Output details

Design Studies: studying design in practice (volume 33, issue 6, edited special edition)

Dr Luck edited and contributed articles to the themed special issue ‘Studying design in practice’ which responds to two research agendas and marks a methodological shift in the scientific study of design. The first is the ‘turn to practice’ where the empirical study of what people actually do, in contrast with observation under experimental conditions, has become increasingly important in design studies. Secondly, in response to the epistemic question ‘how do we study practice?’ several previous studies presented at DTRS7 were beginning to pay attention to ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM/CA). The papers in this collection are exemplars of what this form of analysis looks like and can reveal about situated design conduct in different domains. Offering analyses of this kind up for design research scrutiny is important to an audience that is long-versed in the analysis of conversation from a cognitive psychology perspective. Taking the world from a different point of view in needed with EM/CA to be able to recognise the different insight into ‘what is going on’ that is revealed through these analyses. The papers are written by international scholars and forge closer connections between social science researchers with this analytic expertise, with design researchers that study design in practice and practitioners that apply these approaches in the formative stages of workplace, product and service design. This collection of papers advances the canon of research methods that are part of the design communities’ repertoire and opens up avenues for further design research exploration. The special issue is novel and as the first published collection of EM/CA studies of design in practice it may become a primary point of reference. Dr Luck’s invitation to review a design study for the Journal of Pragmatics is evidence of early impact and the cross-disciplinary reach of the research.