Designing with Uncertainty

Designing with Uncertainty: Encouraging Participative Thinking in the Design Studio

Chapitre publié dans l’ouvrage collectif Participatory Practice in Space, Place, and Service Design, sous la direction de Kelly L. Anderson, Vernon Press, 2022.

This chapter explores the social significance of uncertainty and its role in design education. It suggests that uncertainty has the potential to tie students’ critical thinking with knowledge production in university and in practice by exposing the ways in which design methods and processes are devised, institutionalized, and incrementally developed through time. The chapter focuses on a design studio I have taught for which uncertainty was taken as a conceptual foundation. The main ideas it brings up are the significance of making methods explicit in the late stages of design studies, the intertwining of project and subject, and the knowledge and experience this produces. The theoretical framework developed is based on an exchange between the concept of uncertainty within design studio pedagogy and concepts drawn from the work of Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin.

https://vernonpress.com/book/1257