Design Theory
22 posts tagged with “Design Theory”
Weeknotes
States Not Stages: On Process Reification, Cybernetic Traditions, and the Construction of State Spaces
Jaimes Nel published a post this week - "From GPS to Map & Compass" - proposing what he calls the IO Loop: a model of design and innovation that replaces linear stages with recursive loops between...
Research Updates
The Compass Unpacked: Seven Accounts of Evaluative Capacity in Design
The previous post explored why design process becomes what Jaimes Nel (2026) calls GPS. Nel's argument is that models like the Double Diamond, originally intended as orientational maps, hardened into...
Bodies of Knowledge: Relationality and Norm-Critical Awareness
The Design in Programme Management series examines how designers navigate the institutional dynamics of programme-led organisations: the epistemological tension, the cross-cutting value proposition,...
Design in Programme Cultures: Idealism, Capture, and What It Costs
This post synthesises the literature on what happens when Design enters organisations governed through the programme management tradition - the stage-gate reviews, programme boards, benefits...
The Reification Gap: How Institutional Governance Transforms Design Understanding
Gedenryd (1998) identified a fundamental discrepancy in design methodology: a gap between "the received, theoretical views of how things ought to work, and how they have turned out to work in reality...
Does Formalisation Resist or Produce Reification?
I have been making two arguments simultaneously, and I am increasingly aware that they pull in different directions. The first argument, developed across the formal apparatus posts and the statechart...
Three Frames: Fillmore, Goffman, and Dorst on Structure and Meaning
The word "frame" appears across multiple intellectual traditions, each using it to describe how structure shapes meaning and possibility. In the domain engineering vocabulary, frames are domain...
Motivational Design Revisited: The Thesis
In 2011, I completed an MPhil thesis titled An Investigation into the Concept of Motivation within Design (Bisset, 2011). It argued that design practitioners and researchers needed to more clearly...
What Works, for Whom, in What Circumstances? Realist Evaluation and Design's Theory of Change
In a previous post I worked through von Busch and Palmås's (2023) Realdesign propositions against my experience at SCÖ, and the exercise left me with a question I could not answer within their...
The Service Designer as Abstract Signifier: Metaphors We Design By
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...
Who Whom? Returning to Von Busch and Palmås After SCÖ
I first read The Corruption of Co-Design (Von Busch and Palmås, 2023) when it came out late last year, around the same time I was writing about organisational metaphors and performance and substance....
The Limits of Making Visible
Design theory rests on an assumption so foundational it's rarely examined: that making things visible enables change. Prototypes surface problems or prove viability, or provide something tangible...
Aesthetics as a Design Problem
Before I became a service designer, I spent several years working as a ski instructor in Norway. The transition from teaching people to ski to designing public services might appear to be a...
Performance and Substance
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...
The Dichotomies of Design
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...
Images of Organisation: When Metaphors Collide
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,...
Counterfactual Thinking and Human-AI Teaming
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...
Metaphors for Working with AI: How Language Shapes Design Possibility
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...
Metaphors We Think With: How Language Shapes Understanding
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...
What is a Concept? Perspectives from Design, Cognitive Science, and Social Theory
In my previous post on conceptual modelling as design method, I articulated an approach to making visible the conceptual structures that underpin complex sociotechnical systems. What I did not...
Krippendorff's Trajectory of Artificiality: From Products to Discourse
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...
What Can Design Contribute to Machine Learning?
Three months into this industrial doctorate, I find myself in an unusual position. I was hired as a designer - someone with a background in service design, interaction design, and design research -...