GDE750 – Week 18

Translating Research into an Actionable System

This week marked the first concrete development of the methodology that will underpin the Studio Practice. Drawing on Schön’s concepts of reflection in action and reflection on action, I began constructing a framework that could guide both my own decision making and potentially other designers exploring dialect based work.

I outlined the six stage model: Engage, Collect, Workshop, Experiment, Display and Reflect. Each of these stages emerged from a specific strand of my research. For example:

• Engage reflects Hall’s theory that identity is produced through interaction and must be observed in context.
• Collect aligns with Johnstone’s idea of dialect as living cultural memory.
• Workshop draws from Open Works and IDEO AMPLIFY, emphasising shared authorship.
• Experiment connects directly to expressive typographers like Moross and Bunbury.
• Display mirrors research into place making and public visual culture.
• Reflect ties back to Schön and the iterative nature of design thinking.

I also began sketching early versions of workshop tasks, such as visualising tone and scale, exploring loud versus quiet dialect, and identifying personality traits within words. These tasks were shaped directly by the research, ensuring the methodology remained theoretically grounded rather than invented in isolation.

By the end of the week, the methodology existed as a working draft, ready for refinement.

TUNE OF THE WEEK