Design Iterations as Material Culture Artifacts: A Qualitative Methodology for Design Education Research

Abstract Studying design processes requires the researcher to move with the designer as they negotiate an action-reflection cycle comprised of a multitude of relationships, including the designer's relation to themselves, to human and more-than-human others, and to the beliefs, values, and assumptions that design us every day. This paper's goal is to introduce a new qualitative methodology for studying the complex relationality of design, particularly (but not exclusively) in an architectural design education context. This methodology has theoretical and methodological underpinnings in Process Philosophy and Material Culture. It presents a configuration and triangulation of ethnographic methods to reveal concealed relations of design, the designer's ethical and caring thought and practice, and how, if at all, design relationships were valued. This methodology was tested throughout three semesters with undergraduate students in a community-engaged Architectural Technology course. This thick and particularistic research requires a suite of ethnographic methods, as well as some innovations. The methods described in this paper include participant observation, life history interviewing, textual/discourse analysis of course artifacts (e.g., student reflections), and a personalized summative interview protocol for each student. For participant observation, the author embedded themselves in an Architectural Technology course for three semesters, took copious fieldnotes, and strove to learn how to assemble floor designs with students for course community partners using Revit software. Participant observation provided the researcher with insight into how design students negotiate their personal interests, the International Building Code, and the interests of a "client" in their designs. Over the three semesters, 18 students participated in life history interviews, which provided insight into how early experiences shaped each student's educational trajectory and their values. Through this data, the researcher was able later to inquire into how student values and past experiences influenced their design work. The researcher also collected and analyzed students' reflective writing captured in their journal entries, code studies, and mind maps. For the final interview, the researcher created a personalized interview protocol for each student that facilitated the student's and researcher's co-examination of the trajectory of their designs across the semester. This was a time-intensive process. To create these personalized interviews, the researcher had to triangulate all data gathered through the methods previously described. This means that the researcher had to (1) review field notes for documentation of events in which the student in question was involved; (2) review the life history interview recording/transcript; (3) analyze each student's journal entries, code studies, mind maps; and (4) map a series of personalized questions born from the researcher's analysis of these data across each student's floor plan iterations. This final interview helped to map the circulating relationships, interdependencies, and affective forces of human and more-than-human actants – their credits and debts – across the iterations of student architectural designs. The author concludes by considering how this methodology facilitated the ethnographic interrogation of design relations and the ethical sense-making of students and, in doing so, points to new potentialities for design education capable of uplifting relationality and challenging the beliefs and values that design us every day.