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Abstract:

Understanding future users is acknowledged to be essential in design, yet also challenging. Due to the increasing complexity of architectural design processes, architects often have no direct access to the perspectives of those they are designing for. User experience is largely considered a matter of intuition. Its implicit position in design challenges exploiting architects' expertise. It makes user experience hard to discuss and argue for against more tangible aspects, as well as hard to extend beyond architects' personal experience as to encompass diversity. The limited insight into users' perspectives has been criticised in several areas, from inclusive to sustainable design. These criticisms often point to the lack of adequate ways to inform architects about user experience. There is clearly a need for information formats that provide architects design-relevant insights and that tie in with their ways of working. Setting out to address this need, this project seeks inspiration in related design disciplines (e.g., product design, interaction design), where user experience has been advanced as a main driver for design. To explicitly involve users' diverse perspectives in the design process, these disciplines have developed a gamut of techniques, which are largely unknown to architects. It is hypothesised that certain techniques have value for architecture as well, but require careful tailoring to the particularities of architectural design practice. Inspired by the challenges of present-day architectural design practice and the developments in related disciplines, the research aims to understand architects' designerly ways of knowing with regard to user experience and explore ways to support it. This requires moving beyond traditional understandings of 'informing' and embracing the more creative ways of knowing inherent to design practice. Unlocking knowledge in a design-oriented way is expected to support architects in attending to user experience. To this end, the research is set up around a two-fold research question, with the answer to first informing the answer to the second: [1] How do architects know about users? [2] How can architectural design practice be informed about user experience in a design-oriented way? The first research question is addressed through ethnographic research in three architecture firms in Belgium. This approach allows getting under the surface of a 'culture of practice', tracing the situated, embodied and distributed knowledge architects draw on in design. The ethnographic study investigates how architects currently attend to user experience and how their particular practice and context set preconditions to informing them about user experience. The notion of user experience is unravelled into the facets of how a space feels, how it works, and what it means, which turn out to be addressed differently by architects. Architects' personal and embodied ways of acquiring, registering and applying knowledge about user experience makes this knowledge fragile and particularly challenging to share. Findings from the ethnographic study allow mapping the socio-material environment of architectural design practice, which is shaped by dynamic constellations of architects (showing a spectrum of attitudes towards users in design), in diverse relations with clients and stakeholders, and material aspects - which all mediate knowledge about user experience. Understanding the mechanisms of design practice provides insight into challenges to knowledge transfer, and is a key to understanding how experience-related knowledge can be transferred more effectively from use to design contexts. As social and material aspects support each other in mediating knowledge, potential lies in coupling narratives to material aspects (e.g., design materials and the built environment), as to facilitate engagement with user experience in design. The second part of the research sets out to address the challenges identified in architectural design practice in a design-oriented way, informed by techniques used in related design disciplines. Scenario-based design in particular comes to the fore as an approach that holds potential for supporting architects' knowing about users. Test workshops in two architecture firms (of which the findings are validated by an expert panel) suggest that this flexible approach for explicitly engaging with user experience in design can be tailored to architecture. Findings illustrate how it offers architects insight into user profiles and themes, facilitates exploring and diversifying potential futures during design development, and supports communication with team members and the client. Scenario-based design does not only provide a way to introduce information that allows gaining insight into user experience, it can also make user experience tangible, applicable and negotiable in the different stages of the design process. The research contributes to both theoretical areas, by offering insight into the dynamics of architectural design practice and articulating tacit aspects of architects' knowing, and practical areas, by presenting principles to overcome barriers to knowledge transfer in a design-oriented way. Different stakeholders may find scaffolding for their initiatives to take on board user perspectives in design. The findings can help architects to reflect on their design practice and strengthen their position in the design process. Also, they can help clients in communicating their concerns about user experience and become more actively involved in the design process. Finally, they can help researchers in improving the uptake of research on user experience in design. Further development of a scenario-based design approach in different design stages and beyond may contribute to sustainably integrating user perspectives in architects' design process.