Nearly all teams displayed a mixture of both behaviors.

The behaviors of
those teams who performed radical breaks were heavily weighted on the waynding
side, while the behaviors of teams who optimized were heavily weighted on the
navigation side.
3.6 Shared Media
How does media work in design? How is media related to other aspects of design?
What is the impact of media on design teams?
These questions are often touched upon by design theorists and practitioners.
While these writers have provided insights into the use of media in design, they
have thus far have not provided a comprehensive framework that can be used by
designers to make informed choices about the most effective kinds of media for the
phase of design in which they are engaged.
The rich and growing corpus of design theory and methodology has begun to
show interest in examining the media that design engineers use in their work. Much
of the literature addresses formal models and optimization. A smaller body of work
examines prototyping and tangibility.
These sources range from brief dictums about the roughness and renement of
sketches [6], to descriptive lists of characteristics of prototypes [3], to rules
of thumb in situated design [20, 21], to lists of cognitive dimensions of types of
prototypes [1, 2].
While all these approaches warrant merit, none offer a coherent framework for
looking at media in the context of practice. In addition, there is little work done on
the body of behaviors associated to the media. What are the mechanics of this
movement? What are the mechanics of the use of the renement of sketches?
In our analysis we consider both the effect of the media we introduced as stimuli,
and the role played by media the team produced.
In the next sections, we build a functional description of how media works in
action, and suggest the distinctions of scaffolds and anchors in media. Briey
stated, scaffolds serve as a vehicle for gaining insight while envisioning morphing
possibilities. Scaffolds tend to be ambiguous models, which are clearly not the nal
object. Anchors focus the redesign on the object at hand. Anchors tend to be
geometric/analytic models, or models that exhibit precision and high delity to
the nal object.
3.6.1 C-K Theory: Logical Status
Our notion of scaffolds and anchors is based in part on the work of Hatchuel and
Weil [9]. For Hatchuel and Weil, some concepts have logical status and some lack
logical status. Those concepts having logical status are those that fall under the
rubric of true and false, either they exist in the world or not. For Hatchuel and Weil,
44 J. Edelman et al.
those concepts that lack logical status are combinations of existing concepts, but
have yet to be viably realized in the world. The notion that something is possible or
impossible does not come into play.
Our interest in the notion of logical status and lacking logical status focuses on
discovering if and how media can exhibit logical status or not, or how they elicit
responses that indicate logical status or non-logical status. Indeed, we have found
that media which claims logical status supports optimization, while media which
makes no claim to logical status supports radical breaks.
3.6.2 The Grammar and Agency of Maps
We now consider how media has been taken up by leading archeological theorists.
Insights drawn from these thinkers will form a basis for understanding of how
media operates in design. In order to understand the characteristics of media that
has logical status, we will rst consider the grammar and agency of maps.
In his paper Mediational Techniques and Conceptual Frameworks in Archae-
ology [25], Timothy Webmoor examines how the production and use of maps
conditions and restricts the thought process of the map reader. Maps, Webmoor
argues, are not neutral. They are media, and as such they carry a message. The
map, according to Webmoor, is a fundamental conceptual framework that
archaeologists utilize in directing their methods and formulating interpretations
and that these frameworks predispose certain interpretations. In Webmoors
view, the word map is considered to include, any spatial representation convey-
ing visual information in a strictly coordinate, graphical manner.
The purpose of mapping, Webmoor explains, revolves around the identication
of boundaries. These lined boundaries, like the lines of maps and engineering
drawings, characterize knowledge. This type of media facilitates the portrayal of
all surfaces as abstracted and mathematized. Mathema (the Ancient Greek root of
mathematics) is often translated as knowing, a knowing that is associated with the
contemplation of unchanging, immutable truths.
Webmoor speaks of how the grammar of the map changes the nature of the
phenomena it represents: The detail of the cartographic map can often, however,
elide the very feature or for that matter, an urban or built architectural space that
it presumes to envisage in its visual conventions. . .Furthermore, maps by virtue of
their univocal scientic strategy atten sensory data into the restricted medium of
articulated lines and create gaps and blank spaces.
Maps claim a truth of their own. They have an authority by virtue of the
coordinate grid upon which illustrated boundaries are placed. The grid and the
boundary are the stock and trade of the grammar of truth-making.
Webmoors exploration elucidates Ingolds concept of Waynding and
Navigating [12, 13]. The methodologies and tools of Waynding and
Navigating suggest two paths similar to the methods and paths of design
engineers. Waynding occurs when one walks through a landscape without a map
and relies on primary sensory data to move through a territory. It is direct, specic,
Understanding Radical Breaks 45
and immediate. Navigation, on the other hand, requires a map. One determines
where one is through consulting the map, the compass and comparing it to what one
sees. In this respect, navigation involves triangulation.
3.6.3 Media and Knowing
Maps, like charts and equations, are how we know in contemporary terms. In
Thinking with Eyes and Hands [17], Bruno Latour examines the modern way of
knowing in respect to embodiments of knowledge in common use. We can hardly
think of what it is like to know something without indexes, bibliographies,
dictionaries, papers with references, tables, columns, photographs, peaks, spots,
and bands.
Latours characterization of the media of knowing is based on his observations
of scientists at work [18, 19]. The media used by design engineers to support
optimization and incremental change, often in the context of manufacture, have
the self-same characteristics. Engineering drawings fundamentally exhibit the same
form as maps. Optimization engages charts and equations in the process of literally
mathematizing processes and materials for robust and predictable outcomes. When
optimizing, engineers know their products in the same way that scientists know
phenomena. This is aided and abetted though the use of the specic kinds of media
that Latour traces in his examination of how knowledge is made.
3.6.4 Media in Cognitive Science
Contemporary studies in human cognition suggest that thinking goes beyond the
classic notions of boundaries of thinking and the mind as promoted by Descartes
and his followers. Contemporary researchers in human behavioral and cognitive
science seek to ll in the gap between mind and object through examination of how
different kinds of media inuence thinking.
Barbara Tversky has made a very strong case for the effect of different kinds of
thinking that is elicited when experimental subjects produce different kinds of
maps. In short, Tverksy found that rough sketches accompanied what she calls
sketchy thinking. More formal maps indicated more formal thinking [2224].
Tversky found that architects leverage rough sketches to create new knowl-
edge and new scenarios in a manner that formal architectural drawings did not
readily support. Signicantly, the interpretation of rough, ambiguous sketches was
a skill that improved with experience and practice.
3.6.5 Scaffolds and Anchors
These considerations lead us to posit two aspects of media: scaffolds and
anchors. These distinctions are based on situated cognitive and behavioral
46 J. Edelman et al.
distinctions proposed by Kirsh [1416] and Hutchins [10, 11]. For Hutchins and
Kirsh, thought is often grounded in physical representations, to which they refer as
anchors. The anchor provides a place fromwhich to build or understand newideas.
Kirsh speaks of scaffolds in respect to creating external structures connected to
thoughts that allows the mental projection of more detailed structures than could
be held in the mind. This affords driving thought further than unaided thinking alone.
In our study, we found that some media served as anchors, though we observed
that at times the anchoring was so strong, that it precluded exploring alternatives.
Other types of media seemed to invite letting go of an idea, and entertaining new
idea. These media we call scaffolds. Scaffolds aided designers to nd not only
greater depth in their designs, as Kirsh observes, but scaffolds help build designs
that are distant relations to the scaffold.
Scaffolds
Scaffolds make no claim to being the exclusive and nal thing. They serve as a
vehicle for building insight, for building other things. Scaffolds in construction the
construction trade are explicitly not the edice itself, but allow the construction of
the edice. They may in some way resemble the shape of the edice, but are not
usually confused with the edice. Media scaffolds serve as vehicles for designing,
they are not the nished product.
Media scaffolds often function as metaphors, and are treated as metaphors.
Experimental subjects who make radical breaks speak of the mouse metaphor or
the point and shoot metaphor. In this respect media scaffolds are abstractions,
because they give the exploration direction and form under a single rubric.
In the same way that important features in the terrain appear and evanesce before
the senses of waynder, the mediations of the design engineers who produce radical
breaks appear and evanesce. Hand motions and many-ness of sketches, never
meaning to be the nal thing, but meaning to help unpack metaphors, vehicles,
temporary signs that change along the way. Objects may sometimes stay the same
but the gestures associated with them change. Stories abound, narratives and
scenarios unfold often in wonderment.
An example of scaffolds and media used as scaffolds can be observed in the
agency of rough, ambiguous sketches used to envision new and changing ideas.
Another example was observed in several groups who produced rough paper
prototypes, envisioning and acting out scenarios with them, and changing the
prototypes as the scenario changed.
Anchors
Like Webmoors maps, anchors make the claim to the essential truth of a thing, and
elide specic sensory cues. Anchors elicit responses which suggest logical status.
Understanding Radical Breaks 47
Conversations surrounding anchors are limited to yes/no or optimization. Engineer-
ing drawings and rened models often act as anchors.
Webmoors description of maps serves as a guide for understanding the gram-
mar of engineering drawings. Like maps, engineering drawings represent physical
volumes with thin, geometric boundaries.
We can easily substitute cartographic map with engineering drawing in
Webmoors account of the agency of maps: The detail of the. . . engineering
drawing. . . can often, however, elide the very feature. . .that it presumes to envis-
age in its visual conventions. . .Furthermore, engineering drawings by virtue of
their univocal scientic strategy atten sensory data into the restricted medium of
articulated lines and create gaps and blank spaces [25].
An example of anchors and media used as anchors can be observed in the agency
of a well resolved prototype. In one team, after ve minutes, the looks-like model
(Fig. 5), a well-resolved hard foam version of the engineering drawing, was given to
the group. Each time the conversation veered to a new and different design, team
members pointed to the foam model and returned to solving problems suggested by
the foam model.
Note well, that with anchor objects, when the conversation hedges on a new idea,
the object at hand brings the conversation back to the notion circumscribed by the
object. Anchors are not employed as a vehicles to nd alternatives. Instead, they are
treated as the thing itself; they are the destination.
4 Discussion and Conclusion
The Scoping-Behaviors-Shared Media Triad in Action
In our study, teams who produced redesigns that exhibit radical breaks presented
many alternatives to the engineering drawing. In contrast, teams that made incre-
mental improvements presented a single solution to what they perceived to be the
problem.
When asked how they redesigned the product, the strongest team in respect to
radical breaks offered, Obviously we dont have one new model. Weve probably
got three or four different themes and then we riffed on those.
This team began their work with 5 min of navigation behavior, asking What is
this? and How do we use this?, and How can we x this? In the course of this
investigation they enlist the engineering drawing very much like a map. They speak
of features, and usability. By all indications, this group is fully anchored on the
engineering drawing on the table in front of them.
After 5 min, the experience-like stimulus (Fig. 4) was introduced, at which
point they enlist it to act out how and where it could be used. Next, they began to
produce rough sketches, made hand gestures to develop and esh out the sketch,
and told narratives in which the object plays a role. The sketches changed with
changing gestures and changing scenarios, as they felt their way through the
imagined environment. Extractive scope rapidly shifted back and forth between
48 J. Edelman et al.