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A sociomaterial perspective on epistemic objects in design practice
... This process is often facilitated through the utilization of prototype tools such as sketches, physical models, and digital models, contributing to the construction of cognitive objects. These prototype tools not only facilitate the transition from abstraction to concretization, but also support the establishment of consensus with other stakeholders, such as team collaborators (Beltagui et al., 2023). Designers typically externalize their internal ideas using conventional means, including traditional sketches, to acquire 4 visual feedback and progressively refine their concepts until a design concept takes shape. ...
One of the raging debates in organization study concerns the use of “templates” in qualitative research. This curated debate brings together many of the players in that debate, who make statements of position relative to the issues involved and trade accusations and counter-accusations about statements they have made that in their view have been misinterpreted or misconstrued. Overall, it is quite a lively debate that reveals positions, points of tension and grounds for disagreement. Denny Gioia wrote the triggering essay that prompted other players to weigh in with their personal and professional views.
System‐wide change is often challenging to achieve due to complex and fragmented institutions, dispersed and diffused power structures, confidence‐sapping histories of failure and the influence of multiple and overlapping fields. This study examines how a large complex system‐wide problem such as the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace Process was paradoxically opened up and made more receptive to change by widening of the way the problem was framed. We demonstrate how and why the framing enables the mobilization of cooperation and the delivery of contextually appropriate collective action critical to the achievement of outcomes in system‐wide change processes. More specifically, we examine how and why such complex and precarious processes emerge over extended timescales through four mechanisms: frame contesting, reframing, frame reproduction and frame defending. Each of these mechanisms is agentic, dynamic, purposive and politically charged. The time‐series analysis of these interlinked mechanisms is a crucial and innovative feature of the study. We encourage management and organizational scholars to elevate their gaze to the system‐wide changes so emblematic of contemporary society and offer an outline agenda for research.
Studies have examined how managers use strategy tools, but we know much less about how managers create strategy tools de novo. We undertook an ethnographic study of a business facing a wicked problem and investigated the sociomaterial practice of collective toolmaking. We identify how strategy toolmaking oscillates between different problem domains and reveal how this manifests process affordances, which are ‘unintended’ by‐products of the toolmaking process. Counterintuitively, by intentionally making a strategic tool, actors unintentionally create a sociomaterial springboard for 'spin‐off strategizing' and ‘the discovery of latent ambiguities’, generating strategic value beyond the tool produced. These insights illuminate how the practice of collective toolmaking can stimulate wayfinding, indirectly helping managers to respond to wicked problems, characterized by high degrees of complexity, ambiguity, and indeterminacy.
This article reviews scholarship dealing with the notion of “boundary work,” defined as purposeful individual and collective effort to influence the social, symbolic, material, or temporal boundaries, demarcations; and distinctions affecting groups, occupations, and organizations. We identify and explore the implications of three conceptually distinct but interrelated forms of boundary work emerging from the literature.
Competitive boundary work involvesmobilizing boundaries to establish some kind of advantage over others. In contrast, collaborative boundary work is concerned with aligning boundaries to enable collaboration. Finally, configurational boundary work involves manipulating patterns of differentiation and integration among groups to ensure that certain activities are brought together, whereas others are kept apart,
orienting the domains of competition and collaboration. We argue that the notion of boundary work can contribute to the development of a uniquely processual view of organizational design as open-ended, and continually becoming, an orientation with significant future potential for understanding novel forms of organizing, and for integrating agency, power dynamics, materiality, and temporality into the study of organizing.
Three-dimensional printing (3DP) is touted as a core element of a new industrial revolution, in which digitization, information and connectivity transform product innovation. However, while the purported benefits of 3DP are compelling, existing research suggests that expected benefits of advanced manufacturing technologies are rarely realized in practice. This research addresses the timely question of how to make effective use of a new digital technology. A theoretical framework based on Resource Orchestration Theory is used to analyze survey data collected from 177 US firms that use 3DP for innovation. Internal and external moderators of the relationship between the use of 3DP in innovation and performance are identified. Orchestration, measured as the level of coordination between information technology and manufacturing functions, and technological turbulence, are both found to act as positive moderators. These results indicate that adopting 3DP for innovation brings greater benefits to firms that orchestrate the functions involved in its implementation and use. In other words, how resources such as 3DP are used is at least as important as possessing them. Furthermore, 3DP is likely to be more effective in environments facing external uncertainty than under less turbulent conditions. With manufacturing becoming increasingly digitized, these results have implications for future innovations in manufacturing technology.
Contemporary organizations increasingly rely on images, logos, videos, building materials, graphic and product design, and a range of other material and visual artifacts to compete, communicate, form identity and organize their activities. This Special Issue focuses on materiality and visuality in the course of objectifying and reacting to novel ideas, and, more broadly, contributes to organizational theory by articulating the emergent contours of a material and visual turn in the study of organizations. In this Introduction, we provide an overview of research on materiality and visuality. Drawing on the articles in the special issue, we further explore the affordances and limits of the material and visual dimensions of organizing in relation to novelty. We conclude by pointing out theoretical avenues for advancing multimodal research, and discuss some of the ethical, pragmatic and identity-related challenges that a material and visual turn could pose for organizational research.
Research on design and designers has emphasized the tacit nature of the aesthetic knowledge that these professionals draw upon to make decisions about formal properties of objects and spaces, but is less clear about how design teams address the difficulties associated with expressing and sharing this type of knowledge. A ten-month ethnography in a design consultancy revealed a range of multimodal and cross-modal ways in which members of a design team compensate their imperfect capacity of articulating verbally their aesthetic knowledge in order to enable creative collaboration. In so doing, our study offers two main contributions. It illuminates the interplay between designers’ aesthetic experiences, visceral responses and intuitive cognitive processes that enable designers to draw upon their aesthetic knowledge to support the collective accomplishment of their task, and provides an interpretation of the design process as a form of ‘creative’ intuition driven by emotional reactions to environmental stimuli and emerging formal solutions.
Current research on strategizing and organizing has explored how practitioners make sense of an uncertain future, but provides limited explanations of how they actually make a realizable course of action for the future. A focus on making rather than sensemaking brings into view the visual artefacts that practitioners use in giving form to what is ‘not yet’ – drawings, models and sketches. We explore how visual artefacts are used in making a realizable course of action, by analysing ethnographic data from an architectural studio designing a development strategy for their client. We document how visual artefacts become enrolled in practices of imagining, testing, stabilizing and reifying, through which abstract imaginings of the future are turned into a realizable course of action. We then elaborate on higher-order findings that are generalizable to a wide range of organizational settings, and discuss their implications for future research in strategizing and organizing. This paper contributes in two ways: first, it offers future making as an alternative perspective on how practitioners orient themselves towards the future (different from current perspectives such as foreseeing, future perfect thinking and wayfinding). Second, it advances our understanding of visual artefacts and their performativity in the making of organizational futures.
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This paper examines how professionals working in bureaucratic organizations, despite having formal authority, struggle to enact authority over the clients they advise, transforming their right to command into deference to commands. Drawing on a comparative ethnographic study of two professional groups overseeing compliance in university laboratories, I identify how choices about their task jurisdiction influence each profession’s ability to enact authority over and gain voluntary compliance from the same group of clients. One group constructs its work domain to include not only high-skilled tasks that emphasize members’ expertise but also scut work—menial work with contaminated materials—through which they gain regular entry into clients’ workspaces, developing knowledge about and relationships with clients. Using these resources to accommodate, discipline, and understand clients, they produce relational authority—the capacity to elicit voluntary compliance with commands. The other group outsources everyday scut work and interacts with lab researchers mostly during annual inspections and training, which leads to complaints by researchers to management and eventual loss of jurisdiction. The findings show the importance of producing relational authority in contemporary professional–client interactions in bureaucratic settings and challenge the relevance of expertise and professional identity in generating relational authority. I show how holding on to, not hiving off, scut work allows professionals to enact authority over clients.
It is generally accepted that the development of the modern sciences is rooted in experiment. Yet for a long time, experimentation did not occupy a prominent role, neither in philosophy nor in history of science. With the 'practical turn' in studying the sciences and their history, this has begun to change. This paper is concerned with systems and cultures of experimentation and the consistencies that are generated within such systems and cultures. The first part of the paper exposes the forms of historical and structural coherence that characterize the experimental exploration of epistemic objects. In the second part, a particular experimental culture in the life sciences is briefly described as an example. A survey will be given of what it means and what it takes to analyze biological functions in the test tube.
A growing body of research is drawing attention to the material practices that support verbal exchanges and cognitive processes in collective sensemaking. In this study, building on an ethnographic study of a design consulting firm, we develop a process model that accounts for the interplay between conversational and material practices in the transition from individual to group-level sensemaking, and we begin to unpack how the "materialization" of cognitive work supports the collective construction of new shared understandings.
For all its richness and potential for discovery, qualitative research has been critiqued as too often lacking in scholarly rigor. The authors summarize a systematic approach to new concept development and grounded theory articulation that is designed to bring “qualitative rigor” to the conduct and presentation of inductive research.
This paper reviews research on product design in the broad domain of business studies. It highlights established and emerging perspectives and lines of inquiry, and organizes them around three core areas, corresponding to different stages of the design process (design activities, design choices, design results). Avenues for further research at the intersection of these bodies of research are identified and discussed, and the authors argue that management scholars possess conceptual and methodological tools suited to enriching research on design and effectively pursuing lines of investigation only partially addressed by other communities, such as the construction and deployment of design capabilities, or the organizational and institutional context of design activities.
Abstract Only critical distancing let Godard value the premonitory potential of film, and at the same time, point out the incapacity to register the realness that it generated. The filmmaker has always believed that “film is prophetic, it predicts and announces things”, and that this condition corresponds to its essence as a record. Rancière in a lucid reading of Film History says that for Godard: “film is responsible for not filming fields in their time; great for filming them before their time and guilty for not knowing how to recognize them”. This article begins with these clear political propositions, as well as proposing some variations.
This paper considers the limitations of project management tools as boundary objects within dispersed or global programs of teamwork. The concept of boundary object is receiving growing attention in the management literature. These artefacts are argued to provide a basis for negotiation and knowledge exchange between differentiated communities of practice. The paper assesses these claims theoretically and empirically in the context of global projects. Theoretically it draws on the literatures on boundary objects, dispersed work and project management tools and organization. The paper then analyses a case study of a global program in a major computing corporation. The program spanned numerous geographical sites across the US, Europe and Japan as well as several functional communities of practice including production, services, sales, IT and company registry. The method involved interviews with 33 program managers at six sites and analysis of program management devices such as integrated timelines, online status reporting tools and modular roadmaps. The paper argues that in dispersed programs where there is no opportunity for face-to-face interaction, and/or ambiguous lines of authority, project management tools will be ineffectual as boundary objects and prone to avoidance. Boundary objects are inherently limited precisely because of their marginal nature, the effects of which are exacerbated in diverse and dispersed programs.
This paper examines how written research accounts based on ethnography appeal to readers to find them convincing. In particular, it highlights the role of rhetoric in the readers' interaction with and interpretation of the accounts. Extending relevant work in the literatures of organization studies, anthropology and literary criticism, the paper develops three dimensions-authenticity, plausibility and criticality-central to the process of convincing. Further, through the analysis of a sample of ethnographic articles, it discloses the particular writing practices and more general strategies that make claims on readers to engage the texts and to accept that these three dimensions have been achieved. Through authenticity, ethnographic texts appeal to readers to accept that the researcher was indeed present in the field and grasped how the members understood their world. Strategies to achieve authenticity include: particularizing everyday life, delineating the relationship between the researcher and organization members, depicting the disciplined pursuit and analysis of data, and qualifying personal biases. Through plausibility, ethnographic texts make claims on readers to accept that the findings make a distinctive contribution to issues of common concern. Plausibility is accomplished by strategies that normalize unorthodox methodologies, recruit the reader, legitimate atypical situations, smooth contestable assertions, build dramatic anticipation, and differentiate the findings. Finally, through criticality, ethnographic texts endeavor to probe readers to re-examine the taken-for-granted assumptions that underly their work. Strategies to achieve criticality include: carving out room to reflect, provoking the recognition and examination of differences, and enabling readers to imagine new possibilities. The empirical analyses, which highlight both the rhetorical and substantive aspects of convincing, suggest that at a minimum ethnographic texts must achieve both authenticity and plausibility-that is, they must convey the vitality and uniqueness of the field situation and also build their case for the particular contribution of the findings to a disciplinary area of common interest. These analyses also suggest that the most provocative task and promising potential of ethnography is the use of richly-grounded data to not only reflect on the members' world, but more importantly to provoke an examination of the readers' prevailing assumptions and beliefs.
The traditional scientific approach to design extols the virtues of completeness. However, in environments characterized by continual change, there are challenges in adopting such an approach. We examine Linux and Wikipedia as two exemplary cases to explore the nature of design in such a protean world. Our observations highlight a pragmatic approach to design in which incompleteness is harnessed in a generative manner. This suggests a change in the meaning of the word ‘design’ itself — from one that separates the process of design from its outcome, to one that considers design as both the medium and outcome of action.
This study explores the premise that knowledge in new product development proves both a barrier to and a source of innovation. To understand the problematic nature of knowledge and the boundaries that result, an ethnographic study was used to understand how knowledge is structured differently across the four primary functions that are dependent on each other in the creation and production of a high-volume product. A pragmatic view of 'knowledge in practice' is developed, describing knowledge as localized, embedded, and invested within a function and how, when working across functions, consequences often arise that generate problematic knowledge boundaries. The use of a boundary object is then described as a means of representing, learning about, and transforming knowledge to resolve the consequences that exist at a given boundary. Finally, this pragmatic view of knowledge and boundaries is proposed as a framework to revisit the differentiation and integration of knowledge.
This paper suggests that knowledge is shared in organizations through the transformation of occupational communities' situated understandings of their work. In this paper, I link the misunderstandings between engineers, technicians, and assemblers on a production floor to their work contexts, and demonstrate how members of these communities overcome such problems by cocreating common ground that transforms their understanding of the product and the production process. In particular, I find that the communities' knowledge-sharing difficulties are rooted in differences in their language, the locus of their practice, and their conceptualization of the product. When communication problems arise, if members of these communities provide solutions which invoke the differences in the work contexts and create common ground between the communities, they can transform the understandings of others and generate a richer understanding of the product and the problems they face.
The importance of design as a source of value creation has been studied for decades. In the late 90s, however, a specific approach in the practice of design achieved a rapid diffusion across organizations: Design Thinking. This is a formal method for creative problem solving characterized by user-centeredness, ideation, and iterative prototyping. The rapid diffusion of Design Thinking in practice has not been coupled with similarly rapid and robust development of its theoretical underpinnings. Most contributions have been inward-oriented toward a confined community of scholars; therefore, the scientific discourse on Design Thinking has unfolded in a vacuum—often independently from other innovation management theories. The consequence has been that Design Thinking is often confused (especially among those new to the field) with the entire practice of design. Subsequently, we still lack an understanding on whether, why, and when Design Thinking contributes to innovation. In this editorial, we discuss the journey to the Special Issue “Design Thinking and Innovation Management: Matches, Mismatches and Future Avenues” that intends to critically reflect and enrich the scientific debate around Design Thinking. First, we aim at clarifying the distinction between “design” and “Design Thinking.” The former is a practice, to be studied; the latter is a paradigm, that is, a set of specific principles, methods, and tools to practice design. Second, we offer a brief overview of the community that has been investigating Design Thinking, a synthesis of the ten papers included in the Special Issue (distributed across this and the next issue), and show how they contribute to close the theoretical and empirical gaps with innovation studies. Finally, we suggest that the paradigm of Design Thinking is significantly contingent: its diffusion and success have been favored by the emergence of specific contextual conditions (substantially by the ubiquitous diffusion of digital technologies in direct interaction with users). As the context is dramatically shifting again, we wonder whether Design Thinking will keep its relevance and ability to support organizations in addressing the new challenges ahead? We address this question with the support of a contingent framework to position several design paradigms and suggest that the context ahead, where problems have multiple stakeholders and are undefined, will require the emergence of new paradigms characterized by a systemic (rather than user-centered) and reflective (rather than ideative) practice. We therefore propose a few research questions that will hopefully encourage and shape future scholarly efforts into the study of the design practice for innovation in organizations.
This paper presents a detailed analysis of the uses of sticky notes in a range of design-oriented activities, from three different projects. The paper makes two principal contributions. First, it introduces a socio-material analytic for the study of design materials, and exemplifies this analysis with respect to video data of designers’ uses of sticky notes. Second, it illustrates how the material properties of sticky notes come to have interactional consequences in the performance of particular social actions. Four general thematic considerations emerge from this socio-material analysis of sticky notes: (1) a reappreciation of the embodiment of space, ownership and actions-with-notes; (2) the interactional history of notes; (3) the social and conceptual inertia of gestalt contextures; and (4) the unity of the social, material and conceptual in embodied design activity.
This article examines ‘material literacy’ in graphic design practice, defined as the idea that designers interpret meanings in material properties. Given existing definitions of ‘literacy’ and ‘visual literacy’, the concept supports the theory that because materials are as diverse in their capacity for expression as are words and images, materials facilitate a form of design language in themselves. Useful for consolidating contemporary literature's many recognitions of the significance of materials in post-digital designing, by focusing on the productivity of technologically fluent graphic design ideation, the article emphasises the importance of a practitioner's knowledge, choice, and discriminate implementation of tools.
Researchers can expect to perform analytic actions repeatedly; that this iteration is required is a common observation. Yet, how researchers engage in iteration to progress their theorizing is not articulated. Our analysis provides new insight into what it means to iterate in the service of driving analysis. We examine iteration through the lens of the analytic process of coding in specific research projects. Using a relational definition of coding, we identify the reported coding actions of several studies with rich descriptions of their analytical processes. By doing this, we show that it is useful to understand these coding actions in the context of coding moments that relate to how researchers use the coding actions as their project develops. The moments we identify are making codes, organizing to code, and putting patterns together. To show iteration, we trace the reported coding practices in exemplar articles. These tracings indicate that the reported process is not a fixed or consistent sequence. Rather, iterativity is organized by what is the next needed analytic input required to progress a given situated study.
The design process requires coordination between professions that have different ways of seeing. Using ethnographic data from a building project, this paper explores how architects and engineers mobilize visual objects to coordinate their professional visions around a design issue. The findings articulate the visual practices whereby design professionals move from a fragmented towards a shared professional vision. In this move, they cease looking at the design issue from within their disciplinary perspective, and begin taking inspiration from each other's. They further adjust the emergent shared professional vision, by iteratively narrowing and broadening its focus. The paper contributes to the practice perspective in design studies, explaining how different ways of seeing are coordinated through practical engagement with visual objects.
Diane E. Bailey is an associate professor at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, where she studies technology and work in information and technical occupations. Her research interests include work and artificial intelligence, computational technologies in engineering design, remote occupational socialization, and Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D).
Arecognized challenge in innovation scholarship is how to coordinate the efforts of many minds contributing to the design of a single artifact. Much research shows that product concept representations can help coordinate design tasks, but we know little about the practices that make representations more or less effective. We used an inductive approach to examine how six teams in three industries used concept representations when creating novel products. All six teams crafted three types of representations: stories, metaphors, and prototypes. However, merely using representations did not ensure a shared repertoire and concept coherence—a common understanding of desired product attributes. Teams that failed to consistently engage in three practices—(1) collective scrutiny of representations, (2) linking representations to design constraints, and (3) active editing of representations—produced concept disunity, with disparate understandings of desired product attributes. Teams that maintained concept coherence were better able to coordinate design tasks than teams that experienced concept disunity. Our research explains how the ultimate effect of concept representations on the coordination of innovation is contingent on the practices used to manage a repertoire of representations in use.
In this paper we examine the role of different material artefacts in the exploration of novel strategic topics. We conceptualize strategic topics as epistemic objects that become instantiated in multiple material artefacts, i.e. partial objects, which not only represent the epistemic object but also energize and direct the exploration process. Based on a longitudinal case study of a company that (in collaboration with other companies) explored the strategic topic of ‘flexible production’, we develop a new typology of material artefacts in terms of their relation to the strategic topic. We describe the layered nature of materiality, differentiating between different types of objectual and non-objectual material artefacts, and show how their interplay shapes the dynamics of the strategizing process. In particular, we explain how the constellation of material artefacts can lead to a shift of the strategic topic itself. We offer a conceptual model that captures the mechanisms in the dynamic interplay of different types of material artefacts and their effect on the process of exploration.
"Inquiry from the inside" is characterized by the experiential involvement of the researcher, the absence of a priori analytical categories, and an intent to understand a particular situation. "Inquiry from the outside" calls for detachment on the part of the researcher, who typically gathers data according to a priori analytical categories and aims to uncover knowledge that can be generalized to many situations. Greater appreciation of the epistemological differences between these two approaches can help organization scientists select the mode of inquiry appropriate to the phenomenon under study and to their own abilities and purposes.
Scientific work is heterogeneous, requiring many different actors and viewpoints. It also requires cooperation. The two create tension between divergent viewpoints and the need for generalizable findings. We present a model of how one group of actors managed this tension. It draws on the work of amateurs, professionals, administrators and others connected to the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, during its early years. Extending the Latour-Callon model of interessement, two major activities are central for translating between viewpoints: standardization of methods, and the development of `boundary objects'. Boundary objects are both adaptable to different viewpoints and robust enough to maintain identity across them. We distinguish four types of boundary objects: repositories, ideal types, coincident boundaries and standardized forms.
One of the key concepts of the neo-institutional studies of organizations has been routine—an established, rule-governed pattern of action. The concept of routine creates difficulties when used for making sense of the emergence of new practices or change in organizations and institutions. There are two reasons for this. First, routine was introduced originally to account for the continuity of organizational life. Second, it is based on theories of action and behaviour that focus exclusively on the pre-reflective and embodied aspects of human practice. This paper seeks an alternative approach by using the concepts of epistemic object and artefact mediation of human activity. It argues that representational artefacts, such as concepts and models, are instrumental in inducing change in human practices. Using the work of occupational health and safety inspectors as an example, it is shown how a practice or set of routines is made into an object of enquiry in order to generate a working hypothesis for an alternative practice. The hypothesis is further objectified by designing a set of informational tools and procedures that carry on the new practice.
This paper compares two alternative theoretical foundations upon which the study of sociomateriality can be built: Agential Realism and Critical Realism. It begins by providing a brief overview of the sociomaterial perspective on organizational practices and considers why this perspective holds great appeal at this point in time. I then engage with Mutch’s (2013) critique of the agential realist foundation upon which most current discussions of sociomateriality are constructed to highlight what practical problems are generated when authors attempt to map agential realism’s philosophical discussion onto empirical phenomena. Next, I attempt to make explicit what Mutch leaves implicit in his paper: how building studies of sociomateriality on the theoretical foundation offered by critical realism can, potentially, overcome some of the practical problems created by a footing on agential realism. Finally, I push Mutch’s arguments one step further to compare what practical consequences arise when researchers attempt to construct studies of sociomateriality on either of these two theoretical foundations. I suggest that there are important implications for what one can study, how one can study it, and how scholars can contribute to theory on technology and organizing based on the theoretical foundation they choose to build upon.
In today's complex world, companies often find themselves facing confounding strategy problems. These issues are not just tough or persistent; they're "wicked" - a label used by urban planners for problems that cannot be definitively resolved. Poverty and terrorism are classic examples. A wicked problem has innumerable causes, morphs constantly, and has no correct answer. It can be tamed, however, with the right approach. In this article, Camillus, a professor at the Katz Graduate School of Business, explains how executives can tell if they're dealing with a wicked strategy problem. In a 15-year study involving 22 companies, he identified five key criteria. If a problem involves many stakeholders with conflicting priorities; if its roots are tangled; if it changes with every attempt to address it; if you've never faced it before; and if there's no way to evaluate whether a remedy will work, chances are good that it's wicked. According to the author, the need for faster growth is, in all likelihood, a wicked issue for Wal-Mart. Traditional linear processes - identifying the issue, gathering data, studying all the options, choosing one strategy - don't work with wicked problems. They instead demand social processes that constantly engage stakeholders, explore related issues, reevaluate the problem's definition, and reconsider the assumptions of stakeholders. A strong corporate identity is essential: It serves as a rudder that helps the enterprise navigate a sea of choices. Because it's impossible to tell which options are appropriate, executives should stop analyzing them and start experimenting with actions. Eventually they will make progress by muddling through. Envisioning possible futures and identifying moves that will realize the one the company hopes for will uncover promising remedies. That's how PPG Industries, a 100-year-old manufacturer, has successfully coped with its wicked strategy issues.
The ability to reframe a problematic situation in new and interesting ways is widely seen as one of the key characteristics of design thinking. In this paper we study how experienced designers have professionalised the crucial art of frame communication and new frame adoption with their clients. During briefing, professional designers elicit a client's frame, reframe it to be more workable and desirable, and reflect it back. In this study fifteen experienced visual communications designers were interviewed and asked about briefing activities for what they deemed to be 'typical' and 'innovative' projects. This yielded rich descriptions of strategies that these professional designers used to enable refraining of the situation with clients, insights into possible difficulties and patterns of briefing practices.
In this essay, I begin with the premise that everyday organizing is inextricably bound up with materiality and contend that this relationship is inadequately reflected in organizational studies that tend to ignore it, take it for granted, or treat it as a special case. The result is an understanding of organizing and its conditions and consequences that is necessarily limited. I then argue for an alternative approach, one that posits the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material in everyday life. I draw on some empirical examples to help ground and illustrate this approach in practice and conclude by suggesting that a reconfiguration of our conventional assumptions and considerations of materiality will help us more effectively recognize and understand the multiple, emergent, and shifting sociomaterial assemblages entailed in contemporary organizing.
C-K theory is a unified Design theory and was first introduced in 2003 (Hatchuel and Weil 2003). The name “C-K theory” reflects the assumption that Design can be modelled as the interplay between two interdependent spaces with different structures and logics: the space of concepts (C) and the space of knowledge (K). Both pragmatic views of Design
and existing Design theories define Design as a dynamic mapping process between required functions and selected structures.
However, dynamic mapping is not sufficient to describe the generation of new objects and new knowledge which are distinctive features of Design. We show that C-K theory captures such generation and offers a rigorous definition
of Design. This is illustrated with an example: the design of Magnesium-CO2 engines for Mars explorations. Using C-K theory we also discuss Braha and Reich’s topological structures for design modelling
(Braha and Reich 2003). We interpret this approach as special assumptions about the stability of objects in space K. Combining C-K theory and Braha
and Reich’s models opens new areas for research about knowledge structures in Design theories. These findings confirm the analytical and interpretative power of C-K theory.
Design thinking is the core creative process for any designer; this book explores and explains this apparently mysterious “design ability.”
Focusing on what designers do when they design, Design Thinking is structured around a series of in-depth case studies of outstanding and expert designers, interwoven with overviews and analyses. The range covered reflects the breadth of design, from hardware and software design to architecture and Formula One. The book offers new insights into and understanding of design thinking, based on evidence from observation and investigation of design practice.
Design Thinking is the distillation of the work of one of design’s most influential scholars. Nigel Cross goes to the heart of what it means to think and work as a designer. The book is an ideal guide for anyone who wants to be a designer or to know how good designers work in the field of contemporary design.