Abstract

Over the past few years, several collaborative processes in design have been experienced between designers and the public of their creations. Designers not only have learned the importance of the user’s view but also design has been valued as a whole process, many times integrated to interdisciplinary approaches that brought together many other study fields to reckon about the act of designing things in design. Hence, this article is based on the argument and methods of Richard Buchanan (1995) in which the author demonstrates the need to identify rhetorical perspectives about the origins of design. In a broader sense the present work aims to draw a parallel by investigating the origins of collaborative processes such as user-centered design, participatory design, co-design/co-creation and design anthropology through a similar scheme that enables reflections about the rhetorical perspectives upon each of these processes. Knowing that many design practices that engage professionals (designers) and ordinary citizens in a shared design experience are today becoming more popular, it is crucial to design education to be well-informed about how these collaborative processes have been set in order to build a critical reflection upon historicism.