ABSTRACT
Building upon the experiences of the third author—an architect who continues designing after having lost his sight—this chapter questions to what extent prevailing notions of design may be complemented with alternative articulations. It focuses on cognitivist understandings of human cognition underlying design researchers’ outspoken attention for “visual thinking,” and shows disarticulations and empirico-analytical absences these come with. Inquiring into design researchers’ limited attention for alternative understandings of human cognition and approaches to research it raises questions about how design research is produced, and consequently what design may or can also be. The chapter therefore calls for a double re-articulation in design research, both epistemological and methodological. It suggests complementing the predominant cognitivist stance and its laboratory-style experimental methods with a more situated stance and ethnographic mode of inquiry. Applying the latter to the third author’s design practice allows accounting for the multiple ways in which he and his collaborators re-articulate and make researchers re-articulate prevailing notions of design—and subsequent epistemologies. This account of an alternative design reality invites design researchers to conduct design research that keeps the discussion open by allowing for other articulations of design—be it by adopting other epistemologies or researching in other ways.
