11.3 Central but Decentered: Repositioning the Practitioner in Design Research Involving Practice

Corresponding Chairs

Luis Vega, School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Julia Valle Noronha, Department of Design, Aalto University

Co-Chairs

Laurene Vaughan, School of Design, RMIT University

Brian Dixon, Belfast School of Art, Ulster University

Macarena Gaete Cruz, Faculty of Architecture, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Abstract

Design research involving practice affords a unique mode of inquiry facilitated by acts of making, generative thinking, and iterative experimentation with the world. The practitioner’s perspective is central to this mode of inquiry, specifically because it foregrounds the significance of tacit, embodied, and situated ways of knowing in close-reading the problem situation at hand. Current efforts in the field are nonetheless aiming to expand this inward-looking gaze and engage more meaningfully with the systemic and entangled dimensions of designing. With the increasing turn to relational, pluriversal, indigenous, decolonial, and posthuman onto-epistemologies in design research, it is imperative to reconstrue what counts as ‘practice’ and reexamine whose perspectives are included in this reconstrual.

Our track thereby asks how design research involving practice can fully account for the centrality of the practitioner’s perspective while addressing the urgency to decenter it. We invite theoretical, empirical, and methodological papers grounded in practice-led, practice-based, constructive, participatory, and research through design approaches that:

• illustrate how to move beyond the identity, agency, and reflexivity of the practitioner-researcher.

• explore more-than-individual, more-than-embodied, more-than-situated, and more-than-reflective ways of investigating one’s practice.

• demonstrate how first-person methods can accommodate multiple perspectives and vice versa.

• discuss what forms of authorship and accountability are needed when personal modes of inquiry become entangled with complex socioecological systems.

• navigate the tensions between positionality and relationality through concrete philosophical alignments.

Submissions must articulate how the researcher is positioned as a practitioner and what decentering this position can do to push current frontiers and understandings in the field.

Keywords

decentering, relationality, pluralism, entanglement, diffraction

References

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822388128

Hernández Ibinarriaga, D. (2025). Decolonising and indigenising design: Theory, methodologies, storytelling, and creative practice. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032645681

Hill, C. M. (2017). More-than-reflective practice: Becoming a diffractive practitioner. Teacher Learning and Professional Development, 2, 1–17. https://journals.sfu.ca/tlpd/index.php/tlpd/article/view/28  

Petrella, V., & Yee, J. (2023). Building a shared relational identity: Shifting notions of self in designing social innovation. Proceedings of ServDes2023: Entanglements & Flows Conference. https://doi.org/10.3384/ecp203055

Vega, L., Mäkelä, M., & Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, P. (2023). Listening to the sociomaterial: When thinking through making extends beyond the individual. Design Studies, 88, 101203. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2023.101203