Artful surfaces: an ethnographic study exploring the use of space in design studios

Abstract

A largely overlooked aspect of creative design practices is how physical space in design studios plays a role in supporting designers' everyday work. In particular, studio surfaces such as designers' desks, office walls, notice boards, clipboards and drawing boards are full of informative, inspirational and creative artefacts such as, sketches, drawings, posters, story-boards and Post-it notes. Studio surfaces are not just the carriers of information but importantly they are sites of methodic design practices, i.e. they indicate, to an extent, how design is being carried out. This article describes the results of an ethnographic study on the use of workplace surfaces in design studios, from two academic design departments. Using the field study results, the article introduces an idea of ‘artful surfaces’. Artful surfaces emphasise how artfully designers integrate these surfaces into their everyday work and how the organisation of these surfaces comes about helping designers in accomplishing their creative and innovative design practices. Using examples from the field study, the article shows that artful surfaces have both functional and inspirational characteristics. From the field study, three types of artful surfaces are identified: personal; shared; and project-specific. The article suggests that a greater insight into how these artful surfaces are created and used could lead to better design of novel display technologies to support designers' everyday work.

Keywords:

• ethnography
• design studio culture
• artefacts
• space
• design

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the European IST Programme Project AMIDA (FP6-0033812). This article only reflects the authors' views and funding agencies are not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained herein. We thank Kees Overbeeke, Caroline Hummels, Mark Baskinger, Mascha van der Voort and the Master's students of Industrial Design at Technical University of Eindhoven and University of Twente for participating in our study. Thanks also to Lynn Packwood for proof reading.

Notes

This article discusses only a subset of our field study results. Elsewhere we have discussed how physical artefacts support coordinative (Vyas et al. 2008) and experiential (Vyas et al. 2009a) roles and elaborated on the specific practices designers apply to support creativity (Vyas et al. 2009b) in the design studio culture.

One such tool that we have designed using the results of this field study is called Cooperative Artefact Memory (CAM) that allows designers to collaboratively store relevant information on to their physical design artefacts in the form of messages, annotations and web links. A detailed description and use of this tool was presented in a NordiCHI conference in 2010 (Vyas et al. 2010).