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Design+ Transposing human action research to design

a part of the overall shelving system, then we would label it has slightly more than a reductive, descriptive value in
a pragmatic fulfillment (“That’s good enough, let’s keep it.”) the context of design. We argue that the six analytical
In contrast, the subject would be labeled as an epistemic categories of design episodes shown in Figure 5 account
fulfillment (“I see a way to improve this.”) if we observed better for the empirical observations we make in the ill-
the geometry to be subject to further reconsideration structured design context than the binary distinction
and change. We then revised the linkographs with our proposed by Kirsh and Maglio. Thereby, our work not
descriptive categorization of each action, extending it only extends an established distinction between epistemic
with a more differentiated notational vocabulary. In this and pragmatic actions in design; it also offers an extended
extended notational vocabulary, we represented pragmatic linkography notation that supports both kinds of action
objectives and fulfillments as squares, and their epistemic in design and promises general utility for empirical design
counterparts as circles (as shown in the “Extended research.
Linkograph” column in Table 2). We identified a minimum
of 70 and a maximum of 110 design episodes in the six 3.2. Communication patterns in problem-solving
design protocol datasets. groups
In the extended format, our linkographs showed that The second project is outlined here at a preliminary,
epistemic and pragmatic actions were not necessarily speculative level to indicate the broader applicability of
mutually exclusive. We often observed pragmatic design the described approach. Similar to the test and refinement
objectives yielding epistemic fulfillments and vice versa. of Kirsh and Maglio’s purposeful human action theory,
On several occasions, design episodes turned into dead- it transposes an experimental task performance study
ends (“This doesn’t work; let’s see if there are better ways of problem-solving groups conducted by Bavelas from
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forward.”), which we visualized using the + symbol in the the well-structured problem domain to the ill-structured
two diagrams shown on the right of Figure 5. Overall, we domain. Based on earlier work that resulted in models of
found the design episodes we identified to fall into a total of the mathematical properties of group structures and earlier
six distinct relationships starting with either pragmatic or experimental work based on these models, 72-75 Bavelas’
epistemic objectives and ending with pragmatic, epistemic study investigated groups of five collaborators tasked
fulfillments, or dead-ends. with the solution of closed-ended (i.e., well-structured)
To some extent, these findings are in accordance with problems using experimentally controlled communication
Kirsh and Maglio’s distinction between pragmatic and patterns (Figure 6). The independent variable investigated
epistemic actions and reassert the distinction’s merit in was the groups’ experimentally determined communication
the rejection of earlier linear purposeful human action pattern, with its effects on the dependent variables, namely
theories. However, our findings also show that Kirsh the groups’ task performance and “morale.” The groups
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and Maglio’s distinction, originally formulated based were asked to perform one of two closed-ended tasks, with
on observations made in the well-structured context, group members communicating using written messages

Figure 5. Six different relationships between objective setting and objective (non-)fulfillment in observed design episodes

Volume 2 Issue 2 (2025) 9 doi: 10.36922/dp.4875