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In my last editorial piece (‘Social Distancing’, Vol. 23, Iss. 3) I discussed the then quite recent emergence of the Coronavirus and the huge impact it had quickly had on our daily lives. Of the numerous ways we all had to adapt, the ones of particular interest from a design point of view were the myriad ways in which people had ‘hacked’ or innovated temporary design solutions to immediate problems out of sheer necessity.
As things have progressed, and it is becoming clear that a quick fix is unlikely to happen, many of those temporary hacks have, as predicted, been replaced with more permanent, professionally designed alternatives. The hastily taped distance markers and direction arrows on the floors inside and outside of shops, supermarkets and banks have been supplanted by well-designed graphic information stickers. Permanent Perspex screens have been fastened to countertops between shop workers and their customers, superseding the flimsier, provisional barriers shop owners had erected. Public parks have had circles painted on the lawns for families to sit in at a safe distance from others, and open-plan offices and pubs and restaurants have rearranged their interiors or landscaped their outdoors areas to enable people to return. As we slowly come to terms with this ‘new normal’, all kinds of newly-designed solutions continue to emerge.
However, while reading the articles for this issue, I was struck by another implication for design stemming from these new requirements for interpersonal relations—how will it affect the practice of design research itself? How likely are participants to agree to lengthy face-to-face, semi-structured interviews with researchers they have never previously met? Can those interviews, with all their rich underlying subtleties of body language and subliminal cues, be satisfactorily substituted by the blunt instruments that are Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams or other online meeting spaces? As more and more design research relies on participatory research methods, what then for the co-design workshop? And as for ethnographic research, in particular the role of the participant observer, where does one begin to catalogue the barriers to be overcome? Reading these articles with that in mind it becomes clear that the societal and behavioural changes the Coronavirus has wrought are certain to drastically alter the ways in which we as design researchers go about our work, and will need much careful thought and deliberation in the search for solutions.
This issue opens with just such an article: Tessier’s ‘Insights on Collaborative Design Research’ analyses 75 published articles to propose ‘a more precise use’ of the term ‘collaborative design’. Using activity theory as a framework for analysis, a series of peer-reviewed design journals was selected and searched for relevant collaboration terms, and the reference lists of those articles flagged as containing them were examined. The resulting 41 definitions of collaborative design show the range of interpretations, and their organization into meaningful categories provides a valuable overview. This article is followed by Taffe and Kelly’s ‘Exchanging Expertise Across Cultures’, which argues the case for the use of participatory design practices when undertaking knowledge exchange projects between different cultural contexts. The case study discusses an Australian design team’s involvement in a project to design a cultural museum with a community in Borneo, within which the team became facilitators helping the community to fulfil their own needs. The discussion explores the issues of the internal politics and power relationships involved in such participatory design studies.
Cultural differences are also the focus of Li and Höltä-Otto’s article ‘The Influence of Designer’s Cultural Differences on the Empathic Accuracy of User Understanding’. Their study tackles the seemingly insurmountable problem of the need to understand the user’s experiences of designed solutions in a global market that involves users from so many different cultural backgrounds. To explore this problem, the researchers measured the accuracy of designers’ empathic understanding of culturally different consumers’ responses to particular products. Predictably, perhaps, the study concludes that the accuracy of the designers’ understanding diminishes the more cross-cultural the group of consumers. However, the authors conclude, the designer’s own cultural backgrounds also influence their understanding of the consumers’ experiences. Additionally, they found that reading user surveys alone did not provide the designers with understanding—they also had to directly observe the users interacting with the products involved, which clearly has a number of implications for future studies.
Observing people’s reactions to stimuli is key also to Kim and Hong’s article ‘How Virtual Exhibition Presentation Affects Visitor Communication and Enjoyment’. Their research examines the ways in which different forms of presentation affect users’ experiences of exhibitions. Concentrating on virtual exhibitions, the study compares the use of 3D and 2D forms of object presentation and their effects on the visual communication of information. The findings indicate that both forms were found enjoyable by audiences, but at different points in the exhibitions, and perhaps surprisingly, that 2D presentations were considered more effective in communicating information than 3D presentations.
Two articles address issues of meaning and interpretation. In ‘Personal Meaning Organization’, Sylleros, Taladriz, Bernasconi, Pizarro and Cadiz take the stance that psychologists and designers are both concerned with human meaning, and examine the adoption of the psychologist Vittorio Guidano’s model for organizing personal meaning and applying it to the field of design research. The authors see personal meaning organization as a plausible explanation of how people interpret reality from a set of personally embodied meanings, which are held within a meaning structure that makes sense of the knowledge they are presented with. Providing similar structures of meaning to interpret people’s responses to design issues can provide a way forward for uncovering a variety of potential design solutions. Nickpour’s article ‘What is Information Behaviour in Design?’, on the other hand, looks at how designers make sense of the typically large amounts of information they are presented with when undertaking a design project. Using a mixture of theoretical and empirical methods, the results indicate there are seven key dimensions of information, enhancing the understanding of practicing designers’ use and requirements of people information throughout the design process.
The final two articles in this issue address reading and writing. Firstly, Thiessen, Beier and Keague’s article ‘A Review of the Cognitive Effects of Disfluent Typography on Functional Reading’ investigates the ‘disfluency effect’—the counterintuitive phenomenon whereby increasing the difficulty of the reading material can have a positive effect on information retention. In other words, the perceptual fluency of a text—how clear and easy to recognize the letters and words of a text appear to be—has an effect on how much attention is perceived to be necessary to pay when reading the text, and consequently can slow down reading speeds and increase the retention of facts. This is understandably problematic for typographic designers, whose basic aim is to enhance the legibility and hence improve the readability of text. Before accepting this effect fully and changing the typographic rulebooks, the authors conclude that further collaborative research between psychologists and typographers is needed to progress our understanding of reading processes and materials. Lastly is Ferreira’s article ‘Writing is Seeing – Towards a Designerly Way of Writing’. In a (thankfully, given the subject) well-written article, the author acknowledges the problem of poor academic prose and the tendency for academic writing to fail to convey complex ideas in an understandable way. The author believes that while designers are not particularly known for their writing skills, the issue can be seen as a design problem that could benefit from being exposed to the different ways in which designers think. Ferreira proposes that Pinker’s ‘Classic Style’ of writing academic prose, in which the key is to ‘have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which [the writer] is pretending to communicate’ can be directly compared to design practice, where it is commonplace to put forward conceptual scenarios in which proposed design solutions might operate.
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Finally, we announce a new Call for Submissions for a Special Issue on The Value of Design Driven Entrepreneurship: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/design-driven-entrepreneurship. Authors are invited to submit full articles, PhD Study Reports, or book reviews. Guest edited by Dr Ida Telalbasic, the themed issue will be published in Vol. 24 Issue 5 in September 2021.
Until the next time, keep safe.
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