Lucy Kimbell’s Design-as-practice and designs-in-practice
I can’t say how great I think Lucy Kimbell’s recent paper “Beyond design thinking: Design-as-practice and designs-in-practice” (pdf) is. Beginning with an overview of design research it describes a way around the problems we have talking about design and introduces a new way of thinking about design, what is designed, who designs and how it’s done.
If you’re at all interested in design research or “design thinking” you should read Kimbell’s paper.
And now, in a shameless crib of Migurzski’s blog-all-dog-eared-pages meme, I present: blog all highlighted passages.
See: 
Who designs?
But the term “design thinking” is confused and the literature on which it is based is contradictory. (p1)
Design seems to have moved from being a specialized competence of professions rooted in industrialized economies, to become something we can all practice as part of our consumption activities. (p2)
Knowing how objects work, what they do, and how to make them, product and industrial designers are lay theorists whose ideas about human behaviour are inscribed in their sketches, models, plans and specifications and in the final design of an object. (p3)
“Designers are immersed in this material culture, and draw upon it as their primary source of their thinking. Designers have the ability both to ‘read’ and ‘write’ in this culture; they understand what messages objects communicate, and they can create new objects which embody new messages.” (Cross 2006: 9) (p3)
The concept “design thinking” with its suggestion of cognitive styles neglects to account for the artifacts without which design practice cannot proceed and which constitute design. (p10)
What do designers design?
Objects are central to the work of professional designers, but theories of design have moved away from objects. (p3)
Shove et al. (2007) argued that innovation in products often requires innovation in practices, calling for a “Practice Oriented Product Design”. (p4)
Research about design has seen understandings of design shift away from objects towards the social, but it is not clear where this idea of the social is located. (p5)
The contribution of this study [Orlikowski, 2000] was to show that structures are not located in organizations, or in technology, but are enacted by users in practice. (p8)
When the designers have finished their work, and the engineers and manufacturers have finished theirs, and the marketers and retailers have finished theirs, and the customer or end user has taken engaged with a product or service artefact, the work of design is still not over. Through their engagement with a product or service over time and space, the user or stakeholder continues to be involved in constituting what the design is. (p11)
Design-as-practice and designs-in-practice
But if we take seriously the contributions of anthropology and sociology to understanding what people do, especially once the formal design process is over and people are engaging with products and services in situ, then it becomes important to acknowledge the part that end-users and other stakeholders play in constituting the meaning and effects of design through practice (Shove et al 2007). (p9)
Design-as-practice mobilizes a way of thinking about the work of designing that acknowledges that design practices are habitual, possibly rule- governed, often shared, routinized, conscious or unconscious, and that they are embodied and situated. (p10)
the term designs-in-practice draws attention to the impossibility of there being a singular design. (p11)
In praise of mess
Practice theories offer an alternative by switching the unit of analysis from a choice between individual actors or society and its norms, to a messy, contingent, iterative combination of minds, things, bodies, structures, processes and agencies, and the configuring and reconfiguring of and between them. (p11)
The practice-theoretical approach, however, shifts attention to the practices involved during the design process, instead of focussing on the cognitive styles of individuals or teams of designers or other professionals or employees. (p11)
