Abstract
Design continues to look beyond the confines of the studio as both practitioners and researchers engage with wider social and political contexts. This paper takes design into the Parliamentary debating chamber where a country raises and debates problems and proposes and explores solutions. There is an increasing amount of work that explores the use of design in policy-making processes but little that explores design as an interpretation of the Parliamentary process. This paper draws on one characteristic of the design process, the use of precedent, and examines how this appears and functions in Parliamentary debate. The paper argues that this ‘design analysis’ gives insight into debate as a design process and into the debate transcript as a naturally occurring source of design data. This contributes to the scope of design studies and suggests that the UK Parliament could be considered one of the most influential design studios in a country.
Keywords
political debate; design process; design precedents; design analysis; design data
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2016.378
Citation
Umney, D., Earl, C., and Lloyd, P. (2016) Design as analysis: examining the use of precedents in parliamentary debate., in Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Future Focused Thinking - DRS International Conference 2016, 27 - 30 June, Brighton, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2016.378
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Design as analysis: examining the use of precedents in parliamentary debate.
Design continues to look beyond the confines of the studio as both practitioners and researchers engage with wider social and political contexts. This paper takes design into the Parliamentary debating chamber where a country raises and debates problems and proposes and explores solutions. There is an increasing amount of work that explores the use of design in policy-making processes but little that explores design as an interpretation of the Parliamentary process. This paper draws on one characteristic of the design process, the use of precedent, and examines how this appears and functions in Parliamentary debate. The paper argues that this ‘design analysis’ gives insight into debate as a design process and into the debate transcript as a naturally occurring source of design data. This contributes to the scope of design studies and suggests that the UK Parliament could be considered one of the most influential design studios in a country.