Abstract
Aside from design theories and design methods, the design research field has built numerous methods for observing design practices. Most of them can be classified into two categories: ethnographies, which consist of sharing the daily lives of designers, and experimental approaches, which reconstruct design situations in the controlled environment of a laboratory. This study retraces the history of these methods, that exist almost independently from one another creating silos within the design research field. Throughout their respective developments, both ethnographies and experimental approaches indicate the same blind spot: the study of material traces of processes that have already taken place. Yet both traditions repeatedly gesture toward the potential value of doing so. Following this thread, I examine existing (yet underdeveloped) attempts to reconstruct design processes through the analysis of sketches, models, drawings, and other artifacts; an approach described here as an archaeology of design processes.
Keywords
Design Process; Design Ethnography; Protocol Analysis; Design Representations; Archaeology of Design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1429
Citation
Catros, A. (2026) How to observe design practices, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1429
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Included in
How to observe design practices
Aside from design theories and design methods, the design research field has built numerous methods for observing design practices. Most of them can be classified into two categories: ethnographies, which consist of sharing the daily lives of designers, and experimental approaches, which reconstruct design situations in the controlled environment of a laboratory. This study retraces the history of these methods, that exist almost independently from one another creating silos within the design research field. Throughout their respective developments, both ethnographies and experimental approaches indicate the same blind spot: the study of material traces of processes that have already taken place. Yet both traditions repeatedly gesture toward the potential value of doing so. Following this thread, I examine existing (yet underdeveloped) attempts to reconstruct design processes through the analysis of sketches, models, drawings, and other artifacts; an approach described here as an archaeology of design processes.