WHAT DO DESIGNERS REALLY DO?

This paper reports on the initial findings of a six week long ethnographically oriented study of designers within an interdisciplinary practice in Glasgow, Scotland. Ethnography has been used increasingly by design researchers since the mid 1980s (Laurel, 2003) as it provides a detailed and in depth observation of people’s behaviours, beliefs, and preferences. As the field ethnography is conducted in the designer’s normal work location (i.e. studio), the designer can relax in his/her familiar surroundings where details of past and current design projects are close at hand. Cross and Lawson (2005) stress the importance of conducting interviews with designers in natural environments as they give a richer picture than formalized data and also enable insights to emerge that may not have been planned by the researcher.

The early results of this ethnographically oriented study reveal that the behaviour of designers in action bears no relation to the idealised, and often romantic, viewpoints contained in many of the early seminal texts on design research and methodology (Archer, 1974; Jones, 1992; Pahl and Beitz, 1995; Pugh, 1991; Ulrich and Eppinger, 1995). In these works, an idealised, ordered and relatively generic notion of the “design process” typically falls along the lines of (1) problem statement, (2) research, (3) conceptualisation, (4) refinement and detailing, (5) evaluation, and (6) end-solution. However, the practice of design as observed during the six weeks field ethnography in this study revealed behaviour which was often chaotic, disordered, haphazard, rushed, and error prone. In this respect, the designers exhibited behaviour closer to that depicted in Lee McCormack’s brusquely titled book – “Designers are Wankers” – wherein tantrums, silences, naivety, selfishness and ego were prevalent characteristics of the designers involved (McCormack, 2005).