Design Theory and Methodology 2019

In this second design practitioner podcast Mieke talks to Cathelijne Bertels, who is based in Amsterdam. Cathelijne originally studied at IDE in Delft before going on to work at Microsoft for 13 years, working as a user-experience designer at a time when UX design was just becoming a major part of large IT organisations. After working at Microsoft, Cathelijne established her own design agency and over the years has broadened her approach to design, embracing an ever wider range of design problems, and working with very different organisations. Most recently she has been working in the area of social innovation as a designer in government.

Cathelijne describes the progress of her long career as a designer and discusses what she has learned (and continues to learn) along the way. She reflects on the iterative nature of design processes saying that designing“isn't just a double diamond, it’s a gazillion diamonds in a certain time frame pressed together”. But she also describes designing as a human process that can feel like magic: “that's just the magic of the creative process and in our brains, this stuff that we can't really figure out- this beautiful human side”.But she emphasises that for design to be effective, the scientific side of designing, including working with real experts, needs to be present.

In the third design practitioner podcast Mieke talks to Grace Turtle, a well-travelled Australian-Colombian strategic designer and futures research manager. Grace is based in Amsterdam, dividing her time between Deloitte and Becoming Studio, a speculative and critical research collective based in Barcelona. Grace originally studied Interior Design in Australia, before focusing on sustainable design at the Pratt Institute in the US. From the US she returned to Colombia to work on social and community projects, before then going to Australia to do a Masters, establish a makerspace and a new design studio called ‘Mash Up’ where she first did a project for Deloitte. Her next move was to The Netherlands, where we catch up with her.

Grace talks about her unique path of working and learning in different places in the world. She talks about the way she uses design and other practices such as, futuring, play, and embodiment in her work and the many different people, books and other resources that have inspired her work and continue to influence her today. She reflects on the role of designers in the world, particularly in what she calls ‘designerly engagement’. She describes design being about doing things with beauty, not creating beautiful things. 

Grace is a unique person, who is critically engaged with many different practices of design and how they can be used to bring about change and transformation – whether that is an organization, a community, or herself.

In the first of several podcasts with design practitioners, Peter talks to Wouter van der Hoog, who set up the Rotterdam-based design practice Hoog+Diep in 2006. The aim of the practitioner podcasts is to get more of a professional view of how working practices and design theory & methodology are related. Many of the questions asked relate directly to Assignment 2. 

Wouter touches on many aspects of designing in the interview. As an IDE alumnus he starts by reflecting on his education and notes his thirst for learning as many subjects as he could. He explains in detail what working with clients involves. There is often education required, and clients aren’t necessarily always after design outcomes he says.

As he has acquired more experience Wouter has learned to trust his intuition – something that both Matthijs van Dijk in the Design Expertise podcast, and the associated paper Expertise in Realworld Contexts note. He explains how design methods and theories provide a structure and discipline that he can then use to improvise with, working in a more opportunistic way. 

A key element of Wouter’s design practice is working effectively with others. He explains how the process of ‘alignment’ is important, communicating with all stakeholders. He describes how you always need a person as a ‘sounding board’ to test your ideas and also to reflect on your own learning. And he explains how you bring new employees into the business. Perhaps surprisingly he describes a large part of the design process as being about managing the design process, something that might not be obvious to design students using methods where the element of management is lessened. 

Finally, Wouter gives a tip for design students: get as much experience as you can! It’s a fascinating conversation with a lot of insight from a practitioner, but also an educator and thinker about the activity of design.

In the final DTM podcast Peter talks to Elisa Giaccardi, Professor of Interactive Media Design at IDE, about what design methods will look like in the future. They talk about how artificial intelligence and machine learning are changing the design process from something that is ‘user-centred’ into something much more dynamic. Elisa introduces the idea of how humans and computers can design together through ‘co-performance’. They also touch on the ethical issues involved when dealing with non-human intelligences.

The interview is based on a book chapter by Elisa called ‘Technology and More than Human Design’ which explores how technology is impacting the design process. She mentions her PhD supervisor Roy Ascott, who has been a strong influence on many well-known designers and artists throughout the world. On page 6 of his book ‘Art, Technology, Consciousness’ he talks about the idea of ‘seeding’ that Elisa refers to. She also quotes from the much-cited social anthropologist Tim Ingold, who writes in his book ‘Correspondences’ about different modes of interaction between humans and non-humans. Ingold has published many interesting books touching on the cultural and contextual aspects of designing.

In the discussion Mieke mentions the work of John Seely Brown, who was director of the world-famous Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC). In a video titled Sense-making in our Post AlphaGo World he explores the “rapidly changing, broadly connected and radically contingent world and the lenses needed to frame, or reframe, the challenges that technological advances have pushed forward”.

Peter also mentions an idea called ‘negative capability’, the ability to embrace uncertainty and be comfortable in situations of ambiguity. The idea originally comes from the Romantic Poet John Keats! This short blog post provides more context and further links to explore the subject if you are interested.

In this penultimate DTM podcast Peter talks to one of his colleagues at Delft, Professor Matthijs van Dyke. Matthijs is a Professor of Practice and co-author of the well-known Vision in Product Development (ViP) method. Matthijs is not only an educator though. His main job is working at the design business he co-founded: Reframing Studio in Amsterdam, where he has built up considerable expertise in design working with major clients and organisations. In the podcast Matthijs reflects on his changing role in the business, what his core expertise is, and why he doesn’t think that trying to categorise people into different levels of expertise is useful. Following the interview Peter and Mieke discuss what they think about design expertise, pulling out some key themes from the interview with Matthijs. Total running time is 35 minutes.

Peter introduces a book by Bryan Lawson and Kees Dorst called Design Expertise (also mentioned in the Assignment 2 description) which gives an overview of how designers develop across many different disciplines. There are some excellent case studies of how top designers work – a recommended read. The different ‘levels of design expertise’ that the book quotes is from a paper by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus called Expertise in Realworld Contexts which is an insightful look at why it is difficult (or impossible) to encode human expertise into computer code. Bryan Lawson has written much about the design process and the expertise of designers, and Mieke mentions one of his papers about how designers make sense of new situations through their experience: Schemata, Gambits and Precedent: Some Factors in Design Expertise.

Peter mentions a bestselling book by Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers: The Story of Success, which amongst other things discusses the idea that becoming an expert ‘simply’ takes 10,000 hours. Finally if you want to follow up on the cooking documentary that Peter mentions, ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’, it is currently playing on Netflix.