Henderson ( 1995 ) was a participant-observer during the design of a lens that was to be medically inserted into a human eye. She conducted interviews with most of the engineering stakeholders ( those on the ‘production’ side; end-users such as surgeons and patients were not interviewed ) in the design process, attended meetings and evaluation sessions, and observed laboratory tests and design drafting activities. She was particularly interested in visual representations in the design process, specifically sketches and CAD models, and their role as social tools for interactions between designers, thus she closely followed the development of the product through the visual representations ( 2D and 3D ) that the designers generated.
She characterises visual representations as ‘conscription devices’ and ‘boundary objects’. She coins the term ‘conscription device’ to convey the idea that a design representation demands that all stakeholders in the project participate in creating, using, and revising it, if they are to have any say in its form and function. In this sense it conscripts designers to use and manipulate it. She borrows the concept of ‘boundary objects’ from Star ( 1989 ), where it is used to highlight that representations are flexible; the same representation is used for different purposes and interpreted to have different meanings by different people. ( Bucciarelli 1994 p. 71 makes a similar observation in his discussion of 'object worlds' ). She is also interested in the iterative development and refinement of ‘paper/object pairs’—2D drawings that inform the construction of 3D prototypes, that in turn call for changes in the drawings.
From interview transcripts, she is able to make some of the following observations about visual and physical representations:
Sketches:
• increase the stature of an idea by making it more tangible
• facilitate changes to and modification of ideas because they make concepts specific enough to be shared
Prototypes:
• provide empirical information from which to effectively evaluate competing concepts
• serve to trial and demonstrate the function of a concept
• provided invaluable ‘use’ information—the ‘feel’ of the product, its ease of use, its actual size
• served as a political tool to enlist the support and financial backing of important stakeholders, such as upper management and clients
The interview excerpts also revealed the importance of other factors related to design representations, such as the importance of ‘tinkering’. Not only is it essential that representations are made and seen, but vital to their utility is the interaction between designer and representation ( in this case, a prototype ). The designer in the excerpt likens his involvement with the prototype to play and experimentation.
Henderson makes some general characterisations of the roles of representations in design that are worth noting, also. Visual representations are the locus of power and negotiation for the design project. They act as “social glue”, serving as an organising influence and communicative tool between various stakeholders. Additionally, representations are storehouses of various types of knowledge including verbal, visual, mathematical and tacit. I should note that while there is some evidence in the paper in direct support of these characterisations of representation, the authority from which she makes these claims stems more from her intimate involvement with the design team than from a presentation of observational data ( as is often the case in ethnographically informed research ).
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