Out of Time, Out of Place: Reflections on Design Workshops as a Research Method.

This paper examines design workshops as research practice: how workshops bind time and participation in ways that privilege certain types of action and foreclose others. In five workshops we facilitated, we asked members to design a new item from two existing items in need of repair and studied their acts of appropriation and reuse. Although we hoped to explore possibilities for collaborative practice, we more clearly saw what happens when garments with rich histories meet the blunt instrument of workshop interventions. Members aligned anticipated outcomes in opposition to our guidelines and abandoned projects due to personal obligations. In reflecting on these encounters we further show how workshops shape what it means to study collaborative settings. This work contributes a reflective study of workshops that gathers and extends CSCW methods for interventionist inquiry.