Introduction

DARB — the Designer’s Assisted Reflection Bot — is a digital personality created to make reflective writing more approachable for instructors and students in design studio environments. Emerging from the findings from my Documentation for Designers qualitative research, DARB aims to close the gap between hands-on making and critical reflection by offering a structure for students to access what they think, feel, and notice through words — all from within the stream of creative practice itself.

DARB 1000, the initial lo-fi prototype, was evaluated through a series of user tests and interviews. Early feedback suggests that the concept is successful in motivating designers to write and in eliciting insights that might not have otherwise emerged. These findings indicate that the DARB framework might be adapted to a variety of reflective ends in the future.

You’re welcome to try DARB out for yourself!

A GIF of DARB’s face (a colon above a single parenthesis, forming a smile).

Part 1: development

Design brief

Much existing scholarship on design documentation focuses on how documentation can support the development (and reproducibility) of specific design artifacts or design research findings. However, documentation methodologies — especially when coupled with critical reflection — also have the potential to reveal deeper aspects of a designer’s process: hidden narratives, underlying ideologies, and latent motivations. Documentation methods that bring this type of material to the surface may ultimately help designers visualize, articulate, negotiate, and perhaps alter the way they work and the objects or systems they bring into the world.

DARB helps designers explore the deeper, more self-reflective dimensions of the design process through reflective writing.

DARB seeks to:

Bring writing into the design studio

Make critique sweet

Motivate designers to write

Facilitate multi-scalar reflections

Character + conversation design

DARB is a genderless, bodiless character — a simple face comprised of punctuation. DARB strikes a delicate balance between robotic stiffness (they love a good protocol) and literary flair (they relish a tasteful synonym). A self-described aspiring writer themselves, DARB’s often clunky rhetorical flourishes are amusing and reassuring (while occasionally inscrutable) to those who might not be motivated to write on their own volition. DARB is passionate, but not intimidatingly so.