Why
What is MDM?
How
The Method for Design Materialization (MDM) is a methodological approach to design practice documentation that connects design reasoning and materials, in order to make design processes traceable.
- in context and
- in response to constraints or intentions and
- in response to material conditions and work environments and
- in relation to timelines and
- in relation to prior experience and
- in embodied states and
- in subjectivity.
Materializing design activity therefore involves intentionally surfacing context, constraints, timelines, materials, experience, and subjectivity. Design activity also involves exploration of multiple solutions that may impact significantly on the designer’s reasoning process, but which the external world may never encounter.
Within a digital context, software version control technologies exist to incrementally track changes to software code bases over time. Each time a developer writes a significant block of code, they commit it to a version control software repository. Over time, the repository comes to represent the entire history of the project from the first line of code to the last. Each change is accompanied by a commit message that briefly describes the work done (e.g., “Added a close button to the dialogue box”).
Each moment along this timeline can be fully recovered by checking out a specific version of the project via the associated commit. This enables interim design prototypes to be experienced.
MDM leverages version control processes, concepts, and technologies, but reorients them to privilege intentional documenting or tracing of design processes primarily involving digital materials. Alongside declaring and documenting changes to software, a designer practicing MDM explicitly documents and reflects on the evolution of their design intentions, their design reasoning and problem solving, along with their design practice experiences.
An MDM archive can also trace designerly reasoning through capture of physical design process artifacts such as sketches, experimentation with physical construction techniques, and more.
Given its digital nature, however, instead of asking, “Can I use MDM to archive a specific artifact?”, a designer practicing MDM asks, “What forms of digital capture will communicate a legible trace of my reasoning?” reasoning?”
MDM 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.
WHY?
HOW?