AN UN-NATURAL WORLD: THE DESIGNER AS TOURIST

Design Research is about dancing with disorder, a formation of patterns out of a dynamic array of possibilities. As Glanville suggests in “Researching Design and Designing Research” patterns are a human construction. To construct patterns of understanding is to create an artificial order out of the natural world, transforming the world out of the Natural to form an Un-Natural World. This concept of the Un-Natural World has no physicality, it is the pattern created out of the process of knowing and knowledge; Quine’s web of belief or Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic network.

This paper considers how, in this virtual landscape of the Un-Natural World, the designer is a tourist. We book our tickets to somewhere, guidebook in hand, adding new destinations along the way, and return with something; souvenirs, tales, increased understanding of the diversity, and an ability to reassess the scaffolding of our own World.

When we travel to another context sometimes we seek solace in the similarities until we become adventurous enough to immerse ourselves in the differences. Those that are too dependent on their guide book or tourist guide do not see past what is interpreted for them and miss those enriching experiences to be found off the tourist trails.

Tourism is fundamentally about the Journey and the outcomes of that journey cannot be predicted until arriving home and allowing the knowledge to coagulate into patterns of understanding. Then it can be put into practice for the everyday. The Design Researcher is the Designer as tourist. The Researcher travels, explores, notices, converses, assimilates, discerns and on returning home recounts their travel stories for the Design World.

This paper will examine how Design Research resembles tourism.