The Design Landscape: A Phenomenographic Study Of Design Experiences

Design is central to engineering education and practice. Thus, it is important to investigate aspects of design that can be applied to facilitate engineers in becoming better designers. Designers’ experiences impact their views on design, which then impact the ways they approach a design task. Design approach then impacts new experiences, and the cycle continues. To investigate experiences and analyze the results in a way to understand key differences in a broad range of experiences, a particular research method was utilized, that of phenomenography. This paper explores and explains phenomenography as a research method through an example of phenomenography of design experiences. For this study, the outcomes included six qualitatively different ways that design has been experienced. Represented in a hierarchical form, from less comprehensive to more comprehensive, these categories of description included: Design is 1) evidence-based decision-making, 2) organized translation, 3) personal synthesis, 4) intentional progression, 5) directed creative exploration, and 6) freedom. An additional outcome of this study was four themes of expanding awareness, including the role of the problem, the role of ambiguity, the task endpoint, and the task outcome. This paper describes the path from the beginning to the end of a phenomenography, contextualized in a study on design experiences of professionals from diverse disciplines. Introduction What does it mean to design? There are theoretical answers to this question. For example, Visser described design as consisting of the act of “specifying an artifact, given requirements that indicate — generally neither explicitly, nor completely — one or more functions to be fulfilled, and needs and goals to be satisfied by the artifact, under certain conditions (expressed by constraints)” (p. 116). While I could continue to present definitions of design, it is more interesting to point out that none of these definitions that could be presented come from professionals who design on a regular basis as a part of their careers. The lack of understanding design from this perspective prompted the research study presented in this paper. My search to find a research approach to address this question of how professional designers understood what it means to design lead to investigations on an approach called phenomenography. This approach yielded results that contributed to understanding the broad picture of what it means to design. The intention of this paper is to emphasize the design and outcomes of phenomenography as a research approach. Presenting the research design and summarizing the outcomes of a phenomenography of how design professionals experience design allow for an example of what a phenomenography looks like as it goes through the development stage and is analyzed for outcomes. Research Approach Phenomenography is grounded in the idea that what people remember and aspects on which they reflect about concrete experiences are related to the meanings they associate P ge 14189.2 with a particular aspect of the world, discerning critical components of an experience from non-critical components. These memories and reflections can be defined as constituting a person’s awareness. Each person’s awareness is unique, and as different people express different critical components, there becomes a number of qualitatively different ways an aspect of the world is experienced. Thus, the primary goal of a phenomenography is to uncover these qualitatively different ways an aspect of the world is experienced. The way of experiencing an aspect of the world is situated in the relationship between subjects and that aspect of the world according to the way subjects see that relationship, which is different from an independent focus on either the aspect of the world or the subjects. In this case, the reason to do a phenomenography was because the target was a bigpicture view on how designers experienced design in their profession. In other words, what was their perceived relationship between them and design? How did they view it? How did they experience it? How did they approach it and carry out a design task? These questions could have been studied through intense observations or think-aloud protocols, but the aim and outcomes of the study would have changed. The intention was to get at how professionals associated meaning with design, and the best way to do that was to design a rigorous way to ask them personally. It was not a question that could just be asked with the expectation of a well-developed deep answer in response. To get at this would require a well-designed way to facilitate professionals in deeply reflecting on what it really meant to them to experience the act of designing, not just a surface-level response. Phenomenography was well suited to guide this pursuit. Research questions in a phenomenography are targeted to understand the qualitative critical variations in how a particular aspect of the world has been experienced. This outcome could be described as a landscape of possible experiences. For this phenomenography, the following research question guided the study: What are the qualitatively different ways practicing designers from a variety of disciplines have experienced design? This question addressed the goal of understanding critical components and meanings professional designers associated with their design experiences and also indicated the diverse disciplines from which professionals would be recruited. Thus, the outcome of the phenomenography would be a landscape of how design has been experienced across disciplines and not restricted to a single field, which would reduce the opportunity to fully understand the variation. Participants. Participant selection is guided by an attempt to gain the largest diversity in experiences possible within the aims of the study. Phenomenographic studies do not aim to generalize, thus the sample is not statistically representative, but rather chosen to obtain diversity. The sample size of a phenomenographic study is traditionally small, in the range of fifteen to twenty participants. In this study, twenty professional designers served as participants. Participant diversity was based on three criteria: gender, years of experience, and disciplinary association(s). After considering the scope of possible disciplines from which to recruit, which were justified by comparing disciplinary activities to Goel & Pirolli’s features of a design P ge 14189.3 task, participants were selected based on researcher networks within those disciplines. Table 1 provides participant information. Table 1. Study Participants Pseudonym Gender Years of Experience Domain(s) of Expertise (as stated by the participant) Alan Male 15-20 Architecture Bill Male 20+ Biomedical Engineering Charlotte Female 5-10 Chemical Engineering Duncan Male 20+ Chemistry Evelyn Female 10-15 Civil Engineering Fritz Male 5-10 Computer Science Glenda Female 20+ Dance Composition Hannah Female 20+ Fashion Design Isaac Male 5-10 Mechanical Engineering Jack Male 10-15 Painting and Writing Ken Male 20+ Physics Leann Female 5-10 Mechanical Engineering Marcus Male 20+ Experience Design and Computer Science Netty Female 10-15 Instructional Design Omar Male 10-15 Culinary Arts Parker Male 20+ Civil Engineering Quentin Male 5-10 Chemistry and Educational Research Roberta Female 15-20 Chemical Engineering Svenson Male 15-20 Chemical Engineering Tyson Male 20+ Analytical Chemistry Data Collection. Data sources in phenomenographic studies are typically interviews. While other qualitative methods may use multiple data sources for triangulation purposes, one source of data—interview transcripts—comprise a typical phenomenographic study . A phenomenographic interview is designed to utilize detailed discussions on concrete experiences to uncover understandings about the aspect of the world of interest 4, . The core of the interview and the sought data are not the specific details of the experiences, however, talking about these details facilitates contextualized and more meaningful reflections about the awareness held and values associated by the individual. In this study, interviews were used as the sole source of data. The structure of the interview protocol is key in achieving the intended outcomes of a phenomenography. Questions should facilitate movement between discussions of concrete experiences and reflections on those experiences. The protocol is semistructured, consisting of a general order of open-ended questions and supplemented with deeper probing ones asked to investigate responses more deeply. The structured P ge 14189.4 questions provide a context for the participants to discuss deeper meanings and facilitate participants in verbalizing their awarenesses. A structured protocol maintains some consistency in the interviews from participant to participant, a vital aspect to ensure the validity of the data. Examples of questions used in this work to get at underlying intentions or purposes included reasons the participant had for their decisions, what they hoped to gain from a particular experience or decision, why aspects of the experience were or were not important to them, how one concept or meaning they discussed related with other concepts or meanings they discussed, and how one priority, reflection point, or experience compared to another. While general ways to follow-up with participants may be the most important part of the interview for achieving the outcomes of a phenomenography 4, , often follow-up prompts cannot be pre-planned because they depend upon what the participant says during the interview. The development of the interview protocol in this study was governed by the focus on design as the particular aspect of the world being investigated. The goal of the questions in the protocol was to prompt participants’ discussions on their experiences, meanings, and awareness related to des