Method for Design Materialization (MDM)
Version Control as a Foundation: MDM repurposes standard version control systems to track the design process. Each commit is paired with reflective commentary that documents the rationale behind design choices. This approach allows recovery and examination of each developmental stage, complete with the designer’s insights.
Reflective Journaling: The designer maintains a reflective journal, stored within the version control repository, detailing thoughts, challenges, breakthroughs, critical incidents, but also the vernacularities of creation. This journaling provides additional context for the process.
Grounded Theory (GT): MDM integrates qualitative analysis to derive insights from the recorded data. This involves triangulating evidence from commits, executable builds, code, and journal entries to develop findings that may apply broadly to game design research.
Khaled, Rilla, and Pippin Barr. 2023. “Generative Logics and Conceptual Clicks: A Case Study of the Method for Design Materialization.” Design Issues 39 (1): 55–69. https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00706.
How-To
Taken from the Materializing Design website.
In a perfect world, an MDM archive features:
- An explanatory motivation statement, in which a designer articulates their motivations, intentions, objectives, problem statements, or research questions. This will likely be edited over the lifetime of the project
- Most, if not all, of the digital materials that form the final creative work, granting someone other than the designer the capacity to download or examine the materials, and potentially reconstruct the work
- Most, if not all, earlier iterations of the creative work, granting someone other than the designer insight into how interim artifacts were used to navigate the design problem space
- A log of software repository commit actions (modifications and additions to the project’s materials)
- Meaningfully explained commit actions that relate to changes in design (i.e. explanations of design reasoning at that moment)
- A regularly maintained reflective design journal, consisting of numerous reflective accounts of the experience of navigating the design problem space
- An explanatory closing statement, which bookends the motivation statement, and serves as an opportunity for the designer to reflect on the process, outputs, and successes of the project
In the real world, an MDM archive is missing at least one of the above items. If your archive is missing half or more of the above items, your chances of benefiting from MDM are significantly reduced.
We recommend that you block off a recurring time slot in your calendar each week that is dedicated to authoring reflective design journal entries.
We also recommend that you learn about the differences between descriptive and reflective writing: the more commitment you invest into reflective writing, the greater the payoffs will be from your journaling.
Notes
- “What forms of digital capture will communicate a legible trace of my reasoning?”
- Work with a version-controlled repository that holds all digital matter that is produced during the process
- Keep all long-form writing in a separate branch
- Add a
why.htmlto your repository in which motivation and intention are initially detailed - Add a
journal.htmlin which you regularly journal on the process of development - The way to go about journaling is through a ‘What?
So What? Now What?’ approach
- ‘What?’ helps you describe the situation you want to learn from. You should identify the facts and feelings of the situation.
- ‘So What?’ allows you to extract the meaning of ‘What?’. Moreover, you should question what knowledge you and others had in the situation, and what knowledge or theories that could help you make sense of the situation.
- ‘Now what?’ allows you to create an action plan for the future based on the previous questions.