Seeing design stances

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the stances that designers take in relation to one another in design critiques. Analysis of audiovisual recordings of critiques between students and professional designers in industrial design in the DTRS 10 data-set reveals that design concepts not only are verbally narrated but also come to life in gesture, gaze, orientation and body movement. In these bodily performances, participants adopt and shift between several identified stances, which we call inscriptional, third-person, first-person and phenomenal. In social relations, these stances are mirrored, taken up, responded to and elaborated by the other participants. The critique itself, then, can be seen as a dialogical movement by the participating designers through a set of stances. By comparing a case in which participants are collocated to a case in which the participants are at a geographic distance facilitated only by real-time audio and shared computer display, we conjecture that this responsive mirroring and elaboration of stance can be hindered when participants do not have visual access to one another and thus increase the chances of communication breakdowns.

Keywords:

• Design stance
• embodiment
• gesture
• design critique

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This and the other names of participants in the design critiques are pseudonyms.

2. We use the following notational conventions for the transcripts, standard in conversation analysis. Unless modified, all words are written with small letters. A period in parentheses indicates a pause of greater than 0.1 s in length. Descriptions in double parentheses are transcriber’s comments. Colons indicate lengthening of a phoneme, about 0.1 s per colon. Square brackets in consecutive lines by different speakers indicate overlap of speech between these speakers. Speech within angle brackets preceded by ‘p’ (or ‘pp’) standing for ‘piano’ (or ‘pianissimo’) indicates lower (or much lower) speech volume than normal, as in ‘<<pp>scavenger hunt>’. Speech within angle brackets preceded by ‘len’ (or ‘all’) indicates lento (or allegro), i.e. slower (or faster) than normal speed. A word inside parentheses ending with ‘?’ indicates difficulty in hearing the word on the recording and that the word in parentheses is the closest approximation. A question mark inside a parenthesis is a word that could not be approximated. Capital letters indicate speaker’s emphasis. An equal sign at the end of a word indicates that there is no hearable pause prior to the next word uttered. Downward and upward arrows indicate the pitch jumping downward and upward. The punctuation marks ‘,?;’ indicate movement of pitch (intonation) toward the end of an utterance: slightly and strongly upward, slightly and strongly downward, respectively.