Design Frames: A Narrative and Network Approach

Abstract

In today's increasingly interconnected world, we are facing challenges that are unprecedented in complexity and scale. At the same time, there is a growing awareness about the inadequacy and obsolescence of old and "best practice" strategies for solving these vexing challenges. The inadequacy of solutions that work within existing frames of thought has generated a renewed interest in research on problem-solving and creativity. While originally initiated in cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence, research on the mechanisms underlying the creative process has become a central topic in a variety of other disciplines, such as management, business, and healthcare. As a result, public and private organizations are increasingly turning to designers to bring a fresh perspective to the challenges they are facing.

As designers become more engaged in solving large-scale and intricate questions, the need for developing systematic approaches to design and their deployment in both design education and practice becomes more evident. Developing methods that function successfully within design environments requires a thorough understanding of problem-solving approaches in design. In recent years, a growing number of studies have addressed this question by investigating designers' working practices in the lab or in the field. One of the most influential concepts in studying the design process is the constructivist notion of "framing" (Schön, 1983) which suggests that the core activity in the design process is constructing a frame: a perspective or a point of view that allows the designers to tackle a problem in a vague and indefinite design situation. While the frame's concept has been central in studying the design process, its formal definition remains vague and unclear.

This dissertation aims to shed new light on the concept of frame by proposing two models for systematically describing their structure. These models can be used to make the frames constructed during the design process more explicit by following their development throughout the design process. Building upon two language-based representation modes (stories and semantic networks), the models employed in this dissertation facilitate the description of frames and the analysis of the design process by tracking the shifts in the content and structure of frames. These models were utilized in three verbal protocol studies to investigate different aspects of framing in design. In these studies, we explored the strategies for managing the multiplicity of the frames (chapter 2), reframing process (chapter 3), and divergent and convergent patterns (chapter 4) during the design process.

The contributions of this dissertation are both theoretical and practical. Models and results presented in this dissertation open up new paths future research on the use of framing in design, thereby informing design education and practice. Models presented in this work address the gap in the formal description of frames in the existing literature. The concepts of narrative and network show a flexible way to describe frames that can be utilized to identify and describe frames both qualitatively and quantitatively. On the other hand, the description of frames as a system of stories (narrative model) and concepts (network model) allows the frame to be analyzed on both meta-level (network and narratives) and the component level (concepts and stories). This systematic perspective suggests an interactive analysis of frames in which shifts in the frame level can be traced to the constituent elements of the design process and vice versa.