Designerly Ways of Being

In this paper, we inquire into the stances that designers take in their design activities. The setting in which we investigate this question is that of design critiques, where participants make their stances publicly available to one another. During a critique, participants use their bodies as a framework for mutual orientation and reference. Design concepts are not so much told as they are staged and performed, using multiple semiotic modalities, including gesture, speech, gaze, orientation, inscription, and artifact. In performing their design, participants adopt and shift between several identified stances, which we call inscriptional, third-person, first-person and phenomenal. During the critique, designers often mirror the stances of others, where failing to do so can lead to communication breakdown. Although analyzed in the social setting of the design critique, because these stances are made public, they can thus become internal resources that designers draw upon in design situations in which others are not present. Rather than representing epistemic states or “designerly ways of knowing,” we suggest that these stances represent “designerly ways of being.

The "prototype walkthrough": a studio-based learning activity for human-computer interaction courses

For over a century, studio-based instruction has served as an effective pedagogical model in architecture and fine arts education. Because of its design orientation, human-computer interaction (HCI) education is an excellent venue for studio-based instruction. In an HCI course, we have been exploring a studio-based learning activity called the prototype walkthrough, in which a student project team simulates its evolving user interface prototype while a student audience member acts as a test user. The audience is encouraged to ask questions and provide feedback. We have observed that prototype walkthroughs create excellent conditions for learning about user interface design. In order to better understand the educational value of the activity, we performed a content analysis of a video corpus of 16 prototype walkthroughs held in two undergraduate/graduate HCI courses. We found that the prototype walkthrough discussions were dominated by relevant design issues. Moreover, mirroring the justification behavior of the expert instructor, students justified over 80 percent of their design statements and critiques, with nearly one-quarter of those justifications having a theoretical or empirical basis. These results suggest that prototype walkthroughs can be useful not only in helping to teach HCI design, but also in helping to gauge students' evolving design knowledge