EAD:06 DESIGNsystemEVOLUTION Title: Seeing and Seeing Through the Crisis of the Artificial Presenter: Mr Mark Roxburgh Authors: Mr Mark Roxburgh Affiliations: Mark Roxburgh Visual Communication Program Faculty of Design Architecture and Building University of Technology Sydney Objectives of the research / Approach or method used / An indication of the nature of the main findings: This paper stems from initial doctoral research into the potential of observational research techniques for visual communication practice. The overall objective of this ongoing research is to explore appropriate forms of communication that can adequately represent disparate types of information and ideas, prevalent in dealing with complex design situations, to various participants. This paper should be seen then as a fragment of these overarching concerns and a continuum of my earlier and ongoing research interests and publications. As such I offer no definitive conclusions in this paper that, though more speculative than concrete, is laying the foundations for the later empirical aspects of my research project. Such speculation (hypothesis?) is so far based upon the typical mix of literature reviews, design teaching and design practice. Though I examine the potential of photo-based observation for visual communication practice in this paper, I go on to explore the implications of subjectivity in such an endeavour and finally speculate that visual communication design is potentially the most appropriate representational form for communicating complexity in design situations. In this sense I am not making an argument that designers don’t already use a range of visualisation techniques in their practice, rather that there is room for the further development and greater understanding of them and that, in visual communication design at least, such techniques are largely outcome focused and not research focused. Abstract: Alexander (1964) and Jones (1992) argued that design-by-drawing was not up to the task of dealing with complex design ‘problems’. In a similar vein Lawson (1980, p18) argued that ‘problems’ which aren’t visible tend not to come to the design-by-drawers attention. To overcome this Alexander developed a ‘language’ of representation, based on mathematics, to help eliminate this subjective bias of designers in determining the key issues and relationships in complex design settings. Design Methods promoted a rational procedure of analysis / synthesis as the natural order of design to replace the intuitive model that dominated. On this basis Design Methods 1