Doing Research in Design

Christopher Crouch, Jane Pearce

• Publisher: Berg Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857852199
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Doing Research in Design presents new ways of thinking about the relationship between design and research by positioning design as a social as well as a material practice. This approach emphasises the social consequences of design decisions as well as the importance of the efficient functioning of a design. Doing Research in Design argues that design promotes social change and that, in order to understand that change, designers must turn to social science research methods. The book outlines the relationships between thinking and doing in design - and makes explicit links between design, research, philosophy and sociology - and then examines four central social research methodologies in practice. The aim of Doing Research in Design is to provide anyone involved in the field of design with the knowledge and understanding of the best methods to plan and conduct their research.

1
Positioning the Designer

The world of designers is already close to the world of researchers. This chapter starts by positioning designers within their everyday practices, and then positions those practices in a broader context of what goes on around them, with the intent to establish an ‘ecology’ of design. An understanding of what a designer does and how that practice sits within a design ecology will provide concepts that can be used later to understand the practices of research and of the researcher.

A basic strategy for both the designer and the researcher when faced with a problem to solve is to ask questions. Using this strategy, a series of questions might be asked about what designers do. Is a designer someone who possesses a specific skill that is applied to a specialist area, or someone who has a set of transferable skills that can be applicable across a range of specialist areas? Does a designer produce objects, or systems and strategies to make things happen? Does the designer work individually or as part of a team? A questioning process like this could be endless in the attempt to describe everything the designer does, and although it is good to get a glimpse of the range of activities that constitute designing, attempting to define what a designer is by saying what the designer does is akin to saying that electricity is something that makes refrigerators, hairdryers and torches work. While it is perfectly true, it is not the whole picture. A greater sense is needed of what lies at the centre of being a designer. One way to do this is to go straight to existing sociological and philosophical ways of understanding the world, and then apply them directly to the work of a designer. In this way we can move backwards and forwards between ideas about the real world and real life to see how they illuminate each other.

What the designer does

The specialist tasks facing the designer range from the disciplines of cybernetics to engineering and the built environment, with the colloquial view of design as something rooted in the visual and the object sitting somewhere in the middle. What unifies the design disciplines is the transformation of cultural and social life that happens as a result of designing. These acts of transformation initiated by design have become bigger and more complex in a world in which the interaction of local and global actions has resulted in a new word, ‘glocalization’ (Roudometof, 2005). In the glocalized economy, designers work in a space where their actions are both more far reaching than ever before and at the same time more personally circumscribed.

Because of the complex chain of events in the production of mass clothing in industrial societies—where specialists shops, customers, textile manufacturers, clothing manufacturers and transport systems are all involved in the venture of making sure clothing sells—the fashion designer effects transformation over materials and people. But fashion designers are not necessarily autonomous. The designer is subject to demands from the producers of textiles to ensure their products are used, clothing manufacturers want clothing that can be assembled economically, the customer demands certain styling and the retail industry is always trying to promote new consumption through new designs. The designer has to work within those competing constraints, and at no point in the process are decisions made without some kind of research. For example, the Swedish fashion company H&M has several dozen global production offices where local staff are responsible for liaising with the suppliers and manufacturers of H&M products (mainly in Bangladesh, China and Turkey). The production offices ensure that products are produced according to quality specifications and test for things such as shrinkage, twisting, colour fastness and dry rubbing. In some cases, production centres are asked to turn around goods from conception to consumer within three weeks (Runfola & Guercini, 2004). Designers are not just involved at the fashion level but also in processes of materials testing, developing systems for sourcing, testing production and so on. Designers who are unable to position themselves personally and institutionally are unable to function at their best. The need to identify and develop research strategies for designers are evolving as designing itself becomes increasingly complex (Cross, 2001). Finding out who designers are and what they do determines how to find ways of researching that can benefit them.

The designer works within both a society and a culture. These two concepts are linked and in colloquial language often used interchangeably. At this point they must be separated in order to understand their differences as well as their similarities before the terms can be used efficiently as analytical tools. A culture is the network of objects and ideas that communicate meanings to the members of a particular group of people. A society is a group of people who live together within a particular physical territory and who share a sense of identity. Some societies can be very big, others very small, but all share the phenomenon of having attitudes and behaviours characteristic to the group, and shared objects and ways of living (or material practices) that produce a culture of mutually understood meanings and values. Different societies have different cultures. For example, the design culture that emerged from the practices of the society created by the Soviet Union in the 1920s is different from the design culture produced by the post–Second World War society of the United States. In her review of theories about design, the design historian Helen Armstrong describes the Soviet designer Alexander Rodchenko as utilising ‘new technology and mass production in an attempt to give form not just to revolutionary concepts of functionalism and economy but to ideal citizens as well’ (Armstrong, 2009, p. 27). We can compare this view with a 1950s perspective of design from a design exhibition catalogue from the New York Museum of Modern Art which proposes that ‘democratic’ freedom ‘leaves no room for total standardization in the furnishings of a home…. Modern design for the home is more appropriately used to create an atmosphere of “the good life” than of “a brave new world” ’ (Kaufman, 1950, p. 8). Here, two different views of the cultural expectations of the designer emerge from two different societies. One cultural view is of the designer as someone in a planned economy who designs the collective environment in which individuals live; the other is of the designer working within a consumer culture who designs for individuals who wish to mark their domestic environment with a personal touch. The designer working within those differing contexts is still designing, but within markedly different social and cultural circumstances. The designer practices in an ecology that is both material (to do with production and objects) and ideological (to do with ideas about the purposes of production and objects).

The individual designer positioned

At this point what can be said is that a designer practices what is called design. This may seem like a very obvious and rather naive point to make, but in making it, it suggests two things. Firstly it suggests that the designer is someone who is autonomous (who has the capacity to make decisions independently). Secondly it proposes that what the designer is doing is understood by others as being a specific way of thinking and acting in the world. (One’s cultural activity as a designer is moulded by surrounding social circumstances.) These observations can be developed by saying the designer has a set of unique practical, intellectual and emotional attributes that are used to facilitate the way in which the world is understood by others. Some of those ways might be considered inappropriate by one society, but not by another. This suggests that design is not a fixed and unchanging set of practices, but is fluid and responds to different conditions in different circumstances.

There may also be differing expectations within a single society about what designers should do. An extreme example from the contemporary world might be whether designers should help to design bombs or prosthetic limbs. Different groups of people will hold different opinions, but still belong to a shared social and cultural space. Raising these points reinforces that what the designer does is to design, and that the purposes and products of design are the result of other discussions about the world into which he or she fits. The designer is someone who is autonomous and who has insights into the nature of the world, and who is also in a constant dialogue with the social insights and expectations of others. These other insights and expectations may be congruent with, or contradictory to, those held by the designer. The views about design that surround the designer may be developed by institutions, such as governments or museums, or held by individuals who align themselves with such views. If the proposition is now restated that ‘the designer practices design’, it is clear that at the core of this statement is a dynamic relationship between the individual designer and what can be called ‘institutional’ views of what design is.

Is it possible to find a way of talking about the way institutions influence the role of the designer that encompasses the different aspects of what the designer does? A key thinker about how institutional views are formed and how they act on us as individuals is the French philosopher Louis Althusser. He argues that an individual is defined by his or her social function, that a ‘single subject’, a ‘such and such individual’ (that we can call a designer), has ideas that are ‘material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject’ (1971, p. 158).

The idea of the ‘such and such individual’ is a way of describing how someone constructed by an institutional view is understood. We might say, ‘Who is that?’ And an answer might come, ‘That is Ann; she is a designer.’ What is happening in this exchange is that the body of ideas and practices that Ann is engaged in becomes the way in which we define who she is. In this way she becomes incorporated into an institutional model of what a designer might be, and as much as she is an individual, Ann is also defined through her design practices as a designer. That is, to use Althusser’s words again, she has been identified as an individual who designs: a ‘such and such’ individual. How might our brief Althusserian definition now unfold?

We can assume that Ann’s ideas about design are turned into real designs (her ‘material actions’) which become part of the way in which designers work (‘material practices’) within the design community with its codes of professional conduct (‘material rituals’). These professional practices (it is not unusual to hear the phrase ‘best practices’ used colloquially in the design industry to talk about the way things should be done) that Ann is engaged in are regulated by the value systems that are promoted by organizations such as governments, design associations, museums and companies (‘the material ideological apparatus’) that formed the ideas about design that Ann had in the first place! Institutional ideas about what design is and what it should do have helped form not only her identity as a designer but also what her role might be as a designer.

This theoretical model gives a very deterministic view of the designer. That is, Ann has been constructed as someone whose identity has been conditioned by a set of institutional traits, but of course this is only half the picture. In describing the objective, or measurable, conditions that impact on the designer, what has been neglected is the sense of autonomy that the designer has; that sense of self and uniqueness which allows personal interpretations of circumstances to evolve. This personal, emotional and intuitive aspect of understanding the world it what is called a subjective viewpoint.

The designer’s identity

It is important to find a way of discovering how to talk about the relationship between the subjective world of the individual and the institutional values that affect that world, not only for designers but also for researchers. If it can be understand that design is the result of a negotiation between the designer and the objective circumstances that shape the world that the designer works within, then it helps us to understand that research is similarly the result of the researcher attempting to resolve their inquiries about the world. A useful concept in talking about how individuals negotiate with the social and cultural institutions that surround them is that of reflexivity. This concept will be the subject of a closer examination in Chapter 3 but is briefly introduced here in the discussion about the designer.

Reflexivity is a sociological term used by two sociologists whose work is featured throughout the first chapters of this book: Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu. Giddens uses the term reflexivity to describe the processes of learning about who we are and of creating our identity. Pierre Bourdieu uses it as a way of trying to ensure that social scientists are aware that the subjective cultural position the individual holds may influence the way in which he or she understands new information. Both writers describe reflexivity as a process that enables individuals to identify their subjective relationship with the objective world.

Giddens suggests that ‘What to do? How to act? Who to be?’ are the central questions that individuals living in complex contemporary consumer societies perpetually ask themselves (Giddens, 1991, p. 70). His argument is that the complexity of contemporary life, with its multitude of options for behaving and interacting with the world, means that we have to work at discovering our identity. He suggests that the construction of our self-identity is something we engage in continuously, whether it is through the clothes we wear, the films we watch or the values we promote. These views and actions might be at odds with our family’s values, or cut across national boundaries, or rest inside a very narrow set of traditional cultural boundaries. Hence designers may have aesthetic views that are in opposition to those of a client, or to those of the institution where they are being educated. Giddens suggests that the reflexive process of understanding who we are (and we do this by looking at how we are constructed by outside influences, how we are moulded by institutional attitudes and how we then negotiate with them in order to find our own voice and values) is in effect a continual process of writing our own biography as we live it.

There is a distinction here between the invention of a fantasy life and the quest to realistically engage with the outside world. Giddens makes the point that the individual’s construction of self-identity cannot be fictional if the individual wishes to maintain real relationships (and these could be personal or professional) and that the individual ‘must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing “story” about the self’ (Giddens, 1991, p. 54). To relate this back to our task of positioning the designer, let us revisit our example, Ann.

Ann is a designer because she has been identified by others as working as a designer, but she has also chosen to work as a designer and has made a series of conscious decisions to strategically position herself in that role. She has done this by making a series of life decisions that range from big issues, such as what she should study at school and college in light of discussions with her family about her career options, to smaller ones such as choosing the spectacle frames she wears and where she goes to have lunch with her friends. Ann is a designer because others see her as conforming to the conditions that define her as one, but she has also constructed herself as a designer through symbolic acts (choosing her accessories) that identify her as part of a group and by entering into a set of institutional relationships (choosing her course of study) that will enable her to become part of the profession.

The concept of reflexivity has a threefold relevance. Firstly it is a useful idea to set against the view of Althusser. Althusser’s model of how institutional values mould us doesn’t allow much autonomy for the individual. Using Giddens’s way of explaining identity, we can see that Ann has been acted upon by the institutions that have told her what design is, but she has also acted and chosen to accept some of what she has been told in the past and rejected other advice (maybe to study urban design rather than advertising), otherwise she wouldn’t now be at this juncture of being identified as a designer. Secondly, using Giddens’s ideas about the way the individual interacts with institutional structures suggests both that we have the intellectual and emotional space to negotiate with the institutions that form us and that we make choices (either consciously or unconsciously) about who we wish to be. Thirdly, the ability to understand who we are, what our views are and where they have come from allow us to try to position ourselves as objectively as possible in both the act of designing and of researching. Just as Ann’s childhood delight in the colour purple should not necessarily impact significantly on every piece of design work she undertakes as an adult, so too the researcher’s personal worldviews must be put aside if they are to be able to see the world as objectively as possible. This may seem obvious, this idea of both acting and being acted upon, but until it is understood how we have been constructed as designers or researchers by this process and can articulate it to others, we cannot fully understand how to research. This is the whole purpose of this book.

The context of designing

How may this discussion of the designer both acting and being acted upon be developed? There are two approaches we wish to introduce now, one from a sociologist and the other from a philosopher. Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, and Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher, both deal with the dynamic relationship between individuals and their social and cultural context. Successful design and research is dependent upon the meaningful exchange of ideas between individuals and the cultural and social circumstances they find themselves in. By looking at the intellectual, emotional and material structures that enable these exchanges, it is possible to examine the different ways the designer enters productively into cultural and social dialogues.

So far it has been determined that designers have a subjective understanding of the world that they use to interact with an objectively existing environment that defines what they do. We have variously described that environment as being institutional, having to do with professional practices, and being bounded by sets of ideas. These sets of ideas can also be called ideologies, and Althusser’s definition of ideology as ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (1971, p. 109) is quite a useful one. Bourdieu’s most famous work, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984), examined ideas about art and culture in France (through data he collected about visitors to the country’s art museums) and attempted to explore this notion of the ‘imaginary’ relationship people had to their ‘real’ cultural surroundings. The kind of questions he asked were: Why do some people make art and others consume it? How does culture help to interpret and understand the world? What kind of role do people from different social and cultural origins give to cultural artefacts? The ‘distinction’ in the title of his book refers to the practice of exercising aesthetic choice and how this practice of distinction is informed by the economic, social and cultural experience, or in Bourdieu’s own words, the economic, social and cultural ‘capital’ of those who exercise it.

The social and cultural capital reserves that the individual can draw from are used to frame their understanding of the world, and the way in which they are used is the way in which the ‘imaginary relationship with the world’ develops. The more individuals know and the more socially adept they are, the more likely they are to be able to understand the complexities of how the world is organized. The reverse is also true; the less cultural information individuals possess and the more socially excluded they might be from the activities of an institution, the more difficult it is to understand the way in which institutional life operates. For example, if Ann is offered a job as a member of a design team engaged in the restoration and redevelopment of an eighteenth-century precinct in an Irish town ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Positioning the Designer
• 2 What Do Designers and Researchers Do? Thinking, Doing and Researching
• 3 Practice and Praxis, Reflection and Reflexivity
• 4 Thinking about Research: Methodology
• 5 Doing Research: From Methodologies to Methods
• 6 In the Picture: Ethnography and Observation
• 7 Understanding through Story: Narratives
• 8 Using Case Studies and Mixed Methods
• 9 Action Research
• 10 Writing about Research
• References
• List of Illustrations
• eCopyright