Introduction

Design unfolds at more than one scale. When most people talk about design in the everyday sense, they tend to talk about it as a process of finding or creating a solution to a given problem — in other words, “changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon, 1996 — emphasis mine). Through the design process, people have found lots of ways to, say, extend the battery life of phones, improve the accessibility of websites, and envision entirely new devices to make everyday tasks easier. But there are other much more zoomed-out perspectives on design as a discipline: perspectives that consider how the designs of individual objects and systems accrue in the world, and how these designs collectively shape all designs to come.

In this work, I explore how the design process at the small scale and design’s disciplinary impact at the large scale map onto one another. When brought together, theories of small-scale design practice and large-scale design philosophy are actually quite parallel: the design process of developing or changing an individual “thing” is a microcosm of how design (the discipline) shapes the entire world. In light of the destructive forces that design drives today (capitalism being just one key player), it’s more important than ever that designers have tools to envision and conceptualize the impact of their work beyond the immediate task at hand.

That brings us to documentation and reflection — the theoretical power couple of this thesis. Documentation and reflection are tools that capture, communicate, and even shape the outcomes of particular design projects. I suggest that documentation and reflection might also be scaled up to disrupt how design unfurls writ large.

Here’s a general sketch of the argument:

How we design in the present affects how we design in the future, at scales both small and large (as seen below in theories of reflective practice, as well as in theories of ontological design)
Documentation creates moments of reflection that direct how we design in the present (as seen below in theories about how the design process results in new knowledge)
So: if documentation and reflection direct how we design in the present, then they also probably affect how we design in the future
Therefore: if we change the way we document and reflect on design in the present, can we change all design to come?

The following is an abridged literature review of how this argument came to be, including many of its constituent theories.

On documentation

Documentation, most simply put, is the recording of something. Without documentation, many features of “modern life” would not be possible. Throughout history, documents — and the ability to keep records in general — allowed social and political systems to expand in complexity, and political states to extend their power and reach into everyday life (Scott 1998; Weth and Juffermans 2018). We look back and make sense of these changes throughout history in large part by looking at documents. In fact, documents are our very interface with history, allowing us to interpret what has come to pass.

Documentation + design

In a design context, documentation is not just a record of human creation, but an activity embedded within the design process itself. Creative people throughout history (whether or not we would call them “designers” today) have used documents like sketches and drawings to turn ideas into things. Paintings, garments, cities, airplanes, and weapons are all part of this legacy, and we have the sketches, patterns, plans, renderings, and models to prove it. Documents often direct how the creative process unfolds — for example, architects typically draft documentation in the form of plans to direct the construction process (Macken, 2015). These plans are so crucial to the building process that we now have laws to regulate their quality (Payne 2007).

Learning from design documents

But documents do more than dictate how things should be made — they are a big part of how the design discipline learns from and improves upon itself. The Design Rationale efforts of the 1990s sought to record in detail how design decisions were made within the contexts of specific practices (like engineering and industrial design) in order to optimize workflows, improve efficiency, spot and fix errors, and build institutional knowledge (Dalsgaard and Halskov 2012; Pedgley 2007). While the Design Rationale movement was primarily intended to improve internal functions of organizations, currently there is growing social pressure for companies to be held accountable for the design decisions that impact everyday life for millions of people around the world. Even within the academy, the design discipline faces a chorus of demands to make its practices more rigorous, transparent, and reproducible (Gray and Malins 2004).

Design documentation + reflection

However, documentation is not a standardized practice — it encompasses many differing approaches and priorities across design’s many subdisciplines. While some designers and scholars are mostly concerned with representing findings as scientifically as possible through accurate documentation (Ganeshan et al., 1994; Hall, 2011), others are more concerned with capturing how knowledge emerges organically from the very act of designing things (Cross, 1982; Zimmerman et al., 2007). To these scholars, documentation is more or less a way of harvesting knowledge from the design process.