Supportive Resources: Mastering the Art of Making Sense

This paper questions the nature of qualitative user studies as currently applied in the context of experience-centered design. We suggest that conceiving knowledge as if it were an entity that can be captured in some form and transferred unchanged oversimplifies the situation in the case of design, and, for the purpose of opening a dialogue on the topic is problematic. We put forward an alternative perspective, that of supportive resources, which go beyond social science-based approaches, such as user studies, to focus on the forming of knowledge by designers. Supportive resources are intended to inspire, but equally they are intended to help frame, guide and support the design process in a non-prescriptive way. Designers can apply them as needed to support existing approaches. In order to better describe supportive resources and their role in design, the authors present four examples from projects currently being undertaken by the authors; storytelling, language and touch, material knowledge, and video.