Medium Difficulty

In section two of Brenda Laurel’s Design Research, I had trouble understanding exactly the point of what was going on. The concept of design as research doesn’t necessarily elude me, but I feel like most of the passages focused on something resembling a guess and check method. Part of me for some reason wanted to fight this possibility. It just seemed too simple to spend so much time on. It wasn’t for some time after reading the selection that I began to assemble the concepts in my mind in some enriching way.

Lisa Grocott talks about Studio Anybody as a venture that put client projects on hold in lieu of building a library of new methods by process of speculation and discovery. Then towards the end of the reading, the essays “Sanjuro: The Ronin leaves town” and “Shoot your own Dog” resonated the same principles.

It seems that as of the assembling of this book, designers as a group of professionals have fallen into some sort of prison due to corporate constraints. These passages seem to emphasize the creative individual over the quick buck. The over-arching argument is that creativity unleashed is essential to build up a mental bank that, in turn, will help produce more effective, efficient, and overall more stunning designs.

While reading this I thought of my last job (which was working for an online magazine). I felt a beat of sympathy for the designers there. As far as I knew, they never had the chance to really experiment, to research, and to come to new conclusions. They were simply consumed in day-to-day tasks.

Then, I realized, is the perfect time to implement such design tactics. As designers sink deeper into the day-to-day, it seems that the list of design problems only gets longer and longer. That’s the point to stop and take some time to revise the whole process.

That way a given “grand strategy,” as said by Rob Tow, is seen again with a new light and new excitement. Then the “strategies” can be reorganized, and perhaps the “tactics” can be made more efficient.