Imagining design: Transitive and intransitive dimensions

The present study contributes to literature concerned with conceptualising design imagination as social by identifying an analytical distinction between transitive and intransitive dimensions of design conversations. Whereas transitive dimensions, which remain the focus in much contemporary research, concern relations between imagining designers and imagined design objects, intransitive relations draw attention to process of growth irreducible to either subjects or objects. To illustrate our approach, we draw from the metaphor of weaving and examine a design conversation in which two software developers jointly imagine a 'simplest editor' for a software system. The analyses allow identifying three concepts that offer analytical alternatives to going concepts in the literature: instauration instead of construction, correspondence in place of representation, and place-making instead of meaning-making.