The Ontology

The Residence

Zoe Sadokierski’s 2020 paper, Developing critical documentation practices for design researchers, has provided a lens for reflecting on the practices and philosophies guiding the Empathetic Aging Project (EAP) (Sadokierski, 2022).

Sadokierski’s proposal of critical documentation as an active communication channel between the designer and their audience, highlights the process of design reportage as an opportunity for empathy generation. The critical documentation produced by a designer articulates why a design question is raised and how the conclusion is drawn. This reflective synthesis provides a professional insight into the designer and provokes audience participation through resonation with the practices employed. In turn, empathy is generated by the spectators as they appreciate the perspectives and values guiding the designer’s decision making process. Similarly, the proposed outcome for the EAP seeks to elicit community-wide acknowledgement for an elderly individual’s process of AIP through the documentation of engagement with the home. Here, the EAP frames the individual AIP as the designer, the design intervention as the critical documentation and the support community as the audience. Alike critical documentation, the evidencing of an elderly individual's behaviours evokes empathy through the prompted discover of motivations, customs and adaptive conduct.

Sadokierski explores the generative potential of documentation by proposing that reflective practices inspire future design developments. While documentation is widely accepted as a tool for critical analysis, the ‘talk back’, as termed by Sadokierski, between a designer/researcher and their documentation highlights the productive potential yielded from in vivo and in vitro evaluation. This approach to design evidencing has highlighted documentation as both a tool for substantiating a designer’s practice, and a method to generate contemporary design processes and outcomes. Ongoing documentation of the EAP’s progress has facilitated a dialogue between the work formerly completed and, myself, the designer to prompt the ideation of original design methods and solutions. This process is present in the EAP’s research phase, as the documented clarification of synthesised primary and secondary insights saw potential design concepts generated at the conclusion of the define phase. As the research project enters into its develop phase, documentation will be utilised, through the framework of a critical inventory, to record and to stimulate the inception of new design concepts and methods.

Sadokierski calls to attention the human-focused, collaborative nature of documentation. Documentation provides designers with an opportunity to share the knowledge generated by the research project with others. By validating research insights, methodologies and design outcomes with contextual experts, the designer may authenticate their role as a valuable contributor of new knowledge to the field of design. However, peer critique may yield an opposing result, where the findings of the research are challenged and the credibility of the work is questioned. This may offer as much, if not greater, benefit to the field of design as the interpretation of knowledge through shared, interdisciplinary perspectives may offer a richer understanding of the subject matter. Therefore, the shared documentation of design research, which welcomes adaptation, may allow a designer to transcend their sole perspective to embrace expansive knowledges. In documenting and sharing the progress of the EAP, through an online critical inventory, I hope to engage with a wide audience of readers to prompt optimal interdisciplinary feedback. Additionally, through recognising a designer’s embedded role within their research project, the importance of sharing and received critique for design evidencing is highlighted, to ensure that subjectivity and biases are rationalised by an array of perspectives.

Sadokierski stipulates a designer’s dyadic interrelation between acting as a researcher and performing as a creative. A designer has an analytic responsibility to best inform themselves of the context that they are creating within. Similarly, a designer has a generative responsibility to innovate solutions for identified and emerging needs. These juxtaposing responsibilities may entangle the designer, where the designer becomes creatively paralysed by the research they need to undertake prior to developing design concepts. Sadokierski offers a resolution, in which the responsibilities of a designer and researcher do not need to be mutually exclusive. This perspective facilitates the generation of concepts such as, employing research “through” design, where design activities may be used as research methods. The intersection between design and research is explored within the EAP by the engagement with complimentary studio and theory scholarship. This has, and will continue to see, the concepts explored in studio work informing the themes to be researched in the theory subdivision of my honours degree. An example of design permeating theoretical investigation may be seen through the design of an empowering AIP product leading to the ideological exploration of the Wabi Sabi philosophy. This theoretical deepening of the studio work has offered great richness to the EAP’s studio outcome. Similarly, the insights discover from traditional theoretical scholarship will guide the progress of the honours studio project. This may been seen through inclusive practices, which align with a participatory methodology, informing the selection of design methods which are to generate design concepts. The balance between acting as a researcher and designer is to be moderated by documenting my weekly studio ‘news’ and theory ‘analysis’ engagements in my critical inventory. This will allow me to reflectively assess my role as both an active researcher and effective designer.

Sadokierski, Z. (2020). Developing critical documentation practices for design researchers. Design Studies, 69, 100940. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2020.03.002