Making Spaces: How Design Workbooks Work

In this paper, I discuss design workbooks, collections of design proposals and related materials, both as a method for design and as a design methodology. In considering them as a method, I describe a number of examples of design workbooks we have developed in our studio and describe some of the practical techniques we have used in developing them. More fundamentally, I discuss design workbooks as embodiments of a methodological approach which recognises that ideas may emerge slowly over time, that important issues and perspectives may emerge from multiple concrete ideas, potentially generated by multiple members of a team, rather than being theory-driven, and that maintaining the provisionality and vagueness of early proposals can be useful in supporting a quasi-participatory design approach that allows participants to interpret, react to and elaborate upon the ideas they present.