Understandings of professional communication design expertise: a phenomenographic study
Creators: name: TAN, Stella
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 330305
subject: Design management

description: This research study investigates the conceptualisation of professional design expertise by communication designers through socially-constructed concepts of expertise. The outcome of this study presents a DEW model of expertise that reflects communication designers¿ perception of expertise, and the ways in which they work towards developing and retaining status of professional expertise throughout their career.

The impetus for this study arose from a lack of understanding into the ways that communication designers develop, adapt and retain their expertise throughout their design career. Prior investigations of design expertise have predominately focused on specific aspects of the creative problem-solving design process within laboratory confines, removed from real-world professional practice. These studies often apply positivistic research methods that seek either to identify factors differentiating novices from experts, or to measure expertise objectively.

However, designers in professional practice seldom practice in the manner that these studies assume in their enquiry structure. Within these creative organisations, designers are often promoted to managerial positions after some years of experience within industry, often without formal management knowledge. Such situations require them to take on more responsibilities, while maintaining their status as expert designers. Prior studies on design expertise rarely address these core social and political factors that designers encounter in professional practice, thereby constraining our better understanding of design expertise within professional practice. 

Communication design practice was chosen as a case study for two reasons. First, as a socially-embedded practice, communication designers have encountered industry-wide working culture changes, as they move from providing visual aesthetics on pre-determined communications towards working collaboratively with clients to address audience-specific communication problems. Second, most current insight into communication design expertise is based on older, traditional modes of practice, and so does not necessarily reflect these new practice models.

In addressing the above issues, this study adopts a phenomenographic approach to investigate the perceptions of design expertise through communication designers¿ lived experiences during professional practice. Seventeen one-on-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with communication designers, who had at least a minimum of three years working experience. Interview data were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analysed using phenomenographic methods.

Key study findings reveal that communication designers regard expertise as a socially constructed phenomenon, embedded within contextual situations. They describe design expertise in terms of a community of practice, in which the notion of expertise is an ongoing and renewing process of motivation, acquiring of knowledge through hands-on experience, developing wisdom and managerial leadership, while being adaptive to changes within the industry. While these insights stand in contrast to previous assumptions that hard categorical distinctions exist between expert and novice designers, they also provide us with a set of conceptual tools specific to communication designers and design managers, which will enable us to develop further our understanding of design expertise from a shared theoretical platform grounded in the practice.

The insights developed in this study broaden our perspective on design expertise beyond notions of experts or novices, and specific aspects of historical practice. As the lived experiences of communication designers and their conceptions of what expertise means within their profession now come to the fore, this study presents a dynamic evolving work model of design expertise (the DEW model). By more accurately reflecting lived practices, the DEW model offers a starting point for investigating how design expertise might better help educational and managerial programs to develop expertise-oriented professional cultures in communication design.