Arlene Oak - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Arlene Oak

CoDesign, Mar 1, 2009

This paper explores how the roles or social categories ‘architect’ and ‘client’ are performed by ... more This paper explores how the roles or social categories ‘architect’ and ‘client’ are performed by participants as they meet to talk about the design of a crematorium. The analytic framework through which the interaction is studied is Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA). By attending to the participants' talk through the perspectives of MCA, we can see how questions and answers, attributions of building ownership, and assessments of the building are enacted in ways that enable the participants to competently perform as ‘architect’ and ‘client’. Thus, as well as the participants' interaction helping to shape the actual form of the building, it also helps to shape and perpetuate ideas concerning what it is to ‘do’ architecture.

Design Studies, 2013

This paper focuses on design and reported speech (talk where a speaker quotes another), to outlin... more This paper focuses on design and reported speech (talk where a speaker quotes another), to outline how a user of a building employs reported speech to represent the comments of other users to an architect. By analyzing talk from a design meeting, the complex role of the ‘user/designer representative’ is delineated and the uses of reported talk to provide evidence, deflect decision-making, and deliver assessments are described. Also considered is how ‘face’ (positive personal/social regard) is managed in relation to reported speech. This paper offers a close analysis of design-based interaction and a reflection on the importance of hearing users – both who are present and who are absent but spoken for – in situated contexts of design practice.

Journal of Art & Design Education, Feb 1, 2000

This paper begins with an overview of the debate between the ideas of ‘art’ and ‘industry’ in des... more This paper begins with an overview of the debate between the ideas of ‘art’ and ‘industry’ in design education, and the relationship of this debate to liberal and vocational pedagogic approaches in the education of designers. These debates are investigated with supporting examples drawn from tertiary level design education assessment conversations (known as critiques, or ‘crits’) using techniques drawn from Conversation Analysis. The analysis reveals how expectations and perceptions of design activity are articulated and reproduced within design and design education. In addition, the role of interaction in design education is briefly considered in relationship to ethical issues in design and design education.

De Gruyter eBooks, Jun 3, 2019

Proceedings of the annual conference of CAIS, May 31, 2021

This poster will present emerging results from a study of material and discursive information pra... more This poster will present emerging results from a study of material and discursive information practices in tabletop roleplaying games. The focus will be on the ways in which players collaboratively construct and interact with the fictional worlds of play. A "big and small story" approach, influenced by the ethnomethodological methods of conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis, will be used to analyze the players' talk as they intersubjectively create and sustain a fictional space of play.

Proceedings of DRS, Jun 16, 2022

The Thinking While Doing (TWD) project was an ambitious "research-creation" project that involved... more The Thinking While Doing (TWD) project was an ambitious "research-creation" project that involved the designing and building of several full scale, "real" structures by architecture students and professors in "design-build" education. The grant also included two ethnographers (as well as scholars from the humanities). Together the participants in TWD were engaged in intersecting and distinct modes of research, ranging from architecture practice to philosophical reflections. While there were intentions for the insights of the ethnographers to extend and inform knowledge of practice, as the TWD structures were created, it became evident that undertaking ethnography coincident with designing and building was more challenging than anticipated. This paper outlines some of the experiences of ethnographers who followed the activities of designing and building. This paper delves into two interrelated difficulties of cross-disciplinary collaborative work: the logistical organization and implementation of the research project and temporal disjunctions between modes of knowledge production (e.g. design versus ethnography). By exploring TWD as a collaboration between disparate forms of research, each with its distinct rhythms, unpredictable engagements, and contexts of knowledge production, we consider some of the challenges and possibilities of connecting ethnography with the practices of architectural design.

De Gruyter eBooks, Jun 3, 2019

Popular Communication, Oct 1, 2020

ABSTRACT The USA-based television program What Not To Wear (WNTW) was a staple of popular fashion... more ABSTRACT The USA-based television program What Not To Wear (WNTW) was a staple of popular fashion media, informing audiences about acceptable modes of dress and appearance. We consider how aspects of this show and its accompanying book encompass features of traditional fashion reportage – particularly advice literature – and also approaches to fashion communication that overlap with the style and concerns of “New Journalism” (those modes of reporting – sometimes called “Gonzo” – that emphasize informality, emotional engagement, and an interest in “real” people and “real” lives). By examining the text, images, and talk deployed by the book and the TV show, we indicate how WNTW perceives, constructs, and conveys the fashioned subject in ways that link makeover media to broader contexts of cultural commentary.

Proceedings of DRS, Jun 12, 2022

This editorial for the theme track 'Creating connections: Social research of, for, and with desig... more This editorial for the theme track 'Creating connections: Social research of, for, and with design' outlines the underpinning concepts that contributed to a call for papers that would explore social research into the activities and/or outcomes of design practice. This editorial also briefly locates each of the six papers in relation to the track's interests in how design and the social sciences may be effectively engaged with each other. By exploring some of the empirical details and modes of analysis through which research projects into design practice are undertaken, this set of papers will usefully inform design practitioners and social scientists, especially if they are interested in considering some of the challenges, insights, and benefits that might arise through collaborative engagement.

CoDesign, Dec 2, 2015

This paper explores interaction in graduate-level industrial design education. We outline two ins... more This paper explores interaction in graduate-level industrial design education. We outline two instances of how design reviews are conducted through social contexts and provide a theorized analysis of these instances. In particular, this paper considers how participants in a design review-both an instructor and students-enact aspects of role-oriented authority and affiliation within the context of the review. Through perspectives associated with ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this paper discusses how a misunderstanding and a request (and the response to that request) are managed through speech, gesture, and gaze direction. We explore how the interactive, co-presence of an instructor and students impacts upon the overall performance of the review and show how some of the pedagogic practices of design education are enacted through the contexts of discourse and embodiment. This paper provides opportunities for design instructors, students, professionals, and researchers to reflect upon the collaborative micro-activities of design education and to consider the impact that these may have upon participants' experiences and perceptions of design education.

Design Studies, May 1, 2011

This paper considers how the conversational aspects of design may be examined from perspectives a... more This paper considers how the conversational aspects of design may be examined from perspectives associated with micro-sociology/social psychology: Symbolic Interactionism (SI) and Conversation Analysis (CA). Since many aspects of design involve face-to-face talk, this paper argues that an SI-informed CA offers an effective approach to understanding how communication and negotiation are central to design. Through analyzing excerpts of talk (an architect’s meeting with a client, and a design education critique) we can see how the collaborative nature of conversation contributes to understandings and assessments of objects. This discussion outlines how SI and CA can help delineate the processes that link the details of interaction to the wider social conditions and constraints that impact upon the practices and objects of design.

CRC Press eBooks, Apr 7, 2022

Design Studies, 2020

In the imagination of prominent architects and architectural theorists, the detail figures as bot... more In the imagination of prominent architects and architectural theorists, the detail figures as both a promising and perilous element of built form. This paper explores the tension of the "make or break" qualities of the architectural detail(s) in the learning and doing of design, through an ethnomethodologically informed ethnography of North American design-build architecture education. The discussion parses three episodes which highlight the generative qualities of the detail, in terms of its pedagogical value for architecture, and as a heuristic for the study of design practice. As both the material process of joining disparate elements, and a locus for complex social and professional relations and meaning making activities, the assembly of the detail is inherently messy, though productively so.

Design Studies, Jul 1, 2018

In this paper we show how stories and categories help to frame and express values in a car access... more In this paper we show how stories and categories help to frame and express values in a car accessory design process. We consider how a group of designers plan two co-creation workshops through categorising participants in ways that impact upon the subsequent process of design. We then describe how two stories emerge during the design process, additionally structuring design discussion through linking 'past particulars'-experiences and behaviours that the co-creation process reveals-with 'imagined particulars'-stories that place specific actors, objects and relations into an imagined context. We propose a key function of stories within this collaborative design process as holding value tension, allowing contrasting values to coexist together. Highlights • The role of stories in framing collaborative design practice • The management of contrasting categories and values through discourse • How stories represent 'value tension' in design processes • The performance of design as the negotiation of value tension

This paper explores assessment in graduate-level industrial design education. In particular, it c... more This paper explores assessment in graduate-level industrial design education. In particular, it considers how the assessment of students' design work is delivered and who delivers it. Through approaches associated with conversation analysis and ethnomethodology we analyze segments of tutor-student interaction to consider how assessment is performed by an instructor and by students in the opening moments of design concept reviews. We also consider aspects of what assessment consists of, and how its performance may contribute to participants' understanding of what criticism is and how it is to occur in the context of design education. Additionally, although the data was not collected with attention to the gender of the participants, our analyses of the opening moments of the design reviews indicate that participant gender had some impact upon the interaction. Our discussion of assessment in the concept reviews argues for an approach to critique that provides both students and instructors with opportunities to reflect upon and debate some of design education's taken-for-granted practices and performances.

This paper explores assessment in graduate-level industrial design education. In particular, it c... more This paper explores assessment in graduate-level industrial design education. In particular, it considers how the assessment of students' design work is delivered and who delivers it. Through approaches associated with conversation analysis and ethnomethodology we analyze segments of tutor-student interaction to consider how assessment is performed by an instructor and by students in the opening moments of design concept reviews. We also consider aspects of what assessment consists of, and how its performance may contribute to participants' understanding of what criticism is and how it is to occur in the context of design education. Additionally, although the data was not collected with attention to the gender of the participants, our analyses of the opening moments of the design reviews indicate that participant gender had some impact upon the interaction. Our discussion of assessment in the concept reviews argues for an approach to critique that provides both students and instructors with opportunities to reflect upon and debate some of design education's taken-for-granted practices and performances.

Discourse & Society, Jan 29, 2018

This article explores multimodal communication and social interaction in university-level archite... more This article explores multimodal communication and social interaction in university-level architecture education. Drawing on ethnography of North American programs of 'designbuild' architecture, we consider how the judgment of a 'good' (or 'bad') design is as much a result of how it is communicated as what is communicated. In settings like the design 'review', students endeavor to persuade an audience of the merits of their proposed design. This is ideally accomplished through the 'convergence' of multiple design media on the same 'idea' or design gestalt. 'Convergence' involves not just technical competency; it is also a social achievement: an effect of composing and coordinating multimodal semiotic media according to shared representational and communicative conventions. Failure to recognize convergence is often an effect of intersemiotic dissonance. This is also the risk of a design's failure in the eyes of the faculty jury, who often direct their critiques toward communicative inconsistencies.

Journal of Design History, 2006

Design historians are accustomed to dealing with ‘the past’ as they locate their work within part... more Design historians are accustomed to dealing with ‘the past’ as they locate their work within particular periods and historicized frameworks. Yet, as well as a context for research, the past may be used in specific ways to give structure and to support persuasion within particular genres of social interaction, such as oral history interviews and design critiques. This paper uses discursive social psychology (DSP) as a tool to explore the micro-qualities of talk in twelve design history interviews and two design critiques. Through a DSP focus on ‘particularization’, the issues considered here are how, in the interviews, specific terms concerning the past are used to help categorize its relevance for the interviewees and how, in the critiques, specific terms related to the past are used to support arguments about current design work. The approach taken here, wherein details of talk are examined, demonstrates how historians who conduct interviews may ascribe particular status to their interviewees and how contemporary design practitioners may actively use references they have garnered from the history of design. Thus, rather than considering oral history interviews in terms of what they tell us about the designers' pasts and rather than considering critique interactions in terms of what they tell us about ‘good’ design, the data are analysed here with regard to how particular references to the past help give meaning and persuasive power to the present activities of oral history and design practice.

CoDesign, Mar 1, 2009

This paper explores how the roles or social categories ‘architect’ and ‘client’ are performed by ... more This paper explores how the roles or social categories ‘architect’ and ‘client’ are performed by participants as they meet to talk about the design of a crematorium. The analytic framework through which the interaction is studied is Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA). By attending to the participants' talk through the perspectives of MCA, we can see how questions and answers, attributions of building ownership, and assessments of the building are enacted in ways that enable the participants to competently perform as ‘architect’ and ‘client’. Thus, as well as the participants' interaction helping to shape the actual form of the building, it also helps to shape and perpetuate ideas concerning what it is to ‘do’ architecture.

Design Studies, 2013

This paper focuses on design and reported speech (talk where a speaker quotes another), to outlin... more This paper focuses on design and reported speech (talk where a speaker quotes another), to outline how a user of a building employs reported speech to represent the comments of other users to an architect. By analyzing talk from a design meeting, the complex role of the ‘user/designer representative’ is delineated and the uses of reported talk to provide evidence, deflect decision-making, and deliver assessments are described. Also considered is how ‘face’ (positive personal/social regard) is managed in relation to reported speech. This paper offers a close analysis of design-based interaction and a reflection on the importance of hearing users – both who are present and who are absent but spoken for – in situated contexts of design practice.

Journal of Art & Design Education, Feb 1, 2000

This paper begins with an overview of the debate between the ideas of ‘art’ and ‘industry’ in des... more This paper begins with an overview of the debate between the ideas of ‘art’ and ‘industry’ in design education, and the relationship of this debate to liberal and vocational pedagogic approaches in the education of designers. These debates are investigated with supporting examples drawn from tertiary level design education assessment conversations (known as critiques, or ‘crits’) using techniques drawn from Conversation Analysis. The analysis reveals how expectations and perceptions of design activity are articulated and reproduced within design and design education. In addition, the role of interaction in design education is briefly considered in relationship to ethical issues in design and design education.

De Gruyter eBooks, Jun 3, 2019

Proceedings of the annual conference of CAIS, May 31, 2021

This poster will present emerging results from a study of material and discursive information pra... more This poster will present emerging results from a study of material and discursive information practices in tabletop roleplaying games. The focus will be on the ways in which players collaboratively construct and interact with the fictional worlds of play. A "big and small story" approach, influenced by the ethnomethodological methods of conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis, will be used to analyze the players' talk as they intersubjectively create and sustain a fictional space of play.

Proceedings of DRS, Jun 16, 2022

The Thinking While Doing (TWD) project was an ambitious "research-creation" project that involved... more The Thinking While Doing (TWD) project was an ambitious "research-creation" project that involved the designing and building of several full scale, "real" structures by architecture students and professors in "design-build" education. The grant also included two ethnographers (as well as scholars from the humanities). Together the participants in TWD were engaged in intersecting and distinct modes of research, ranging from architecture practice to philosophical reflections. While there were intentions for the insights of the ethnographers to extend and inform knowledge of practice, as the TWD structures were created, it became evident that undertaking ethnography coincident with designing and building was more challenging than anticipated. This paper outlines some of the experiences of ethnographers who followed the activities of designing and building. This paper delves into two interrelated difficulties of cross-disciplinary collaborative work: the logistical organization and implementation of the research project and temporal disjunctions between modes of knowledge production (e.g. design versus ethnography). By exploring TWD as a collaboration between disparate forms of research, each with its distinct rhythms, unpredictable engagements, and contexts of knowledge production, we consider some of the challenges and possibilities of connecting ethnography with the practices of architectural design.

De Gruyter eBooks, Jun 3, 2019

Popular Communication, Oct 1, 2020

ABSTRACT The USA-based television program What Not To Wear (WNTW) was a staple of popular fashion... more ABSTRACT The USA-based television program What Not To Wear (WNTW) was a staple of popular fashion media, informing audiences about acceptable modes of dress and appearance. We consider how aspects of this show and its accompanying book encompass features of traditional fashion reportage – particularly advice literature – and also approaches to fashion communication that overlap with the style and concerns of “New Journalism” (those modes of reporting – sometimes called “Gonzo” – that emphasize informality, emotional engagement, and an interest in “real” people and “real” lives). By examining the text, images, and talk deployed by the book and the TV show, we indicate how WNTW perceives, constructs, and conveys the fashioned subject in ways that link makeover media to broader contexts of cultural commentary.

Proceedings of DRS, Jun 12, 2022

This editorial for the theme track 'Creating connections: Social research of, for, and with desig... more This editorial for the theme track 'Creating connections: Social research of, for, and with design' outlines the underpinning concepts that contributed to a call for papers that would explore social research into the activities and/or outcomes of design practice. This editorial also briefly locates each of the six papers in relation to the track's interests in how design and the social sciences may be effectively engaged with each other. By exploring some of the empirical details and modes of analysis through which research projects into design practice are undertaken, this set of papers will usefully inform design practitioners and social scientists, especially if they are interested in considering some of the challenges, insights, and benefits that might arise through collaborative engagement.

CoDesign, Dec 2, 2015

This paper explores interaction in graduate-level industrial design education. We outline two ins... more This paper explores interaction in graduate-level industrial design education. We outline two instances of how design reviews are conducted through social contexts and provide a theorized analysis of these instances. In particular, this paper considers how participants in a design review-both an instructor and students-enact aspects of role-oriented authority and affiliation within the context of the review. Through perspectives associated with ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this paper discusses how a misunderstanding and a request (and the response to that request) are managed through speech, gesture, and gaze direction. We explore how the interactive, co-presence of an instructor and students impacts upon the overall performance of the review and show how some of the pedagogic practices of design education are enacted through the contexts of discourse and embodiment. This paper provides opportunities for design instructors, students, professionals, and researchers to reflect upon the collaborative micro-activities of design education and to consider the impact that these may have upon participants' experiences and perceptions of design education.

Design Studies, May 1, 2011

This paper considers how the conversational aspects of design may be examined from perspectives a... more This paper considers how the conversational aspects of design may be examined from perspectives associated with micro-sociology/social psychology: Symbolic Interactionism (SI) and Conversation Analysis (CA). Since many aspects of design involve face-to-face talk, this paper argues that an SI-informed CA offers an effective approach to understanding how communication and negotiation are central to design. Through analyzing excerpts of talk (an architect’s meeting with a client, and a design education critique) we can see how the collaborative nature of conversation contributes to understandings and assessments of objects. This discussion outlines how SI and CA can help delineate the processes that link the details of interaction to the wider social conditions and constraints that impact upon the practices and objects of design.

CRC Press eBooks, Apr 7, 2022

Design Studies, 2020

In the imagination of prominent architects and architectural theorists, the detail figures as bot... more In the imagination of prominent architects and architectural theorists, the detail figures as both a promising and perilous element of built form. This paper explores the tension of the "make or break" qualities of the architectural detail(s) in the learning and doing of design, through an ethnomethodologically informed ethnography of North American design-build architecture education. The discussion parses three episodes which highlight the generative qualities of the detail, in terms of its pedagogical value for architecture, and as a heuristic for the study of design practice. As both the material process of joining disparate elements, and a locus for complex social and professional relations and meaning making activities, the assembly of the detail is inherently messy, though productively so.

Design Studies, Jul 1, 2018

In this paper we show how stories and categories help to frame and express values in a car access... more In this paper we show how stories and categories help to frame and express values in a car accessory design process. We consider how a group of designers plan two co-creation workshops through categorising participants in ways that impact upon the subsequent process of design. We then describe how two stories emerge during the design process, additionally structuring design discussion through linking 'past particulars'-experiences and behaviours that the co-creation process reveals-with 'imagined particulars'-stories that place specific actors, objects and relations into an imagined context. We propose a key function of stories within this collaborative design process as holding value tension, allowing contrasting values to coexist together. Highlights • The role of stories in framing collaborative design practice • The management of contrasting categories and values through discourse • How stories represent 'value tension' in design processes • The performance of design as the negotiation of value tension

This paper explores assessment in graduate-level industrial design education. In particular, it c... more This paper explores assessment in graduate-level industrial design education. In particular, it considers how the assessment of students' design work is delivered and who delivers it. Through approaches associated with conversation analysis and ethnomethodology we analyze segments of tutor-student interaction to consider how assessment is performed by an instructor and by students in the opening moments of design concept reviews. We also consider aspects of what assessment consists of, and how its performance may contribute to participants' understanding of what criticism is and how it is to occur in the context of design education. Additionally, although the data was not collected with attention to the gender of the participants, our analyses of the opening moments of the design reviews indicate that participant gender had some impact upon the interaction. Our discussion of assessment in the concept reviews argues for an approach to critique that provides both students and instructors with opportunities to reflect upon and debate some of design education's taken-for-granted practices and performances.

This paper explores assessment in graduate-level industrial design education. In particular, it c... more This paper explores assessment in graduate-level industrial design education. In particular, it considers how the assessment of students' design work is delivered and who delivers it. Through approaches associated with conversation analysis and ethnomethodology we analyze segments of tutor-student interaction to consider how assessment is performed by an instructor and by students in the opening moments of design concept reviews. We also consider aspects of what assessment consists of, and how its performance may contribute to participants' understanding of what criticism is and how it is to occur in the context of design education. Additionally, although the data was not collected with attention to the gender of the participants, our analyses of the opening moments of the design reviews indicate that participant gender had some impact upon the interaction. Our discussion of assessment in the concept reviews argues for an approach to critique that provides both students and instructors with opportunities to reflect upon and debate some of design education's taken-for-granted practices and performances.

Discourse & Society, Jan 29, 2018

This article explores multimodal communication and social interaction in university-level archite... more This article explores multimodal communication and social interaction in university-level architecture education. Drawing on ethnography of North American programs of 'designbuild' architecture, we consider how the judgment of a 'good' (or 'bad') design is as much a result of how it is communicated as what is communicated. In settings like the design 'review', students endeavor to persuade an audience of the merits of their proposed design. This is ideally accomplished through the 'convergence' of multiple design media on the same 'idea' or design gestalt. 'Convergence' involves not just technical competency; it is also a social achievement: an effect of composing and coordinating multimodal semiotic media according to shared representational and communicative conventions. Failure to recognize convergence is often an effect of intersemiotic dissonance. This is also the risk of a design's failure in the eyes of the faculty jury, who often direct their critiques toward communicative inconsistencies.

Journal of Design History, 2006

Design historians are accustomed to dealing with ‘the past’ as they locate their work within part... more Design historians are accustomed to dealing with ‘the past’ as they locate their work within particular periods and historicized frameworks. Yet, as well as a context for research, the past may be used in specific ways to give structure and to support persuasion within particular genres of social interaction, such as oral history interviews and design critiques. This paper uses discursive social psychology (DSP) as a tool to explore the micro-qualities of talk in twelve design history interviews and two design critiques. Through a DSP focus on ‘particularization’, the issues considered here are how, in the interviews, specific terms concerning the past are used to help categorize its relevance for the interviewees and how, in the critiques, specific terms related to the past are used to support arguments about current design work. The approach taken here, wherein details of talk are examined, demonstrates how historians who conduct interviews may ascribe particular status to their interviewees and how contemporary design practitioners may actively use references they have garnered from the history of design. Thus, rather than considering oral history interviews in terms of what they tell us about the designers' pasts and rather than considering critique interactions in terms of what they tell us about ‘good’ design, the data are analysed here with regard to how particular references to the past help give meaning and persuasive power to the present activities of oral history and design practice.