The Designer’s Mixer Board : Communicating Design and Formgiving
Abstract: This report describes the background, methods and results of a master thesis project revolving around communication and form-giving in the product design process. Teo Enlund, former Associate Professor at KTH, who has developed a tool called the Designer’s Mixer Board, in which he draws a parallel from mixing music to discussing product design. The Designer’s Mixer Board has been used in industrial design centred courses at KTH to investigate brand platforms and ways to maintain brand coherency when introducing new product concepts to an existing brand. The purpose behind this thesis was to investigate how designers and their clients communicate on product design and if the designer’s mixer board can be a useful tool to facilitate and/or deepen the conversation. This covers conversations on formgiving between designers as well as conversations between designers and their clients. Additionally, this thesis aims to provide insights into what communicative methods and tools are used by industrial designers when designing products for a client and how the designers communicate with their clients throughout that process. Different methods and tools were used to investigate the questions posed in the purpose of this thesis, a literature study and an interview study were conducted to gather insight into what tools, methods were being used and previous work had been published in the field of design communication. In addition, a series of workshops were conducted to investigate the designer’s mixer board’s potential as a collaborative communication tool. The literature study and the interview study showed that articulated discussions on formgiving between designers and clients is rare. Designers communicate formgiving fluently amongst themselves due to similar expertise and work methods. However, it is the design outcome that is in focus not articulated discussion. The interviewees did not see the designer’s mixer board as a suitable tool for designer-client interaction but for collaborative work between designers. Based on the findings from the workshops the designer’s mixer board was deemed to have potential as a tool for deepened conversations on design and formgiving. The workshops did however not evaluate designer-client interactions.
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