1 The creative translation of design methods into social research contexts
Ricardo Sosa and Lisa Grocott
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic invites imaginative action to adapt to ways of living that only a few months ago were unimaginable. Creativity can lead researchers toward ingenious workarounds when major disruptions impede familiar practices. Creativity can also play a substantial role for researchers who seek to respond to the wickedness and messiness revealed as the novel coronavirus makes visible the close connections between health, economic, political and societal issues. Researchers may respond in various ways, from reformulating long-established research questions and approaches to exploring new transdisciplinary collaborations. The path to a ‘new research normal’ starts with methodological innovation, and this chapter suggests how methods normally used in creative design practice can inform this journey. The chapter unfolds the methodological issues and tensions that characterize the usage of design methods in the contexts of practice-informed academic research.
The authors locate themselves in the intersection between design and research, thus adopting a stance of ‘designerly researchers and researcherly designers’ (Yee, 2017). Their work in this crossroads draws from their experiences as designers to contribute to the innovative transformation of research in a world of imminent disruptions. In doing this, they also draw from their experiences in academia to consolidate inquiry practices in design research. The work presented here is motivated by the insight that ‘knowledge, experience, and skills from almost any arena can make a useful contribution to research’ (Kara, 2015), and specifically asks what design contributes to research collaborations (Grocott and Sosa, 2018).
Introduction
Every research method was first imagined and trialled by those who creatively devised new ways of studying the problems and topics of their interest. New methods and techniques have continuously emerged as part of the knowledge, experience and intuitions cultivated in research activity. At some stage, the new ideas and ways of working are developed, evolved and embraced by a community that forms around accepted beliefs, values and practices, including methods of inquiry. Across fields, there is a continuous flux of creativity in research, from small tweaks to more substantial departures (Kara, 2015). Creativity is ever present in research activity, from formulating a novel research question to framing original ways of approaching a topic of inquiry. On the other hand, creativity also finds opposition in research at the point where disciplinary identities become strongly associated with particular interpretations of methodological rigour within a particular discipline. A significant tension is thus visible between the evolution of methods against demands for integrity, accountability and credibility. Our complementary experiences in the field of design research lead us to reflect upon the nature of methods between academic research and design practice. More specifically, we have noticed how design methods help to creatively respond to challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to deepen participatory encounters, shift perspectives to see situations anew and navigate irreconcilable differences. In what follows we introduce design practices we are evolving as researchers, note the implications of translating design methods into research methods and identify the productive contribution of these design-informed research methods to applied transdisciplinary inquiry.
In professional contexts, designers apply tools, techniques and methods that have been adopted and customized from multiple sources. The term ‘design method’ has had multiple meanings over the years. Here, we refer specifically to the tools and techniques that designers use to inform, guide and support design activity. Collections of design methods (Martin and Hanington, 2012; Kumar, 2013) show considerable variation in what is included, and what implicit criteria identify a design method. Designers refer to methods in general, such as sketching or prototyping, or in narrower categories, such as study sketches or annotated sketches and appearance models or functional models (Pei et al, 2011). Notably, a number of design methods have been appropriated from other fields and many repurposed to support design activity. Examples of design methods with origins from across academic and professional contexts include ‘design charrettes’, ‘morphology analysis’, ‘photo‐elicitation’ and ‘participant observation’ (Martin and Hanington, 2012). Other methods used in design have been radically transformed or created afresh, such as the widely-used ‘Wizard of Oz’ interaction design method (Guindon, 1988). We resist casting a rigid definition of design methods given that new and old, foreign and endemic individuals and design communities have their own preferred practices, habits and terminologies (Pei et al, 2011).
Within the academy, design methods are used within methodologies of practice (based, led, oriented) research (Vaughan, 2017), often with the prevailing claim that design methods ‘used by the practitioner can stand as research methods in their own right’ (Haseman, 2007, our italics). The use of a practice method literally as a research method is well established in artistic disciplines, but this tradition often goes unexamined in design research. However, the focus in this chapter on the potential to translate design methods into social research locates the authors’ interest in methods ‘led by research’ over those ‘led by design’ (Sanders and Stappers, 2012). We critically examine here the synergies and possibilities creative design methods bring to transdisciplinary collaborations. The ways in which these design methods are used in social research deserves particular examination if these are to contribute to innovative research activity in times of crises. In addition, there are opportunities to consolidate a methodology for design research that is appropriate and distinct from quantitative, qualitative and artistic research.
Methods in design and research contexts
To unfold the issues raised by the re-contextualization of design methods to research practices, we begin by clarifying some ontological and epistemological differences that shape not so much the methods themselves, but how they might meaningfully be deployed for research. Succinctly, design practice aims to create paths that lead to better futures, whilst research seeks to create paths that lead to better understandings. To be clear, our focus here is to ask: ‘What might be the creative possibilities afforded by adapting design methods for research inquiry?’ To address this question, we examine design-based research methods that highlight the contribution of these creative methods in transdisciplinary collaborations:
• Visual thinking as a sense-making method
Design draws on emergent and representational visual tools like sketching, storyboarding or diagramming as a mainstay of practice. A design-based research method reframes the affordances of visualizing into a ‘critical thinking meets sense-making’ tool for negotiating the multi-dimensional nature of transdisciplinary research. Departing from the design of visual artefacts created to communicate, the potential of visualizing as a research method is in manipulating the interplay between representing the known and inviting the not-yet-known to emerge. In this way the visualizing process can simultaneously map and question the ephemeral, invisible and tacit social dimensions at play. The integrity of the method lies not in a final artefact but in the affordances of the critical back-talk created by the process to make sense of the otherwise incommensurable component parts. In this way, visual thinking can help surface a tacit belief, map pathways that were previously invisible to a community or allow consensus to iteratively emerge in a complex situation. In our work we use the visual research method of ‘Figuring’ as a particular way of drawing that integrates the reflective ability to provisionally fix certain elements so the designer can navigate complex moving pieces, with the speculative capacity to put forth possible ideas for a situation the designer is still making-sense-of (Grocott, 2012). The sense of uncertainty pervasive in COVID-19 times lends itself to strategies that simultaneously hold space for ambiguity while tentatively capturing possible ways forward for discussion via visual representations.
• Speculative thinking as augmented interviewing
The futures-orientation of design invites speculative, counterfactual or design fiction to be deployed as research methods. Fictitious artefacts, future scenarios and alternative worlds provide a rich entry point for discursive inquiry that can heighten meaningful participation and engagement. In such contexts, dialogic artefacts and activities can prompt co-creation of more democratic, creative and/or inclusive futures. In our work, we apply speculative methods in participatory research projects to open up space for the collective imaginary to surface. In related projects, a humanoid robot is programmed to coordinate group activities where the android enacts implausible characters (a time-traveller that warns about shocking future events; a robot politician running for office). In these projects we adapt ‘crit sessions’ as a dialogical alternative to focus groups and group interviews. Such scenarios lead to lively conversations where hypothetical questions spark deep reflections and meaningful exchanges between participants in ways that have exceeded expectations by experienced (human) facilitators.
• Analogical thinking as a co-creating prompt
Drawn from literary rhetoric, the creative value of metaphorical reasoning is grounded in the generative potential of considering alternative perspectives. As a human-centred design method, the focus is on observing behaviours in a parallel context – for example, if you want to understand brand loyalty, study mega-churches. In co-design workshops, analogical thinking is used to go beyond surfacing participants’ lived experiences. In such settings, analogies work as convivial frames to prompt participants to reveal tensions, surface emotions and generate possible futures. In our work, we use experiential metaphors as a research method for drawing out tacit beliefs and empathic understanding. A COVID-19 wellbeing project asks people to consider how to gift compassionate gestures in a time of people grieving in physical isolation (instead of a 20-second therapeutic hug calming anxiety levels with a synchronized heartbeat, a 20-second video of the sunrise used nature’s analogous capacity to achieve similar results). As a reframing move, the method offers more than a way to learn from observed behaviour but acts as a self-distancing method for obliquely discussing difficult topics.
Noticing the applicability of methods across contexts leads the authors to discuss key considerations when design-based methods are adapted for transdisciplinary research, particularly about social phenomena.
Design methods are used in professional contexts in response to a brief (or problems), and as a means to generate original proposals for change (or solutions). In contrast, design-based research methods respond to a research question or statement. A design method in a research context serves to generate or assess new knowledge or ways of understanding reality, defined by the adopted ontological position. The key difference between these ways of using a given method is in the intent, the shift is from solution-seeking to inquiry-seeking. The appropriateness of design-based research methods weighs the discursive and performative affordances of the research artefact (the figuring diagram, speculative robot or video hug) to contribute research insights over the formal, functional or aesthetic resolution of the material form.
This shift in emphasis from resolved final design (think innovative new product) to designing as a mode of inquiry (the research methods shared here) is significant. Our argument is not that designed artefacts cannot be knowledge productive, but that in adapting methods from design practice into research, careful considerations of purpose and procedure become necessary. The arguments for persuasiveness in design practice rely heavily or entirely on the resulting artefact, with little concern for the veracity of the methods that led to that solution. In contrast, the emphasis of the researcher is on making decisions in an informed manner, and assessment is centred on the integrity of the results. Methodological decisions and the appropriateness of the methods chosen are essential to the positioning and evaluation of research. The arguments for persuasiveness in research rely as much on the methods as on the results.
To this end translating design-based methods for a research context requires an increased systematicity and commitment in applying them. The application of design methods in practice can be attributed to mastery, personal style and responsiveness to contextual adaptability. Their use in research calls for a higher level of transparency and justification that shifts the balance to investing time in evolving a method that can be used across projects or by others. This consistency is not to serve some notion of replication, or even compare results across contexts, but an acknowledgement that the development of a design-based research method requires substantive rethinking, prototyping and evaluation of the method as a process of inquiry. For example, to develop a method for unstructured interviews the researcher needs to pay careful consideration to how design might inform the priming, the questions, the coding and the analysis. The socio-cultural and ethical implications in designing such research methods call for deeper interrogation and consultation.
Creative methods for transdisciplinary collaboration
The key argument of this chapter is that design methods, through careful repurposing and intentional application, can be imaginatively adapted into research methods and fruitfully contribute to methodological innovation. We close with four notes on the use of design methods in transdisciplinary research collaborations:
• Rather than a literal transfer as implied by the claim that design methods ‘can stand as research methods in their own right’ (Haseman, 2007, our italics), a creative process of translation seems c...
