Materializing Design

The Problem

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.

What We Built

As co-founder of Materializing Design, I helped establish an SSHRC-funded research group at Concordia University (directed by Dr. Rilla Khaled) focused on making design knowledge transparent and academically rigorous.

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.

My Role

I co-founded the group, contributed to the development of the MDM framework, built tooling and infrastructure for the project archives, and led collaborative projects with researchers across multiple universities. I also worked on several MDM-documented projects that served as case studies for the method itself.

Outcome

The group has produced multiple published research papers, maintained a growing archive of MDM-documented projects by researchers across institutions, and established a replicable framework that other design researchers can adopt. The work has been presented at international conferences and continues to generate new projects exploring design as a form of knowledge production.