Introduction - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Introduction

This issue of Design Issues assembles articles that, together, reflect
a spirit of inquiry being intrinsic to the broad church of design
research. Here, some articles set out to test the boundaries of our
existing knowledge to determine its limitations. Others apply crit-
ical reason to the orthodoxies of established bodies of knowledge to
expand their modus operandi. However, both approaches assert
that the knowledge we possess is inherited from past times and con-
texts that are unlike our own.

In “Advancing Donald Schön’s Reflective Practitioner: Where
to Next?” Linus Tan, Anita Kocsis, and Jane Burry acknowledge
Schon’s foundational contribution to design research but propose
that his theory of the reflective practitioner has limitations that
must be recognized and addressed to remain relevant. In particu-
lar, the authors observe Schön’s approach to the reflective practi-
tioner at an individual level; they then expand on this approach to
describe a team of reflective practitioners at the organizational level.
In dialogue with works that address the subversive and po-
litical dimension of play, Igor Fardin’s article, “The Politics of Play:
Ugo La Pietra’s Design Without Ends,” considers how a certain type
of play can offer the possibility of suspending and deactivating
the power relations that shape our everyday experience. The author
observes that this understanding of play suggests the possibility
of a design that questions the traditional links between form, func-
tion, and use—so opening up new possibilities by interrupting the
orthodoxies that determine experience.

In “The Influence of Fonts on the Reading Performance in
Easy-to-Read Texts: A Legibility Study with 145 Participants,”
Sabina Sieghart draws attention to the limitations of an extant body
of research that either has been developed by cognitive scientists
who have insufficient professional knowledge of typography or
by designers who possess insufficient scientific competence. In
seeking to establish effective typographic principles for barrier-free
communication, the author demonstrates that the basis for some
conventional wisdom concerning text legibility “is simply wrong.”
In “A Promising Break in the ‘Black Box’: Agency of Com-
petencies and Interpretation in Istanbul Maker Ecologies,” Özgün
Dilek and Cigdem Kaya examine changes to the traditional ecology
of making through the proliferation of digital production and

https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_e_00729

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DesignIssues: Volume 39, Number 3 Summer 2023

communication technologies, maker spaces, and technology-driven
maker activities. In particular, the authors consider how these con-
ditions shift the established orthodoxies of economic production
and labor between independent makers and the managed creativ-
ity of companies. They contend that this shift may give makers the
autonomy to produce independently from the structural forces on
human production.

Dina Lutfi tests another pillar of design research in “The
Design Problem Revisited.” In doing so, the author observes that
the characteristics once used to describe design have shifted and
will continue to do so in the future. However, this still belies a per-
sistent, and stubborn, use of the terms “problem” and “solution.”
Within the context of shifting social and economic conditions, the
author observes that an enhanced understanding of design could
now include its agency as a facilitator of human needs, experiences,
and desires.

These discussions conclude with a reflection on “The De-
lightful Phrase: Are There Really Designerly Ways of Knowing?” by
Richard Herriott. In recognizing the pervasive nature of Nigel
Cross’s terminology of “designerly ways of knowing” the author
also observes that his writings, and that of others in the 1980s, were
a noble attempt to rescue design from being a “mere science.” The
author also observes that to protect it from the design-as-science
position, and through a wish to preserve design´s particular terri-
tory, this clarification about designerly ways of knowing may have
been a “misdefinition.”

To close this issue of the Journal we include an essay in
which the visual evidence of inquiry is a primary source of ref-
erence being augmented by brief textual notes. This visual essay by
Moohan Kim, Jongeun Yang, and Sujeong Lee is titled “Integrating
Technology and Art in Landscape Design. It offers visual evidence
for the use of sand and lasers in the modeling and making of envi-
ronmental features in the landscape.

Bruce Brown
Richard Buchanan
Carl DiSalvo
Kipum Lee
Ramia Mazé
Teal Triggs