Abstract

The questions shaping this chapter and its eventual form began with the realisation that our individual scholarly activities in the disciplines of sociology and visual art, engineering education and philosophy may find a common expansive space in a shared focus on the social, critical and learning relationships expressed through the designed world. In other words, we began with the suspicion that when designers create things, they affirm or question the systems and contexts in which artificial things come to reside (i.e. political, social, economic, etc.). ¹ When we as researchers ask questions about how material production unfolds as a learned social process, we are also investigating how designers shape social relations and cultural knowledge.