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...
- 2
Metaphors We Think With: How Language Shapes Understanding
August 29, 2022
In my earlier posts on conceptual spaces and concept modelling, I explored how people represent knowledge and how designers might make these representations visible. But there's a prior question I've...
- 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...
- 4
Counterfactual Thinking and Human-AI Teaming
October 3, 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, and the metaphors that shape how we...
- 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,...
- 6
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...
- 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...