Towards strengthening Methods in Design Education and Practice

Design skills and methods have been at the conceptual foundation of the design discipline(s) for at least the past half century. Over this period, design has also changed, focusing on new outcomes, serving new goals, and addressing different scales and broader application areas. On the one hand, there is a large set of methods and tools; on the...

A Framework of Design Method Corroboration

Practitioners design artifacts of different kinds. Researchers and practitioners both create methods for designing such artifacts. The question arises whether those methods are actually valid and useful. In this conceptual paper, we argue that there is a need for “method corroboration”-the deliberate and reflected use and possible validation...

Conceptualising sound-driven design: An exploratory discourse analysis

Sound-driven design is an emerging, human-centered design practice informed by technology and listening in the multisensory dimension of interaction. In this paper we present a discourse analysis approach aimed at qualitatively understanding the constituent concepts of such a practice, by means of semi-structured interviews with sound...

Data Exploration for Generative Design Research

The current work elaborates upon a Generative Data Exploration method, which is a design technique aiming at supporting designers in integrating data in their design activities. Digital data offers new opportunities in all sort of professional domains, yet existing approaches and tools to manipulate data are predominantly targeted at data...

From BoP to ToP and vice versa daily practices in settings with limited resources to inspire designers

This paper reviews the methods and practices that reflect subconscious behaviours of people in daily lives. Cases, studied for this paper, show how practices of people living in poor settings, who are members of the base of the economic pyramid, contribute to designers, belonging to the top of the economic pyramid, in designing better products...

Designer-centred design research

This paper demonstrates how a reworked conceptualization of method takes into account the designers’ goals as well as the nature of their activity. In that, the paper seeks to make a conceptual step in how we as design researchers approach and influence what designers do in their practice. This paper presents careful observation of and...

Mapping children's experiences: Adapting contextmapping tools to child participants

Within the area of user-centered design, Contextmapping is an approach to participatory user experience research that provides designers and user researchers with a clear workflow and hands-on toolkit. It acknowledges the user as the expert of his or her own experiences and aims to deliver rich insights to designers: deep, authentic and...

Forming a mindset: Design students' preconceptions about the usefulness of systematic methods

Teaching students to use systematic design methods effectively is not straightforward. While method teaching often focuses on the procedural aspects of method usage (e.g., what steps to take and in what order), effectively using a systematic method entails more than following its ‘instructions’. As noted by Andreasen [1], students need to be...

Design Methods for Young Sustainable Architecture Practice

This paper introduces landscape aesthetics as an innovative design method for sustainable architecture. It is based on the framework of a recent paper where the young and unfamous authors criticized three of the most prominent? architects today in regard to sustainable architecture and its aesthetics. Leading architects expressed their...

Nature-inspired design strategies in sustainable product development: A case study of student projects

In design practice, Nature-Inspired Design Strategies (NIDS) can be applied when developing sustainable products. However, knowledge on how this actually helps designers is lacking. This study explores the effects of applying Cradle to Cradle and Biomimicry in student projects, as compared to using Ecodesign. The findings indicate that NIDS...

The ambiguous role of methods in design education: Initial findings from the Delft method study

Flexibility of choice and perceived impact of using design methods

Parametric 'route structure' generation and analysis: An interactive design system application for urban design

Marshall (2005) developed the concept of characteristic structure of a street network as a characteristic set of indicators extracted from the street network through a process which he called “route structure analysis”. In this paper we propose an integrated process for street network generation and route structure analysis embedded in a...

Designing for sustainable food practices in the home

Activities around food have implications for the environment, personal nutrition, identity, and social relationships. As a way of understanding how daily routines evolve, practice theory (a theory of social action from sociology) provides a framework through which the complexities around consumer food habits can be understood and reveal avenues...

A Culture-Inspired Approach to Gaining Insights for Designing Sustainable Practices

This paper explores a design method to generate insights for designing less resource-intensive forms of everyday life. This study takes the assumption that looking at cultural diversity can widen the variety of insights which can be used as a source of inspiration for designing sustainable practices. However, there is a lack of clear-cut...