Witnesses to Design: A Phenomenology of Comparative Design
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Blackwell-2009-Witnesses to Design A Phenomenology of Comparative Design.pdf
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Author(s)
Bucciarelli, Louis
Earl, Chris
Eckert, Claudia
Blackwell, Alan
Date Issued
February 2009
Journal
Design Issues
Publisher
MIT Press Journals
Citation
Blackwell, A. F. et al. “Witnesses to Design: A Phenomenology of Comparative Design.” Design Issues 25.1 (2009): 36-47. © 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Version
Final published version
Abstract
This research is concerned with describing the experience of being
a designer and doing design. Many case studies have described
individual experiences, both of designers reflecting on their own
work, and academic studies of expert design work as performed in
a professional context. Such studies are an important component of
design research, and provide an essential foundation and sounding
board for design theory. Traditionally, this research has concentrated
on practice in a particular industry or company, generalizing
to an industry sector or designing at large, from a relatively
small number of cases. We depart from the common practice by
comparing the experience of designers across a very wide range of
domains, reported outside of its normal professional context, and in
comparison to other design contexts.
We report on a series of research workshops, each including
several professional designers, initiated with the specific objective of
making a comparison across design disciplines. At each workshop,
designers presented case study illustrations of their practice for
discussion with designers from other disciplines. This paper
describes the motivation, methodology, and results of this project. We
also propose a novel theoretical basis for our comparative approach,
and the implications that this might have for other design research.
The nature of our research and findings naturally is quite
different from research that focuses on specific design activities.
Previous comparative research more often has aimed to establish
general criteria for defining concepts and theories, relating
core concepts in research and theory-making to designing and
designs1 Our aim is not to produce generic findings applying to all
cases of design in all circumstances, but rather to develop a rich
understanding of recurring behaviors across different domains,
even though these might not apply to every process. As a result,
comparative design is complementary to research on specific design
practice, as well as research that aims to describe design in generic
terms.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. School of Engineering
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/desi.2009.25.1.36
