Abstract
This paper focuses on the role and nature of text as external representations that designers interact with, in the same way as they interact with sketch representations during a creative design process. Existing studies about text and natural languages in the field of design studies have primarily focused on how to record the verbal communications and written text, uttered and expressed during a design process so that one could reconstruct, remember, and recollect the situations in the past. Little has been studied, however, about how designers choose wordings in expressing design ideas and concepts, how such textual representations evolve over time, and how the choice of wording affects the subsequent design process. Based on our experience of conducting design case studies in an industry-university cooperative research project, we describe how designers express words, phrases, sentences and wordings on whiteboards, and how design materials expressed in text evolve over time. We then argue for a research agenda for design theoretics, which focuses on the role and nature of wording as external representations to interact with throughout a design process.
