Supervisor: Hélène Day Fraser
Internal Reviewer: Keith Doyle
External Reviewer: Nithikul Nimkulrat

We all experience various changes and uncertainties in our lives in both positive and negative ways. To be able to identify the conditions that limit or afford designers in their design-making process, an open and generative approach of sorting has been identified. This approach helps to validate different fields of study/interest and the lived experience that individual designers bring to their work.

Derived from the Chinese Daoism concept of Zi Ran, a transcultural identity, and an interest in Japanese culture, a series of projects apply embodied practices of observation, making and performance to explore discursive and ontological design theory.

Through three forms of Zi Ran, this thesis uses past personal experiences to explore how transcultural identity might be applied to incorporate different cultural contexts in the design field and serve as a way of sorting through information to untangle designers’ intuitive acts in design making.

This thesis also uses Communication Studies term thin-slicing as a framework to develop the idea of thin-slicing of time, as means to help sort how past and present experiences and surroundings can inform the intuitive actions of designers. Overall, the aim is to highlight possible approaches for designers who are experiencing uncertainty in design practices that seek to apply non-dualist, intuitive making explorations.