Design Talk: Constructing the Object in Studio Conversations

Critical Analysis

In this paper, the author examines the language used during design critique. He proposes a framework for thinking about the emergent nature of design decisions through language, one that organizes language-designing experiences into indexing, constituting, and elaborating.

Design activities are often disregarded, while emphasis is placed on the output of the process. Designing is a situated action, and what takes place in practice is argued to be more important than what comes before or after. The products that are made “exert themselves in fairly obdurate ways,” and seem “impenetrable once they are solidified and endorsed.” But they are not fixed before they become fixed, and the author argues that “language permeates the design process” in bringing the artificial world to life.

Emergent behavior in design means that the issues in a design project become noticeable during the process of working. The critique is a common venue for this emergence, as crits are “often the only contact the students have with their professor once the course has begun.”

The author proposes a model for examining the talk that occurs during critique. Critical talk serves to “imbue the object with the solidity it needs to survive into future conversations.” The type of language, both rich and abstract, indicates when an object is stable or when it is allowed to be further manipulated. Talk about an object, as compared to talk about language, serves to make the object less contingent. When designers speak of what they mean, on the way to an artifact becoming solid, they “access the built world in ways that are inextricably embedded in any unfolding temporal, social and material situation.” This may become a performance, as with seeing and saying working in a close and intertwined manner.

Language in design modifies or formulates an object, and becomes a designing ability to make the work real in a consequential way. When provisional, “language is the artifact” and the things that are said serve to delineate ownership, production ability, technology decisions, visual decisions, intention, and so-on. This language may walk a balance of fixing an artifact, yet still showing a willingness to treat the item as tentative. Students, in this space, must “stabilize the object under discussion, making it as resistant as possible to modification or rejection, and be sensitive to the open, flexible quality of informal, mid-project, designer-designer talk.” They learn to defend an object’s stability so it, and not themselves, can “survive the interaction at hand.” Designers perform their objects (or at least perform for their objects). Yet the artifact remains under revision during the entire conversation.

It is the professor’s language that moves the conversation, and the artifact, towards real stability. They prompt the students to think about their object in a rhetorical manner. This is different than in a mid-project review, where the language used should “help to solidify the plans and ideas of the designers as they try to move the project forward, but it must also be sensitive to the social situation at hand, a situation that calls for a good bit of flexibility.”

The form is the content; manipulating material brings the form to life enough so that the discussion can occur; the discussion is an argument for the object to both remain and change. The professor asks questions and makes statements to and about the object, and the student answers questions and makes statements that historically substantiate the object’s existence, while also leaving room for its future to emerge.

Research Value

The value of this work in informing my own research is that it:

• Supports the idea of design critique as a social, enacted presentation, where the student is actually helping the object present itself—they are acting as a translator of sorts
• Indicates that, at least at a mid-review, objects are both contingent and fixed, and it is language that allows them to remain in that space