Materializer

The method for design materialization (MDM) dovetails git commits with reflective practice, foregrounding a design trajectory. This lays the foundations for a design research epistemology that is grounded in design practice from inception.

Practicing MDM without specific tools forces researches to fit their analysis process into existing tools. Nvivo and MaxQDA do not support markdown files, git commit history is generally not in the same space or format as the other reflective material such as journal entries (markdown), research articles (pdf), source code (code files), and builds (executables).

I have started building Materializer as a tool that would, in the same spirit as MDM, natively foreground design trajectory from software implementation and bring it into close proximity to all the other materials, and presenting it in an interface that visually communicates ideas that are relevant for a grounded theory method (GTM) analysis of qualitative data.

MDM repositories are also highly subjective data, and the same can be said about their analyses: a repository analyzed by two different analysts is likely to produce completely separate and valid analyses. That is the entire argument for an original design research epistemology. As such, I realize that researchers will want to do varying things to archive contents so I have also started with an export to obsidian feature that provides the same data in a highly flexible, obsidian vault form.