ideally, orients itself around problems and questions opening up
something, making something, either we need to bring theory there, or else
it may easily be reduced to tools for reflecting on the results.
Moving on, an idea to explore further might therefore be to what extent
design theory is set up to be present when answering versus in what ways
28  Chapter 2
it is meant to support questioning. Again, this is not by any means unique
to design research—but again, things become more hands-on in our case,
the primary reason being how we aim to initiate change through design.
Not leaving the world as is means that the questioning-answering relation
is a matter of agency. We cannot articulate methods without certain central
concepts: our design methods may be as unorthodox as anything, but if
our work at the same time still relies on conservative definitions of foundational
terms, these definitions will most certainly retain a fossilizing influence.
Or in other words, we can be as inventive as ever when working with
the design of a thing belonging to a certain category, but if the definition of
the category itself is left untouched, then we will remain firmly within its
frames. Indeed, I argue that this is one of the reasons why certain aspects of
design remain so remarkably uncontested despite practice otherwise undergoing
such significant change. Therefore I will return to the issue of definitions
we use to articulate what kind of designing we are doing, and how
such definitions can also be more sensitive to unfolding and temporality,
in chapter 4.