Strangely familiar: revisiting graphic designers’ perceptions of their relationships with stakeholders
Thesis download | Strangely familiar: revisiting graphic designers’ perceptions of their relationships with stakeholders
Abstract
This research argues that graphic designers’ perceptions about their everyday professional relationships with stakeholders can be illuminated and re-evaluated using defamiliarising methods. This graphic design research thesis draws on experimental methods and employs dedicated actors as proxies to address perceptions which are obfuscated within the designers’ everyday professional experiences. Combining the creative practice of making strange, with the reflective practice of ethnography, and the pedagogical tools of process drama and design thinking, the research uses a performative design briefing process to repurpose the experiences of a group of graphic designers into a series of theatrical scenarios. These scenarios are used to motivate a team of dedicated actors, who re-perform the experiences of the designers over three workshops. Such an approach enables the actors to interact with the graphic designers’ perceptions of their practice as third party interpreters. In doing so, the actors are able to shed new perspectives on graphic design practice which otherwise remain hidden under normative professional practice conditions. This research reveals transformed modes of design capital, which challenges notions of hierarchy and power within creative and cultural practices and illustrates the ways in which professional design practice remains a constant and problematic negotiation between stakeholders and design practitioners.
Some stuff going forward
As well as the thesis PDF download, Graphic designers and stakeholders, a recently published article discusses graphic design terminology and job titles with regard to practitioners’ perceptions of their design capital. In addition, and methodologically related, Re-performing Design is a published article about using dramaturgy to uncover graphic designers’ perceptions of stakeholders. There is also a blog engaging with ongoing discussions in relation to communication & graphic design research emerging from the research (and beyond). More recently, what is a graphic design brief? The topic of researching graphic design briefs was reflected on and an article published. Outomes from the research are also being repurposed for use in professional design practice, in particular helping to develop training and design thinking processes for design for non-designers as well as some thoughts on communication and graphic design research in academia. More recently, I present a paper looking at AI and graphic design, focussing on graphic design and artificial intelligence and automation, as part of the Design Research Society conference 2022 in Bilbao. This has been followed up more recently with a collaborative article about AI and design education, that focusses in particular on using ChatGPT for developing design courses. Towards the end of 2023, I collaborated on a peer reviewed article about responsibility in Design Thinking education. The article provides critical commentary on current Design Thinking pedagogy and proposes new approaches for bringing responsibility into these teaching and learning practices. Moving forward, there are articles about design and the digital revolution using old television advertising, as well as revisiting the role of graphic design in relation to design thinking – with particular relevance to the four orders of design. Methodologically, I have also had an article published in The Design Journal, focussing on design and media literacy, in particular looking at defamiliarisation’s efficacy, alongside graphic design, as a research and pedagogical tool. A slight diversion to contextualise the 21st century reformulation of design in the context of industry, managerialism and business consultancy, as discussed in this design education conference paper.