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This paper explores game designers' attitudes and praxis through a Grounded Theory analysis of data collected from interviews with 11 game design professionals. The aim of the research is to investigate and map possible shared approaches and strategies. The study presents a theoretical framework based on the core category "Balancing permanence and change". Designers appear to build and maintain elements of stability, and contemporarily ensure the process' flexibility and adaptability to possible constraints through collaborative approaches and iterative methods. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of game design practices and provide a theoretical framework for interpreting designers' choices. Future research should assess the adaptability of the framework across game genres and cultural backgrounds of designers. • Grounded theory can provide insights on game designers' attitudes and praxis. • Game designers' work is based on balancing permanence and change. • Game designers adopt fixed frameworks to ensure the project's coherence. • Game designers value flexibility to ensure the project's adaptability. • Game designers use team cooperation and iterative approaches as balancing strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Design practices often involve grassroots communities and institutional actors with designers working as or with intermediaries. This paper defines intermediation as a significant design practice, especially when designers engage in commoning and institutioning—concepts that have gained traction in recent discourses in design scholarship. To discuss intermediation, the paper introduces two case studies: a community radio project in Europe and a food supply chain project between Australia and China. The two cases show implicit and explicit ways that intermediation can form an integral part of the practices and competences of designers. The paper discusses the merits of intermediation skills and techniques as well as how intermediation can be better embedded and integrated in design practices. • Expands discourse on institutioning and commoning in participatory design research. • Makes explicit the so far largely implicit design skillset of intermediation practice. • Illustrates the argument with two design cases from Europe and Australia/China. • Argues for the merit of adding intermediaries to interdisciplinary design teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participatory design (PD) is a signature element of good design practice. However, enabling effective participation is often difficult to realise. This article highlights the value of applying psychoanalytic approaches to spatial thinking to better understand the deeper complexities and dynamics of the space-psyche relationship, and the challenges in the spatial thinking process that can inadvertently alienate participants in PD. Lacanian psychoanalysis is used to highlight how participants' lack of access to imagined space compromises their ability to establish a reciprocal relationship with space. The paper contributes to critiques of PD by exploring the relationship between spatial thinking, power, and agency in the PD process through Lacanian psychoanalysis. The paper argues the space that imagination seeks to access should not be gated or guarded by the designer's gaze, and that careful work is required to prevent such foreclosures from occurring. • Lacanian psychoanalysis is used to map space-psyche tension in PD. • Three ideations of space in PD: Lived, Represented, Perceived. • Participant's ability to establish reciprocal relationship with space is compromised. • Represented space should not be gated or guarded in the designer's gaze. • Subjectivity in PD is not a challenge but a gateway to immerse participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge from academic design research projects does not always help design professionals to actually strengthen their work. Based on a multi-case study, this paper describes how researchers view the impact of their design research projects on design practice and what they do to achieve this. Even in projects where impact on design practice is a stated ambition, several challenges can stand in the way, such as a lack of funding opportunities and unclarity on the needs of design practice. The paper provides tips for researchers and funding parties who want to inform design practice by research, including tips to operationalize design practice roles. • Professional design practice as an audience is a blind spot in funding. • Involving design professionals is not sufficient to impact design practice. • Four tips to impact design practice are provided for researchers and funding parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current discussions in practice-led design research concentrate on the thoughtful dimension of working with materials and the problem of analyzing acts of making at the scale of individual practice. Informed by the theoretical tenets of sociomateriality, this paper encloses a practice-led study addressing both issues. We followed the making of a collaboration-based, material-intensive workshop designed by the first author, where he also participated as a maker. This approach afforded us an insider's perspective to delineate how thinking through making transcends the individual and distributes across the entangled becoming of the social and the material. Our findings shed light on four features of sociomaterial assemblages that warrant critical attention in practice-led design research: temporality, contingency, epistemic capability, and analytical agency. • We contribute a methodological approach to conducting practice-led design research. • Our approach situates design practice in collaborative making. • Collaborative making demands a process of sociomaterial negotiation. • This process decenters the designer-researcher from knowledge production. • Adopting a sociomaterial lens can substantially benefit current efforts to analyze own design activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Design anthropology covers various design practices and research. While some researchers/pactitioners rely on anthropological insights to enhance design, others use design as a tool to gain anthropological knowledge. This paper explores the symbiotic relation between design and anthropology and proposes a 'design anthropology of collaborative making'. It contributes to gaining insights in plural ways of knowing while providing contextual insights that inform design practices. Starting from a common skill from an 'in-habitat' position, we consider both perspectives and invite collaborative engagement between people and materiality. Based on collaborations with the San community in Namibia on shoemaking and with Syrian refugee women through embroidery, we explore the added value of this tactile engagement through making to bridge theory and practice. • Collaborative making to inform design practices and situated knowledge creation. • Common skills from an in-habitat position as a means of correspondence. • Values of design anthropology to collaborative design research practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a detailed analysis of the uses of sticky notes in a range of design-oriented activities, from three different projects. The paper makes two principal contributions. First, it introduces a socio-material analytic for the study of design materials, and exemplifies this analysis with respect to video data of designers' uses of sticky notes. Second, it illustrates how the material properties of sticky notes come to have interactional consequences in the performance of particular social actions. Four general thematic considerations emerge from this socio-material analysis of sticky notes: (1) a reappreciation of the embodiment of space, ownership and actions-with-notes; (2) the interactional history of notes; (3) the social and conceptual inertia of gestalt contextures; and (4) the unity of the social, material and conceptual in embodied design activity. • Material properties of sticky notes are used in the performance of social actions. • A socio-material analytic perspective is introduced and exemplified. • The social and material aspects of sticky notes are mutually constitutive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of 'strategic design' has arisen in the past years as an umbrella term for a set of evolving practices. Yet the literature is quite fuzzy as to what this strategic design actually is and how it would lead to strategic impact. In this paper we explore the issue afresh, bracketing the concept of strategic design, and starting from the standpoint that " There is no such thing as strategic design ". We use a longitudinal case study of a design intervention, following its strategic impact as it unfolds over 10 years to critically consider the strategic impact of design practices. The dynamics of strategic impact across this case study is captured in a fledgling 'Game Changers' model. • We question whether what is called 'strategic design' is part of design at all. • There are complex relationships between design and strategic impact. • Strategic impact requires synchronized top down and bottom–up processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current concepts of design processes are largely pre-defined by Westphalian perspectives which omit other non-European-defined onto-epistemes. This paper draws on a co-design education program with young adults from the Aboriginal community of Ntaria to explore Western Arrarnta ways of designing , which are mediated by Country, culture, and community. Questioning accepted universal processes, drawing from multiple participatory methods, and enabling Ntaria students to reinforce their own knowledge systems, practices, and cultural values within their design learning, revealed how identity, place, and culture are fundamental to the enactment of design. In articulating a Western Arrarnta design process, the significance of autonomous and pluriversal ways of designing must be respected. • Westphalian design processes omit other non-European-defined onto-epistemes. • Aboriginal young adults explore Western Arrarnta ways of designing. • Insights reveal how identity, place, and culture are fundamental to design. • Encourages the incorporation of Indigenous values systems within design discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate about place has long intersected with design studies. Our contribution to interdisciplinary design is to facilitate a dialogue between design and human geography. Grounded in Doreen Massey's conceptualisation of place as the interrelations of diverse powers, processes and practices, this paper combines ethnographic methods and examples into a succinct place-based methodology for design researchers. We argue that this interpretation of place can provide designers and design researchers with an approach to understanding the multiplicity of place to locate themselves and their work better. We maintain that taking place-based methodologies seriously can support design researchers working in transdisciplinary teams, help avoid the pitfalls of homogenising and solution-based outcomes, and make space for Indigenous voices, feminist fabulations and pluriversal futures. • The article extends interdisciplinary dialogues to human geography, foregrounding the work of geographer Doreen Massey. • An articulation of place as extraverted and progressive can sharpen the understanding of situated research. • Place-based methodologies can help design researchers avoid homogenising and solution-focused outcomes. • Ethnographic approaches to place expand the idea of design ethnography to the production of alternative situated knowledges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of 'publics' has emerged as a frame for rethinking the relationships between design practices and the communities affected by design. This paper explores two facets of the intersection of design and publics. First, we examine the notion of designing for public interests with an understanding of publics as multiple, conflicting and varied. Second, with reference to the Australian context, we reflect on different ways design communities can identify and support the formation of publics as a pivotal next step to more effectively serve its own interests and values, including the urgent enactment of social change. Our discussion identifies four sets of tensions that we offer as provocations for constructive and ongoing engagement by the design community at large to inform the process of designing for our own publics. • Reviews interdisciplinary scholarship on publics and public interests. • Maps Australia's design industry associations to identify publics' challenges and opportunities. • Identifies arising tensions across distinctions such as fragmentation or pluralism of interests. • Asks design researchers critical questions about advocacy and unionisation. • Invites discussion about how design communities can foment their own publics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]