This special issue of CoDesign presents papers selected from work initially presented at the 10th Design Thinking Research Symposium (DTRS 10), which took place at Purdue University in the fall of 2014 (Adams and Siddiqui Citation2016). Working from a common data set, the participants of DTRS 10 analysed video, transcript and artefactual data from a variety of disciplinary and methodological lenses. The goal of the DTRS international symposium series is to create an environment where researchers from a variety of design-related disciplines can come together to explore the nature and nurture of design expertise. DTRS 10 is also part of an ongoing history of collaborative inquiry into common research data sets that McDonnell and Lloyd (Citation2009a) describe as a ‘landmark in design thinking research’: Analysing design activity for DTRS 2 (Dorst Citation1995; Cross, Christiaans and Dorst Citation1996), About: designing – analysing design meetings for DTRS 7 (McDonnell and Lloyd Citation2009a, Citation2009b) and Articulating Design Thinking for DTRS 9 (Rodgers Citation2012, Citation2013).
The 2014 symposium theme was ‘design review conversations’ – conversations between those who give and those who receive feedback, guidance, critique or mentoring during a design review. Design reviews are a fundamental aspect of design education and practice and provide a fertile venue for making manifest design thinking. Design coaches draw on their prior experience to point out strengths and weaknesses, call attention to potential roadblocks and provide alternatives to consider in order to help students improve their work. Students must justify and explain their ideas, modelling professional behaviour in the process and, through reflective practice, hone their own design thinking and develop their own professional identities. Frequently, design reviews revolve around an artefact and the interactions, both material and social, which surround its description and evaluation. As such, design reviews contain abundant non-textual and non-verbal information. By providing a video data set of design reviews, the organisers of DTRS 10 attempted to make this rich source of information available to researchers for analysis.
The shared data set, made available to symposium participants 10 months prior to the conference, contained 81 videos with time-stamped transcripts and associated project documentation, syllabi and summative evaluation reports (Adams Citation2016). To enable breadth of perspective and comparative analyses, the disciplines included in the master data set spanned choreography, entrepreneurial design, industrial design, mechanical engineering and service learning design (see Table ). Review types included individual and group, formal and informal, interim and final (Oh, Ishizaki, Gross, and Do Citation2012). In most cases, data were gathered from the same student groups multiple times over the duration of their design project. These design review conversations provided a common focus of inquiry for symposium participants to apply diverse perspectives and methodologies and fostered multiple perspective collaborative inquiry as participants came together to share findings and seek connections across papers before, during and after the symposium. Collectively, participants generated substantive connections across perspectives, contributed to existing theories or frameworks, and generated new perspectives and approaches that broaden or challenge existing perspectives.
Table 1. Summary of DTRS 10 design review conversations data set.
When selecting essays for this special issue, the editors focused on visualisation as a common, recurring symposium theme. Like all of the projects presented at DTRS 10, the papers presented in this issue were drawn from a shared pool of data. Whereas several analyses focused only on transcripts of the verbal conversations, the discussions in this special issue take ‘the visual’ broadly conceived, as either or both a site of inquiry (e.g. gaze, gesture or other non-verbal interaction) and a source of evidence (e.g. frame-by-frame analysis, physical and verbal interactions, embodied discourse) in diverse and complementary ways. The authors attended to the visual and material within the videos as a significant aspect of design reviews and the social processes analysed, or created visualisations to help readers make sense of the data through pattern recognition and comparison at a glance.
While the visual and material might provide a common thread, it is also important to acknowledge differences. DTRS as a community embraces scholars from a number of disciplines employing diverse methodologies. The perspectives authors brought to bear traversed diverse intellectual communities, each with their own language, concepts and traditions – e.g. applied cognitive science, communication, computer science, human ecology, engineering, graphic design, product design, psychology and philosophy. Authors employed diverse methodologies in combination with theoretical traditions spanning actor–network theory, boundary objects, conversational analysis including turn-taking, interaction analysis between gestures-talk-representations, ethnomethodology, genre analysis, professional vision and reflective practice.
Despite this diversity, there were nevertheless many interconnections among the papers. Authors drew on similar frameworks and methodologies, although they may have used them in different ways. For example, there was at least one shared reference across the papers, with the paper by Tenenberg, Socha and Roth having the most shared references (8) with the paper by Lloyd and Oak. This provides a pathway for how readers of this special issue can embrace the complexities within design review situations to build a rich interwoven picture of intersecting ideas and insights. With this in mind, as the editors, our goal has been to provide a cross-disciplinary sample of work on the visual, material, interactive and embodied aspects of design review conversations. The seven papers selected for this special issue are summarised in the following paragraphs.
In ‘Seeing design stances’, Tenenberg, Socha and Roth make visible the stances designers take as bodily performances in relation to one another in design critiques to situate seeing design stances of others as a central aspect of the joint performance of designing that constitutes a design critique. Stances represent relations designers establish between themselves, their spatial discursive frames and the objects they envision and bring to life via gesture, gaze, orientation and body movements. The authors investigated the industrial design undergraduate and graduate student videos using repeated frame-by-frame analyses to illustrate four different stances participants adopt and shift between, and how in social relations these stances are mirrored, taken up, responded to and elaborated upon by other participants. They also demonstrate the kinds of communication breakdowns that can occur in a design critique when embodied stances are not a shared resource.
In ‘Giving and Responding to Feedback through Visualizations in Design Critiques’, Tolbert et al. provide illustrative cases of how students and instructors navigate the inherent ambiguity experienced in industrial design reviews using a communication-as-constitutive theoretical lens. They draw on video data and this visualisation lens to characterise interactions in design reviews as an ongoing, situated and embodied communication process whereby human and non-human agents engage in sense-making conversations. Here, the non-human agents in the review setting (i.e. documents, sketches, prototypes) embody the ambiguity in a design in ways that enable the human agents (i.e. instructors) to operate as ventriloquists, speaking for the non-human agents, to surface issues that lack certainty and require sense-making.
In ‘Prototypes and the Politics of the Artefact: Visual Explorations of Design Interactions in Teaching Spaces’, McNair, Groen and Paretti combine science and technology studies perspective on material culture with discourse analysis to explore in situ design reviews conducted for mechanical engineering and industrial design undergraduate juniors and seniors in a classroom setting. The authors find that ‘robust artifacts’ facilitate ‘robust discourse’ which leads to a more collaborative design review and in turn develops the potential for innovation and success in students’ projects. The significance of the visual for this project exists in the ability to analyse discursive exchanges as they occurred around, through and with (or without) artefacts.
In ‘“Throw one out that’s problematic”: Performing authority and affiliation in design education’, Lloyd and Oak mine the visual data to analyse interactions related to authority and affiliation as they play out during design review conversations. Using frame-by-frame analysis, they show how verbal and non-verbal cues affect the quality and nature of the reviews. The combination of speech, stance, gaze and gesture that define the roles of student and instructor can contribute or detract from the openness of the conversation. The authors find that managing ‘face’ in these interactions governs much of the interaction among students in the review, leading to a disinclination to speak and lack of critical analysis of peer work.
In ‘Visualizing Professional Vision Interactions in Design Reviews’, Sonalkar, Mabongunje and Leifer utilise a visual scheme, Interaction Dynamics Notation, to analyse the moment-to-moment reciprocal interactions between individuals in design reviews. This interaction framework provided the groundwork for uncovering patterns that contributed to the display and communication of ‘professional vision’, which is to say the way of seeing and interpreting that is specific to a particular professional group. The authors find four patterns that facilitate the exchange of professional vision: question asking, supportive behaviour, building-on behaviour and humour. They find having a visual notation scheme provides greater accessibility to the data and may allow one to use interaction analyses as feedback to students on how to improve interactions during design reviews.
In ‘The Development and Manifestation of Empathy within Design: Findings from a Service-learning Course’, Hess and Fila make visible the interactions between empathic techniques and design processes. By analysing videos of student–coach conversations for an on-site service-learning design project, they make a case for how empathy is not peripheral to a design process but rather interwoven into the fabric of design. They illustrate this by creating representations of the empathically guided design pathways students used to develop three different concepts. These pathways show how empathic techniques were a core component of dynamically contributing to broadening and re-evaluating an emergent holistic understanding of user’s needs and whether or not solution concepts would be likely to meet those needs.
In ‘A Visual Tool for Analysing Teacher and Student Interactions in a Design Studio Setting’, Fereira, Christiaans and Almendra provide a visual method for representing data on teacher and student interactions. Data for the visualisations they created were generated through a Design Grammar Model (DGM), which allowed the researchers to generate categorical comparisons for tracking practices of (shared) visual language in the design process. For this exploratory study, the researchers focused on interactions between teachers and junior-level industrial design undergraduates, and six design qualities: materialisation, function, communication, elements of form, organisational principles and human factors. The generated graphs depict the creation of form as tightly related to the combination, variety and frequency with which the named qualities (design grammar) were articulated in design review sessions. The results suggest that the success of a form is related to the level of shared ‘fluency’ – dense interconnected interactions across the design grammar. The authors offer their DGM as a heuristic device to track students’ (and teachers’) development of fluency over time.
We hope that viewing this process from these diverse but intersecting vantage points might open new possibilities for interdisciplinary understanding, create space for pedagogical insight and encourage a more systematic conversation about how visual and material elements and processes are part of design thinking research. On the latter point, these papers can be seen as an argument for making connections between design research and the growing body of work on data visualisation and information visualisation. Such connections would allow more attention to both the aesthetics and mechanics of visualising knowledge. We would like this special issue to be a jumping off point for such a conversation.
In terms of co-designing, the papers clearly demonstrate the participatory and collaborative exchanges that underpin design reviews. Again and again, productive reviews are revealed to be contingent, negotiated and elicited through mediating objects, gestures, images, and not unidirectional (e.g. knowledge flowing from experts to novices). On this topic, this special issue represents only a small sample of the entire palette presented at DTRS 10. A comprehensive and thematic overview can be found in the forthcoming, Analyzing Design Review Conversations, which provides an overview of DTRS 10 and the data set, chapters describing the experiences for supporting collaborative inquiry into design review conversations, as well as 19 research chapters across themes of design inquiry, discourse, interaction, being and coaching. There is also a special issue of Design Studies (forthcoming in 2016). DTRS 10 research papers and presentation are available on the symposium website (http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/dtrs/2014/).
Funding
This work was supported by a Purdue University Global Engineering Program International and Global Impact grant, and a National Science Foundation grant (EEP-0748005).
Purdue University, School of Engineering Education
[email protected]
Shannon McMullen
Purdue University, School of Liberal Arts
[email protected]
Michael Fosmire
Purdue University, Purdue Libraries
[email protected]
References
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- Adams, R. S., and J. Siddiqui, eds. 2016. Analyzing Design Review Conversations. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.
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