Revealing Material Intentions and Conversations Through Reflective Accounts, Movement, and Gaze Data

• In Event: Materiality and Sociomaterial Practices in Learning, Designing, and Making

Abstract

Purpose
While many view design as a conversation with materials (Schön, 1992) and acknowledge designers’ familiarity with materials affects how they use them (Anning, 1994), understanding of material agency as it unfolds and across designer-material pairings remains limited. The purpose of this study was to elucidate material agency as revealed in different data sources, across designers with differing familiarity with materials. Research questions guided this work:
What kinds of agency negotiations occur between materials and designers with differing familiarities with the materials?
How might agency negotiations expand or compress opportunities for learning?
Perspectives
Making decisions that are consequential to the framing of a problem is termed framing agency (Author, 2019). This context-specific approach to agency, much like others have treated self-efficacy, provides a lens into how design problems are shaped—in this case, by both designer and materials. To characterize framing agency as a process negotiated between designers and materials, I co-opt terms (Bergström, Clark, Frigo, Mazé, Redström, & Vallgårda, 2010; Manzini, & Cau, 1989): (1) “being” materials exert covert influence and are treated as backdrop; (2) “doing” materials function in a certain way, to meet a need in a design, negotiated with the designer; and (3) “becoming” materials involve agentive repurposing of materials, unfolding interactionally. Viewed through a lens of constructionism (Papert, & Harel, 1991), I consider how these three types of material conversations afford learning.
Methods and data sources
Participants include four students enrolled in two cohorts of a creativity and technical design course. This study focuses on the third lab activity, in which students used LEGOs, copper tape, LEDs, and coin cell batteries to make a “lamp” with a switch. Most had never made a circuit before and they had varied familiarity with LEGOs (none, minimal, moderate, expert). Students in cohort 1 wore head-mounted cameras and wrote reflective accounts as blog posts to document their creative process. Students in cohort 2 wore mobile eye-tracking sets, and one also wrote a reflective account. I conducted qualitative analysis (Saldaña, 2015) of the reflective accounts and interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) of video data, in both cases attending to being, doing, and becoming materials.
Results and substantiated conclusions
Jessica, though familiar with LEGOs, was apprehensive about electricity. She explained how she used the LED leg, pushed by a LEGO, as the switch, making it a becoming material. Leo and Evan, both experienced with circuits but unfamiliar with copper tape, treated it as a doing material. Leo, a LEGO expert, treated the LEGOs as being materials, whereas Evan, familiar with LEGO, treated the LEGOs as being and doing materials. Fabiola, who had never worked with LEGOs before nor built a circuit, treated the circuit as a being material, constructing a LEGO surround once she made a circuit on the workspace. Gaze data sheds light on students’ searching patterns and evaluation of doing materials in particular.
Scholarly significance
Head-mounted and gaze videos provide detailed withness (Shotter, 2006) views of how the students negotiated with materials, highlighting how doing and becoming conversations lead to inquiries.

Author

• Vanessa Svihla, University of New Mexico