Experiential ways of mapping : revisiting the Desktop Walkthrough

Design has formed as a professional field, over time, in relation to social, political, cultural, and industrial transformations. In this process, the ways that designing itself is carried out have responded to these changes as well. There is not one singular way of doing design. The varieties of tools, methods, materials, and situations that design now engages with spans from practices that are well-established since more than a century, to emerging and experimental endeavours that contribute with new approaches and methods. However, attention to the historical origins of design methods is seldom present in contemporary design practice. Instead, methods and tools seem almost timeless, if not neutral. Design’s ways of working are generally not framed in relation to the diverse historical contexts, constellations, and cultures in which they once were formed and introduced. Embedded in the methods applied in design today, however, we can still find traces of the historical situations, concerns, and ideas that they once were made to respond to. An awareness of these embedded historical aspects of designing can bring forth perspectives that support developing what we do in design, and how we relate to the methods that we use. The point of attempting to map a certain design method in relation to its history, therefore, is here not intended as simply a matter of tracing a linear historical genealogy of from where and how this method has come to enter design practice. Through an attention to the historicity of designing, we wish to point to a complex cartography of multi-level relationships between different design practices, diverse conceptual understandings of design, and various trajectories that designing could take towards the future. In this chapter we revisit a specific method used within design projects that deal with integrating spatial and service design solutions, the desktop walkthrough. Through exploring its possible connections to and relationships with previous experiential ways of mapping spatial and environmental interactions, we wish to move beyond discussing what such a method instrumentally “does” and highlight some of the embedded historical and conceptual understandings it brings into designing