Design Talking: How Design Practitioners Talk about Design Research Methods

To support the development of TheDesignExchange – a portal to a comprehensive set of design methods applicable to a range of disciplines – we hosted a series of workshops with design students, educators and practitioners. In this paper, we summarize insights gained from the three practitioner workshops associated with early stage design methods used to: Research, Analyze and Communicate. We contrast the practitioner feedback with insights from previous workshops with design students and educators. We also discuss implications for enhancing professional skills and industry practice through design education. INTRODUCTION TheDesignExchange portal is being developed to facilitate the capture, analysis and widespread use of methods associated with early stage design. Although the integration of design into the product development process has been shown to have high impact on the quality and success of engineered products [1], finding the right design method for any particular problem can be a challenge [2, 3]. TheDesignExchange fills a need to organize disparate early stage design methods, develop a community of design educators and practitioners to evaluate those methods, and educate the next generation of design innovators. TheDesignExchange provides a structure to collect the many design methods in use today, their variations, and examples of use [4-9]. The portal aims to support the design process by providing educators and practitioners alike with a versatile library of proven tools. Given the community-of-practice model and wide application of design processes/methods, theDesignExchange portal is fundamentally multi-disciplinary. The subject matter draws on the diverse range of contributors engaged in “design thinking” [10-13], a human-centric multidisciplinary design process (engineers, designers, architects, business people, educators). By recognizing and promoting the common thread among these different disciplines, theDesignExchange supports the cross-pollination of methodologies among them. By allowing a community-based discussion and documentation of design methods, theDesignExchange has the potential to be the world’s first open innovation archive of design-practice-related subject matter [14]. To accomplish this, we are drawing on previous work in design theory, communities of practice, and expert/lead user-generated content. This paper focuses on insights gained from a series of workshops aimed at understanding user needs associated with theDesignExchange, as well as the development of an ontology for organizing and talking about design methods [15]. BACKGROUND To gather broader input from the design community to support the development and to help frame the features for theDesignExchange portal, we conducted nine workshops with design students, faculty and practitioners. The first four workshops with novice designers, academics, and experts, described below, were used to develop an initial ontology feature base that was refined later during a series of five workshops with design practioners. Participants in these four workshops had backgrounds from a wide range of designrelated disciplines in architecture, engineering, computer science, interaction design and industrial design. Others who specialized in design research typically had degrees in humancomputer interaction, social sciences or humanities. In the Novice Designer Workshop (26 April 2011; 25 undergraduate students from the University of California, Berkeley), design students from engineering, computer science, rhetoric and architecture were invited to a co-design workshop. Starting with a brainstorm, the group identified areas where the students need support, as they become members of the design community of practice. The students were divided into small groups to brainstorm solutions for each area. The results showed that: (1) students are interested in becoming a part of a professional community by making connections and building a reputation; (2) students are interested in building expertise on design methods and processes; and (3) students are interested in tracking and sharing their work to get guidance from experts.