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‘Does this compromise your design?’ Interactionally producing a design concept in talk

This article is a development from the author’s Design Thinking Research Symposium 7 conference paper published in the book ‘About: Designing’ (special mention in F. Brooks (2010) The design of design: essays from a computer scientist Addison-Wesley, New York) selected for publication in CoDesign special issue ‘Analysing conversation from design meetings’. These circumstances mark international interest in this research and its uptake in the field of computer science. The DTRS7 conference took place at a time when there was general acceptance that ‘design is a social process’ and that talk can be construed as a design activity, as the moves that people make in conversation are able to verbally modify what is being designed and change people’s understanding of it (and happens without any drawing or sketching, the activities frequently associated with designing). What was debated were the most appropriate methods to analyse spoken language use, the level of transcription detail and which particles in conversation to analyse. In response, this was one of the first design papers to draw attention to the method of conversation analysis, to explore the particular insight CA-informed micro-analysis adds to the study of design practice. Revealed through analysis was new insight into characteristics of design concepts, beyond the already known ‘primary generator’ function. In these episodes the design concept was seen to moderate what were more and less acceptable changes to the design, in ways that were different from other design ideas. Properties of the design concept were invoked at particular moments by the architect and these were often marked linguistically as ‘architectural’. The design concept was seen to have different agency from other design ideas. Building on this insight there was reflection on the object properties of the design concept with reference to STS (science and technology studies).