Lloyd ( 2000 ) studied a design and manufacturing company that produces assembly line testing devices for automotive subsystems ( e.g. brakes, airbags ). The study lasted only two weeks, but produced a vast quantity of raw data ( 195,000 words of transcribed data ) from interviews, audio taped conversations, field notes and corporate documents. A software package was used to help link and categorise separate units of data.
Lloyd’s analysis focussed on the social experience of designers ( experience of “particular situations, discussions, and agreements, generally what is socially constructed” ), contrasting this with individual experience ( that which is cognitively constructed ) and organisational experience ( that which is organisationally constructed ).
With examples from transcript excerpts he illustrates that designers seek to build understanding ( with clients, other designers and technicians ) on shared experiences. The use of shared experience generates a common vocabulary between communicants that denotes specific stories; these stories are used as agreed-upon points-of-reference, and upon which further interaction is built.
He raises the point that there emerges a disparateness between how design is described by methods ( formal, prescriptive models of the design process ) and how designers describe how they do and what they do ( through use of a narrative-inspired vocabulary ). He asserts that this difference is best understood in terms of the contrast between generalisability and specificity ( the method seeks to cover a multitude of cases; the narrative seeks to explain only the local case ).
In a particularly interesting illustration, Lloyd deconstructs both of these observations ( of designers’ reliance on narrative, and the resulting tension between narrative and formal method ) with use of another example. Engineering designers talked about the product specification as an account of what the customer wanted; salespersons talked about it as a tool to promote customer confidence in a product. To engineers, the specification had to be ‘sufficiently detailed’; to salespersons, it needed only as much detail as that required to sell a product, the implication being that too much detail adversely affected the sell. In this case, two groups within the company appropriated the same object as an artefact of explanation of their work, with conflicting interpretations of the purpose of and nature of the object. Lloyd then describes how the designers appealed to the prescriptive model of the design process in order to challenge the salespersons’ story of the role of a product specification.
Lloyd concludes that vocabularies of shared experience are constructed for each design project, and these vocabularies give each project a unique character. The design process pivoted on issues raised and promulgated through storytelling as much as it was influenced by technical issues. He also noted that individually-produced artefacts ( such as drawings or lists of specifications ) became important social objects; objects for communication and around which shared vocabularies were developed.
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