Methodology used for this research

The research questions in this thesis fall into two main areas. The first is to examine what role tools and materials play in the creative episodes and use shape grammar to bring insights to understand this role. This falls into the established category of ‘research about design’, and can employ conventional methods from design research. On this basis it was anticipated that the best way to gather evidence about designer-maker activities was to interview designer-makers about creative design-through-making processes they had undertaken.

The second area of inquiry is intended to bring new knowledge to the field of digital making, to discover if weighted shape grammars are a useful way to generate designs for multi- property 3D printing. This part of the research is also ‘research about design’ but also

70 MacLachlan, L. (2018) Ph.D. Thesis, The Open University

methodologically was carried out as ‘research through design’, a pragmatic approach of carrying out design processes in order to gathered new theoretical and designerly knowledge.

Owen [86] presented a model of how a knowledge base is assembled, the aim of research, in an article in Design Studies. Owen describes how this occurs in the analytical and synthetic realms of different disciplines and how each realm contributes to new knowledge. His general model can be seen in Figure 3-1, the analytic and synthetic approaches contribute to

knowledge on a subject in different ways. Analytic knowledge building takes place through a process of inquiry, generating and evaluating theoretical proposals. Synthetic applications build knowledge by applying known principles in works which in turn can generate new knowledge.

Figure 3-1: Owen’s model for accumulating and integrating knowledge in the analytical and synthetic realms

To answer the questions relevant in this thesis knowledge will come from both the analytical and synthetic activities of design research, a methodological model based on Owen for this thesis can be seen in Figure 3-2.

71 MacLachlan, L. (2018) Ph.D. Thesis, The Open University

Figure 3-2: Methodological model for this thesis based on Owen

Part 1 of the thesis takes place primarily in the analytical realm and can be termed ‘research

about design’. This method of inquiry begins by gathering evidence from interviews with

designer-makers and observations from the author’s own practice. This evidence is then surveyed for activities related to creative episodes that can be categorised, a process informed and confirmed by related literature, and compared to models from shape grammar theory. A detailed protocol analysis of a computational making process carried out by the author is undertaken, using shape grammar to model the activities, gaining further insights for the research questions.

These research activities will produce new knowledge about designer-maker’s creative episodes, offering useful knowledge in the form of strategies for designer-makers who wish to aim for creative outcomes. It will also provide new knowledge to contribute to shape

grammar and design computation theory in the synthetic realm.

Part II of the research concentrates on the synthetic realm of design, and comes under the heading of ‘research through design’. This is a process of carrying out a design process to

72 MacLachlan, L. (2018) Ph.D. Thesis, The Open University

produce new knowledge about, in this case, design, and specifically the application of shape grammars and multi-material 3D printing. Again the process begins with pre-existing knowledge, the principles of shape grammar weights. From this some ideas are developed about how shape grammar weights can be used in conjunction with multi material 3D printing and design processes carried out to prove and evaluate the usefulness of such an approach through design reasoning and applied design experiments.

By carrying out design experiments naturally situated knowledge about the usefulness of shape grammar weights for generating designs for multi-property 3D printing can be found. These findings will be of use to others working in the field of computational making and digital designer-makers as designerly knowledge, a valid form of knowledge contribution [30]. New theoretical ideas relating to shape grammar weights will also be developed from putting current theory into practice in the design experiments, providing knowledge contributions that may be useful more widely in design.

Some of the outcomes of this research activity will be physical objects, computational tools, 3D printed samples and design objects demonstrating the ideas and possibilities of this approach. Rust et al. [91] define several ways in which knowledge can be found in or through an artefact, paraphrased as:

 Simple forms – demonstrates a principle or a technique  Communication of a process – making a process explicit

 Artefacts within research – that are instrumental in communicating ideas or information

 Knowledge elicited by artefacts – artefacts provide a stimulus or context which enables information to be uncovered

As Rust et al. [91] suggests the 3D printed objects produced by the design experiments will foremost demonstrate the principle and technique of using shape grammar weights as a way of generating designs for multi-material 3D printing, they also have potential to make this process

73 MacLachlan, L. (2018) Ph.D. Thesis, The Open University

more explicit to the reader. Any knowledge resulting from the physical objects will be formalised into written knowledge about the application and theory of grammars and creativity.