Witnesses to Design: A Phenomenology of Comparative Design

This research is concerned with describing the experience of beinga designer and doing design. Many case studies have describedindividual experiences, both of designers reflecting on their ownwork, and academic studies of expert design work as performed ina professional context. Such studies are an important component ofdesign research, and provide an essential foundation and soundingboard for design theory. Traditionally, this research has concentratedon practice in a particular industry or company, generalizingto an industry sector or designing at large, from a relativelysmall number of cases. We depart from the common practice bycomparing the experience of designers across a very wide range ofdomains, reported outside of its normal professional context, and incomparison to other design contexts.We report on a series of research workshops, each includingseveral professional designers, initiated with the specific objective ofmaking a comparison across design disciplines. At each workshop,designers presented case study illustrations of their practice fordiscussion with designers from other disciplines. This paperdescribes the motivation, methodology, and results of this project. Wealso propose a novel theoretical basis for our comparative approach,and the implications that this might have for other design research.The nature of our research and findings naturally is quitedifferent from research that focuses on specific design activities.Previous comparative research more often has aimed to establishgeneral criteria for defining concepts and theories, relatingcore concepts in research and theory-making to designing anddesigns1 Our aim is not to produce generic findings applying to allcases of design in all circumstances, but rather to develop a richunderstanding of recurring behaviors across different domains,even though these might not apply to every process. As a result,comparative design is complementary to research on specific designpractice, as well as research that aims to describe design in genericterms.