Toward Discursive Design

Design research needs to explore and communicate the potential for design practice to be speculative and motivate discourse as and in design. This may be achieved via Discursive Design. Such a view comes out of practice-driven research on interaction and communication design within a sociocultural perspective. It is informed theoretically by Discourse Analysis in Applied Linguistics, with core concepts from social semiotics and studies of multimodality. Together these concepts form a fuller frame for design and design research at the level of mediated articulation and discourse through design. We link the discursive with developments in hybrid products that are medleys of physical form, technologies, interactions and services. We illustrate Discursive Design by referring to a span of artifacts and articulations from a large research project in interaction design. We close with a set of key concepts.