Background: The roles and responsibilities of designers today include considering how design outcomes can have a positive influence on people’s lives and our society. However, inaccessible design outcomes that are created by designers are commonplace. This is an issue identified by scholars from various fields of design research.
Aim: The main aim of this research is to explore the fundamental reasons behind the phenomenon of design exclusion in our society by gaining an interpretive understanding of the meaning of the behaviour of individual designers. This is based on the belief that individuals in designer groups will share aspects of the same reality and express these through language, based on sociolinguistic approaches combining theories of the community of practice and linguistic relativity. The ultimate purpose is to consider more effective ways of offering user-related colour information to designers from a perspective of inclusive design within the socially responsible design paradigm.
Methods: There were three designer studies in this research project which apply multidisciplinary methodological approaches. These were think-aloud protocol, surveys, interviews, focus groups, and colour design experiments. The data collected was analysed both qualitatively by adopting linguistic analysis, thematic analysis, and content analysis, and quantitatively by applying descriptive statistics.
Results: In the first designer study, a think-aloud protocol was utilised to explore characteristics of designers by analysing their language use while doing a colour description task. This involved comparing a designer group and a non-designer group. Behavioural features also were observed. The fundamental characteristics of designers were explored by applying linguistic analysis considering four key adjectives (associative, evocative, emotive, and imaginative). These indicate why designers continue to produce inaccessible design artefacts. Three adverbs (artistically, emotionally, and creatively) may indicate ways to provide information for designers to motivate them to think about users of design artefacts.
Based on the findings from the first study, the second designer study considered how we can apply and use fundamental characteristics of designers to encourage them to change their designing behaviour towards a more user-centred inclusive perspective. For this, a new attempt at providing information was made by creating a set of Affective Imaginary Information [AII] card formats in both digital and physical forms. These included facial images that conveyed emotions. The contents of each of the AII card formats were decided on based on a small additional user study. The actual set of AII card formats was created collaboratively by the author of this thesis with a professional graphic designer and an information design researcher. Focus group interviews were carried out subsequently with design doctoral students to gain feedback for refinement, and evaluate the usefulness of the AII formats. Due to the emotional and creative characteristics of designers, when looking at the AII formats, design participants tended to imagine the situation of information users and create a story when they look at the facial emotion. More refined AII card formats were created following this stage.
In the third designer study, the set of AII card formats were used for actual colour design tasks to test the practical use of the format. The actual use of colour information and designers’ experience while doing tasks were investigated among designer groups with different levels of experience, using online surveys and email interviews. Furthermore, professional design educators were involved to evaluate the usefulness of the AII card formats and gain their suggestions for future directions for these AII formats. This was done by email interviews. Thus, in this stage, the AII card formats were tested by designers with different levels of experience, and positively evaluated by professional design educators.
Conclusion: Designers display emotion and subjectivity toward design tasks. In tasks they tended to focus on expressing their personal feelings, experiences, or preferences, even neglecting design tasks. Also, a subjective outlook, and use of personal factors (design sensibilities, previous subjective experiences, imagination, intuition, perceptions of common sense, and conjecture) along with their effect on design tasks were discovered throughout designer studies. Considering the fundamental characteristics of designers, it is likely that AII card formats with use of facial expressions would be useful in communicating user experiences to designers as this encourages designers to imagine the situation of users and empathise with their feelings. Further investigation is needed about the appropriate amount of text in combination with appropriate images for designers as a source of information and inspiration. Research is needed also on what makes designers heavily react emotionally and subjectively to design tasks and the positive or negative impact of this on design and our society.
Contribution: Various research methods and analysis techniques were applied throughout this research project. This has enhanced the reliability of the outcomes of the research by providing in-depth findings. Furthermore, sociolinguistic theories and concepts were applied to the design research project to examine the phenomena of design exclusion and inclusion by analysing designers’ linguistic characteristics. This is a new theoretical and methodological approach in the area of design which broadens ways of approaching and understanding the behaviour of designers. Also, based on understanding of characteristics of designers, the AII card formats were created. These were tested, evaluated, and revised several times by designers (with different years of work experience and also different levels of design education) in addition to design education experts. All the procedures for creating the AII formats and final outcomes may encourage design researchers to consider how the characteristics of designers can be used to create visual information formats for them, and to consider how providing information effectively to designers may change their behaviour to empathise more with information users from an inclusive perspective.
