Making Spaces: How Design Workbooks Work

The paper discusses design workbooks that present a collection of design proposals covering both method and design methodology during the early stages of the project. Workbooks are defined as collections of design proposals and other material drawn together during projects to investigate design options. By giving the examples of the objective view proposal (from the first in house Alternatives workbook), and the detail of the placeholder proposal (form the second Alternative workbook), Gaver proves that workbooks can play important role, both functionally and experientially, in early stage of the design process.

According to the paper, one of the most valuable roles of design workbooks is as a fulcrum in the transition from initial background research to generation of designs to be developed. Another role is to understand the nature of problems and possibilities to be addressed in a given domain, and a mechanism to compel safe creative activity. The power of design workbooks is in creating a much larger landscape for exploring such concerns by exploiting the combinatorial explosion of similarities and differences among many such proposals.

Moreover, the second two workbooks were produced in the course of developing designs within Equator Interdisciplinary research collaboration which included seven university groups investigating how computer technologies can blur the boundaries between electronic and physical world. Many proposals in this workbook contained a title and a line of explanation. Furthermore, Gaver started to consider the new directions the design research might take in order to develop new perspectives and approaches that made the design more productive, and as the result Equator workbook 3 was presented which contracts visually with workbook 1 in using fewer diagrammatic treatments and including more contextualised images.

After presenting four workbooks, the author shares the methods that had been effective as a way of articulating the implicit intentions behind expressing ideas in particular ways. Images are invaluable in expressing ideas because of allowing design to be appreciated as an integrated whole and as a collection of more detailed parts, and also images tend to compel a degree of resolution about details of design ideas. A more controlled technique for constructing proposals is to produce diagrams, drawings and renderings, using hybrid images, or sketches, different type of texts. To conclude, design workbooks though time-consuming are very useful in preparing initial design explorations.

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