Central but decentered : repositioning the practitioner in design research involving practice

Abstract

Design research involving practice affords a unique mode of inquiry facilitated by acts of making, generative thinking, and iterative experimentation. The practitioner’s perspective is central because it foregrounds the significance of personal engagement with the research problem at hand. Current efforts in the field are nonetheless aiming to expand this inward-looking gaze by attending to the systemic and entangled dimensions of designing. With the increasing turn to relational, posthuman, and decolonial approaches towards that end, it becomes imperative to reconstrue what counts as ‘practice’ and reexamine whose perspectives are included in such a reconstrual. The present track brings together five contributions dealing with this issue, offering an array of theoretical, empirical, and methodological studies that illustrate how design research involving practice can fully account for the centrality of the practitioner’s perspective while also addressing the urgency to decenter it.