Approaches rooted in material things and felt things
Introduction
The six case studies featured in this publication are put together as part of an academic paper that details a particular kind of approach for working with people.
In this paper, two design researchers aim to illustrate a particular kind of practice for working with people, described here as a family of sensibilities. This practice is specifically predicated on both the affordances of material things (materiality) and the reflexive attention to the way we sense and act on what we sense (embodiment).
Through six applied case studies with first-person anecdotes, we define and present elements that make up this practice. To clarify what this family of sensibilities is, we name a collective set of its attributes a practitioner enacts. They range from approaching ways of being with people, and defining what it means to be a practitioner, to ways to attend to things at a personal and systemic scale. While we each may have fundamental theories, methodologies, research methods, and tacit knowledge we accumulate that make up pieces of our practice, we aim to identify one kind of practice that is enacted by multiple practitioners that together, form a cohesive family or culture of sensibilities and a kind of approach for working with people. It is an expansion of the relation between the two authors’ practices, which we describe as sibling.
Case A | A handbag and the making of a boundary
Case B | A deck of cards and a vocabulary for social choices
Case C | A collection of home things and the gauging of limits
Case D | A balcony and a way of caring
Case E | A city playground and the connection of family and everyday life
Case F | A hacienda as an “instrument” to notice and wonder
Through this paper, we contribute at two levels: One is at the level of practitioners considering practical design approaches and methods to adopt. Another is higher-order in that, through this writing, we demonstrate ways researchers might practice transparency through the lens of intersubjectivity in our behind-the-scenes work including writing together.
