Materializing Design

Method for Design Materialization

To emphasise that designerly knowledge is of value (beyond its outputs), we must consciously attend to how we articulate and materialize design knowledge, as well as consider how it affords scholarly engagement and debate. We believe that designers need to develop a discipline of documentation of their design activity, and assume that they are documenting not only for themselves but as a way to continuously demonstrate a through-line in their design reasoning. Documentation resulting from such a mode of audience-oriented introspection can then serve as material traces of design activity that peers in the field can engage with and critically evaluate. They can additionally use it as material evidence on which to theorize designerly reasoning and practice.

The Method for Design Materialization (MDM) is our proposal for exactly this. Devised especially for materializing game and interaction design reasoning, and taking inspiration from prototyping theory, reflective practice, interaction design, software development, archival practice, and qualitative research, MDM involves methodical digital archiving of all stages of design and production, coupled with regular and reflective journaling by the designer. It challenges us to make the way we think about design less opaque in the way we document design, bringing it closer to the way we practice design.

Materializing design activity involves intentionally surfacing context, constraints, intentions, timelines, materials, development environments, experience, and subjectivity. Design activity also involves exploration of multiple solutions that may impact significantly on the reasoning process of the designer, but which the external world may never encounter. Fortunately for designers whose practice is primarily digital, a class of existing software already roughly provides the functionality necessary to support the capture of components of the aforementioned list: version control software.

MDM Archives