Literature Review: Design Thinking and Place

Outlining the role of design, Buchanan (1992) listed four areas that affect contemporary life: symbolic and visual communications, material objects, activities and organized practices, and complex systems and environments. He described these four areas collectively as “places of invention” for all types of design because problems emerge from a complex mesh of these interconnected contexts. Since, as Buchanan wrote, design is responsible for creating the “framework for human experience” (p. 10), designers must consider the interconnected nature of any design situation.

Building on this understanding of contextual interdependence, Buchanan (1992) explained that we should think through design via “placements” that act as kinds of topoi. Placements, he argued, are not as stable as categories. They come from real-life scenarios and are fluid, flexible, and emergent. They provide designers with an environment from which they can begin to build possible solutions. If we take up the example of a community-engaged writing course, the placements might be the desires of the organization, the positionality of the student, or the responsibilities of the instructor. These are the types of scenarios we often start with, but as anyone who has done such work knows, the project begins from these immediate placements and goes on to encompass other related concerns such as the needs of clients, the community, or the university at large.

Since Buchanan’s (1992) influential work, questions about design thinking have delved more extensively into the social nature of problems. Buchanan himself discussed “new design thinking” in 2001, acknowledging the shift to human-centered design that emerged since his 1992 article. Following Buchanan, Wickman (2014) argued that technical communication courses are ideal spaces for students to engage with wicked problems. But defining those problems “can be a complicated rhetorical and methodological undertaking in its own right” (p. 24). Part of this definition work, he argued, is to acknowledge the social, cultural, and political factors that shape the problems we hope to address. Wickman also identified time as a key element of Buchanan’s placements because problems “arise in time” and “continue to emerge over time” (p. 25). For Wickman, this layering and shifting of factors is important to take into account as we (and our students) imagine solutions for the problems we address through our writing.

Rose (2016) delved into these layers as well, arguing for a framework that positions design as advocacy for vulnerable populations, providing “a way to consider how design can support or constrain the needs of people whose lives are affected by the systems and policies that are created by a more digitized world” (p. 428). Rose paid special attention to the availability of resources in addressing design problems, coining the term “resource-constrained contexts” to describe scenarios in which populations have limited access to physical and social resources. For Rose, considering “users and their needs alone is not enough” (p. 443); rather, designers must consider larger social contexts to conjure up different design solutions.

While each of these scholars guides us to more contextual understandings of design, none of them focus explicitly on the plane in which these frameworks come together: place. Design problems are always situated in place. Whether they are purely aesthetic, symbolic or material, public or individual, there are no problems or solutions void of context, and place is always inherently a part of this context. It is the stage and channel for how we make meaning out of our activity. In the midst of the spatial turn, Latour (1996) noted that geography can no longer be measured in distance (“miles and meters”); it must be measured in the proximity between actors and events (pp. 371–372). Similarly, many of Latour’s contemporaries blurred the line between the physical world and social activity that structures and gives meaning to inhabitancy.

Much of this relational understanding of place began during the 1960s with theorists and activists such as Jacobs (1961) and continued with urban-ists such as Whyte (1980) and the emerging field of human geography (Tuan, 1976). Jacobs claimed that traditional city planning focused on designing for buildings rather than people, and she worked to convince urban planners and residents to consider cities as social spaces that should be designed as such. Her influence on concepts such as placemaking is still visible today. Although many other foundational spatial thinkers—Cresswell (2013), De Certeau and Rendall (1984), Ingold (2011), Massey (1994), and Soja (1989)—would disagree on the particulars, they all perceive space as being relational in nature, always in flux and action oriented rather than a static, concrete container.

Place is a rich concept, one that is imbued with layers of meaning. Its counterpart, space, is often used interchangeably in conversation, but we wish to briefly distinguish between the two. At the core of our distinction is an understanding that places, as opposed to spaces, are constantly in flux because they are perpetually defined (and redefined) by use, relationships, inhabitants, and culture. That is, space is understood as the physical environment experienced similarly by everyone whereas place is inherently social and can take on different meanings and uses across users. Discussing the role of place in collaborative systems, Harrison and Dourish (1996) explained this distinction: “Space is the opportunity; place is the understood reality.…We are located in ‘space,’ but we act in ‘place.’…A space is always what it is, but a place is how it’s used” (p. 69). In other words, space is the opportunity for action, but place shapes that action.

A sense of place is forged by a combination of the physical environment (space), our affective attachments, and what Bourdieu (1984) called habitus—the ingrained fabric of cultural awareness and social norms that guide our behavior. Even though a person might initially experience a place individually, places are always enmeshed with a fabric of the social norms that define our tastes and available actions. Places are essentially boundaries of activity, or in other words, they are “sustained by patterns of use,” as Harrison and Dourish (1996, p. 70) noted. Places support certain kinds of practices and prevent others. An awareness that places structure human activity allows us to weave our actions into places appropriately.

While understanding how activities create placeness is an important step, we have to push beyond just an awareness of patterned use to consider how the connections between people and places give places meaning. As we go about our daily lives in our communities, we cultivate different types of attachments to the places we live that shape the ways we interact with not just the place but other people in that place (Estrella & Kelly, 2017; Scannell & Gifford, 2010). These attachments filter into our knowledge systems and the ways we conceptualize place. The relationships we cultivate, whether they are with our environments, texts, or the people around us, are crucial in how we come to know (Hamington, 2019, p. 92).

Framing design thinking as “not a particular disembodied and ahistorical cognitive style” but instead a “situated, contingent set of practices” (Kimbell, 2011, p. 287) helps us consider how design processes and the consequent solutions are contextually bound together. According to Kimbell, one of the major problems that designers have with design thinking is seeing themselves as the core of the design process (p. 300). But by attending to the contextualized nature of place, they can disrupt this pitfall and move into relational thinking. Places cannot be looked at in isolation; they exist only as relations to people, other places, and cultural practices (Cresswell, 2013; Cummins, Curtis, Diez-Roux, & Macintyre, 2007). As relations change, so do the places themselves (Cresswell, p. 235). Any particular place resists static characterization because it changes based on its inhabitants and users. Writers and designers looking in from the outside must rely on those who inhabit the problem—whether they are engineers, designers, users, organizers, collaborators, or teams—in order to define and address problems effectively. By paying attention to place, a designer can no longer be the primary actor in design solutions. Understanding the various ways in which place is constructed by different people can help technical communicators see from many different social and cultural vantage points and also help them pinpoint the often-overlooked issues that inhabitants face.

Place is more nuanced than a first glance might indicate, being perhaps the most complex factor of any design problem. Place, then, should not be viewed as just a setting or a single factor to consider when assembling a profile of a problem at the start of a project. Instead, place has tendrils that continue to influence design throughout a project. As such, it should be taken into consideration as designers and users strategize together, and especially during, the testing phases of design thinking, where it can reveal whether different stakeholders attach to solutions. Although we might be able to assess an intricate profile of a place’s past through personal accounts, archives, and old photos or videos, we cannot have a full experience of its present without considering the current inhabited moment. Places are central to human experience. Design-thinking processes might be enhanced by methods that embrace place, rather than cast it as just another factor of a design problem.