Tracing Design: Practitioner Accounts of Design Value, Documentation & Practices

The role of design in organizations has risen in prominence since the turn of the century. Our collective understanding of this role, identification of designerly practices, and ability to trace their value and influence within an organizational landscape however remains problematic. Both industry and academia have made distinct efforts to study design in practice, acknowledging the importance of the value of design as a competitive instrument but with little agreement on how it is understood, communicated and operationalised. This paper takes a pragmatic orientation, exploring the contemporary challenges design practitioners face in terms of documenting, accounting for and communicating the value of designerly work. We adopt a bottom-up approach, conducting 11 semi-structured interviews with design practitioners, to study how practitioners in situ negotiate the design-value space. Our findings present design value communication strategies, how design knowledge is consumed, what documentation practices are used, and the organizational challenges encountered.