Re-reading Design Methodology and the “Toolbox” Metaphor

Abstract

In 2006 Paul Dourish gave a paper about ethnography and its implication for creating design intervention and form. This is part of the basis of this paper, which illustrates the need to develop critical interrogations of what Dourish called a “toolbox of methods.” The paper argues that the metaphor of the “toolbox” suggests a departure from the reflexivity of the social sciences, where theory and method are continuously questioned and interrogated. The article concludes with a recommendation for how design practice might benefit from such reflexivity.

Keywords:

• design methods
• design practice
• boundary object
• social science

Notes

1. Kimbell (2012, 131) writes of her project that the “distinctive feature is to propose shifting the level of analysis in research away from individuals to practices, conceived of as a nexus of minds, bodies, things, and the institutional arrangements within which designs and their users are constituted”.

2. In their 1989 text, Star and Greisemer discussed boundary objects as repositories, or collections of objects ordered in a standardized way. They gave as an example “the creation of the state of California itself as a boundary object for workers at the museum. The maps of California created by the amateur collectors and the conservationists resembled traditional roadmaps. … The maps created by the professional biologists, however, shared the same outline of the state … but were filled in with a highly abstract, ecologically-based series of shaded areas representing ‘life zones’, an ecological concept.” In their standardization, boundary objects served “as methods of common communication across dispersed work groups” (Star and Greisemer 1989, 411–412).

3. Star and Greisemer developed the contextual use of a boundary object based on its dual readings, within a particular social group (as “well-structured”) and the use of it between groups in negotiation (as “ill-structured” meanings are developed out of a “sketchier” and more tentative series of readings where different groups arbitrate different viewpoints). Moving between the two for a participant is a method of “tacking between.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Scott Townsend

Scott Townsend teaches in the Department of Graphic Design, NC State University. His interests lie in representational issues related to transnational contexts, and the design of “site-specific” interactions. His recent work and projects have taken place in Tokyo, central and southern Europe, the United States, Mexico, and other locations.