The twenty-one contributions to About: Designing draw on a rich variety of methodological positions, research backgrounds and design disciplines including architecture, product design, engineering, applied linguistics, communication studies, cognitive psychology, and discourse studies. Collectively these studies comprise a state-of-the-art overview

Acknowledgements, 1 Introduction, Part 1: Understanding Design Processes, 2 Intersections of Brainstorming Rules and Social Order, 3 Spider Webbing: A Paradigm for Engineering Design Conversations during Concept Generation, 4 Co-evolution in Design Practice, Part 2: Values in Designing, 5 Ethical Imagination and Design, 6 The Mechanisms of Value Transfer in Design Meetings 7 Affect-in-Cognition through the Language of Appraisals, Part 3: Aspects of Design Cognition, 8 Analogical Reasoning and Mental Simulation in Design: Two Strategies Linked to Uncertainty Resolution, 9 Task, Team, Process: The Development of Shared Representations in an Engineering Design Team, 10 Variants and Invariants of Design Cognition, Part 4: Design Process Models, 11 The Influence of the Design Task Description on the Course and Outcome of Idea Generation Meetings, 12 Using the FBS Ontology to Capture Semantic Design Information in Design Protocol Studies, Part 5: Language, Discourse and Gesture, 13 'Does this compromise your design?' Socially Producing a Design Concept in Talk-in-lnteraction, 14 Collaborative Negotiation in Design: A Study of Design Conversations between Architect and Building Users, 15 The Function of Gesture in an Architectural Design Meeting, 16 Aspects of Language Use in Design Conversation, Part 6: Constructing Roles, 17 Performing Architecture: Talking 'Architect' and 'Client' into Being, 18 Behind the Scenes of the Design Theatre: Actors, Roles and the Dynamics of Communication, 19 Exploring the Boundaries: Language, Roles and Structures in Cross-Disciplinary Design Teams, Part 7: Objects, References, Context, 20 From Ronchamp by Sledge: On the Pragmatics of Object References, 21 Keeping Traces of Design Meetings through Intermediary Objects, 22 Matters of Context in Design, List of Contributors, Author Index