Designing with Social Materials
Exploring how design works with social and organisational materials rather than purely technical ones.
- 1
Krippendorff's Trajectory of Artificiality: From Products to Discourse
August 14, 2022
Klaus Krippendorff has been a foundational influence on my understanding of design since my MPhil. His work sits at the intersection of design, cybernetics, and communication theory - a combination...
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Metaphors We Think With: How Language Shapes Understanding
August 29, 2022
This post was originally written in August 2022. It has since been revised to include a cross-reference to the later conceptual spaces post, where Gärdenfors's geometric framework was explored in...
- 3
Metaphors for Working with AI: How Language Shapes Design Possibility
September 5, 2022
In my previous post on metaphor, I explored how metaphors aren't just decorative language but constitutive of thought itself. Lakoff and Johnson showed that we think through metaphors; Schön...
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Counterfactual Thinking and Human-AI Teaming
October 3, 2022
This post was originally written in October 2022. It has since been revised to include cross-references to the later state space and planning vs design posts, where the distinction between navigating...
- 5
Images of Organisation: When Metaphors Collide
October 24, 2022
I've just returned from a period of leave, and I'm trying to make sense of where I am. Six months into the industrial doctorate at SCÖ, and something feels off - not in a way I can easily articulate,...
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The Dichotomies of Design
November 7, 2022
In my previous posts in this series, I've been exploring design's relationship to intangible materials - Krippendorff's trajectory from products to discourses, the metaphors that shape how we imagine...
- 7
Performance and Substance
November 28, 2022
Throughout this series, I've been exploring design's relationship to intangible materials - from Krippendorff's trajectory toward discourses, through metaphors and counterfactual thinking, to the...
- 8
Social Defences in Design: A Doctoral Consortium Submission
May 18, 2023
I have submitted a paper to the NORDES 2023 Doctoral Consortium exploring something that has been building throughout this series: the psychodynamic processes that emerge when designers attempt to...
- 9
The Service Designer as Abstract Signifier: Metaphors We Design By
June 15, 2023
This post draws on a paper Ana Kustrak and I presented at the NORDES 2023 conference, exploring the metaphors through which the role of "service designer" is understood in Swedish public sector...