Project
Materializing Design
Currently managing this research group investigating design practice and design research methodology. I develop the method for traceable game design research, and tools to help researchers practice it.
Since 2025
Design knowledge is often treated as secondary to its outputs — the final product gets published, but the reasoning, iteration, and decisions behind it disappear. In academic research, this is a significant gap: if design is a form of inquiry, the process itself is scholarly material worth preserving and sharing.
We developed the Method for Design Materialization (MDM) — a systematic approach to documenting design activity as scholarly output. The method combines:
- Digital archiving of every design stage — sketches, prototypes, iterations, dead ends
- Version-controlled repositories that capture context, constraints, intentions, and rationale at each commit
- Reflective journaling by designers, embedded alongside the artifacts they describe
- Public documentation that makes the full design reasoning traceable from concept to output
The approach draws from prototyping theory, interaction design, software development practices, and archival science — using Git as both a development tool and a research instrument.
I manage the group, contribute to the development of the MDM framework, and build infrastructure and tooling for the project archives.. I also worked on several MDM-documented projects that served as case studies for the method itself.