I would like to add to this discussion (Hello, Francois; thanks for the reference, Katherine). Artifacts are half-mute; they can only be understood well when part of the practices they are used; the further the distance in time and space from those practices, the feebler their voice, and eventually it dies down: museums around the world host a wealth of artifacts nobody cannot anymore fathom what they were used for. So we need ethnographies of practices to study artifacts. But artifacts do not emerge in vacuum: they are designed with intentions, and produced under certain technological possibilities and economical interests and limitations, and this has also been shaping them. So it is not useless to ask designers either. In fact, we are sort of still lacking the whole genre of studies to discuss about the artifacts in this manner.
Our research group has been exploring a bit one corner of this issue in the following papers (sorry the long links)
http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/46378230/Venta-Olkkonen_etal2016ECIS.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1487890782&Signature=jXSz5lHPYZG11fIwBGf%2FECthZNM%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DUsing_With_Discretion_Identifying_Emerge.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Arto_Lanamaeki/publication/309471513_It's_a_Pain_in_the_Wild_Struggling_to_Create_Conditions_for_Emerging_Practices_in_an_Urban_Computing_Project/links/5813415e08ae90acb23b5e95.pdf
Neither is directed to the design community (the first is a HCI, the second an IS paper), but they anyway raise the question how to study artifacts-in-use (and a litte bit also artifacts-in-design, post-fact).
best regards,
-Kari Kuutti
University of Oulu, Finland
=====================================
>Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2017 18:16:31 +0000
>From: Katherine J Hepworth <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
>Subject: Re: Why asking designers isn't useful in design research and other problems
>
>Hi Francois and Ali
>Francois - I agree that investigation of designed artifacts is more fruitful than interviews with designers. I >have found this to be true in my design history research. Interviews with designers can be helpful, but they >need to be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism and carefully fact checked.
>
>Perhaps the 'artifact first' approach has been neglected, but there are people other than David Sless doing >work on this area. Like me!
>
>Ali - While I agree with your concerns about actor network theory, there are other frameworks for studying the >influence designed artifacts have, without resorting to the claim that they have agency.
>
>A paper of mine that delves into one such framework for investigating the influence of designed artifacts has >just been published in Design and Culture: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/G5ry4djAfawi5PCZBzyX/full
>
>Because I'm particularly interested in studying how design artifacts participate in human power exchanges
>(both big, societal and small interpersonal exchanges) I approach this problem using the Foucauldian concept >of discourse technologies. The 'discursive method' framework was developed for studying design historical >artifacts, but I think it has potential to be adapted for studying present day artifacts in design research.
>
>Katherine Hepworth
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