We submitted a paper that I wrote together with Johan Redström to the IASDR’13 conference in Tokyo. The paper was accepted and I consequently went to Tokyo to present it. Below you can see a video of me doing my talk at IASDR and you can review the slides I used in it.
The paper can be found here: The Wickedness of Design Research Practice. (or from the conference website here)
In this paper we look at current themes in (interaction) design discourse in order to find support for the difficulties I encounter in the structuring and projecting of my own design research practice.
The difficulties I encounter in my own project seem to have to do with what we in the paper call ‘wickedness of design research practice’. We review some papers from the field of practice-led (interaction) design research. The paper identifies that the discussion in current discourse seems to focus on the academic standing of design research, the kinds of knowledge it may yield and in what forms that may be disseminated.
It does not so much go into what is actually done in the practice.
In our paper we propose to shift focus to how design research practice unfolds, what is it that people do that perform design acts in order to get to grip with what they are inquiring into?; how do they do that? We furthermore propose that some insight into this may come from looking at how design practitioners work with conceptual circles.
Some insightful and exciting comments that I received after my talk were those from John Zimmerman. His main concern was with how in this paper the term wickedness is handled. We went on to discuss ways to advance some of the thoughts of the paper differently so as to develop our ideas on how to work with conceptual circles in design research practice. At a later time I’ll report back here on the results of those efforts.
design for human murmurations 
Leave a Reply