Phoneticians, Phoenicians and mapping design research around a Medidisciplinary sea

How might interdisciplinary design research be visualised? And what might this illuminate about the role that design can play among other disciplines? This chapter takes as an example design exploration in augmentative and alternative communication, a field that includes disabled people, speech and language therapists and speech technologists among others. This practice-based research embodied and visualised ‘tone of voice’, an elusive quality usually locked away in the esoteric nomenclature of phoneticians and other experts, engaging discussion with a wider audience. An attempt to draw a map of the research began by using Daniel Fallman’s Interaction Design Research Triangle which recognises a flow between different modes of enquiry. The chapter then introduces an inversion of Fallman’s diagram: by focussing instead on the (previously unmapped) area outside the triangle, other academic, industrial and public domains can also be included in detail. Mapping the flow between disparate fields implies some kind of exchange of knowledge, through design. The chapter finishes by suggesting an analogy to the Mediterranean trade routes of the Phoenicians as a way of defining design research not in terms of a disciplinary territory that it occupies as much as by the interdisciplinary trade that it can mediate.