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About: Designing - analysing design meetings

This book is based on 24 international contributions analysing the same dataset of four filmed professional design meetings; two in architectural design and two in product design. The book followed from an international workshop, held in 2008 and funded by the AHRC (Ref A3288, Lloyd PI). The book has been framed in an introductory section so that it forms a substantial research contribution as a unified and integrated work, strongly shaped by the editors. It is significant both in the quality of contributors (from 15 countries) and the wide range of research methods employed on a single set of data. The ‘common data’ methodology that has been used for the research has led to several further international workshops in the areas of software design (University of California, Irvine, 2010) and new media (University of Missouri, 2013). The data has also become a key resource in post-graduate design research training (for example at Lancaster University). The chapter by Lloyd (‘Ethical Imagination and Design’, pp 85-99) was subsequently published in Design Studies after review and revision. The chapter shows, through a fine-gained content analysis, how ethical issues are intrinsic to the design process through the requirement to imagine and assess alternative futures. Previous studies looking at ethics in the design process have generally done so by considering explicit decisions made, rather than the function of imagination in arriving at those decisions. The chapter is significant in that, rather than simply describing conversational patterns in the design process as conversation analysts might, it questions the nature of those conversations by exploring both what could have been said alongside what was actually said. This way of including counter-factuals as part of the analysis is described as a designerly research method; an innovative way of analysing what designers say during the process of design.