PhD theses are unusual documents, often (in the UK at least) written and revised primarily to satisfy arbitrary academic examination criteria rather than to be readable. That is certainly the case here: as the author, I am proud of having done the PhD, but not particularly enamoured of the thesis in the form it was finally approved. My main aim with the whole project was to do research that was actually useful to designers, and communicating it is a large part of that. So it disappoints me to have to put out something so hard to read. I had naïvely assumed that my clients for the research were designers, when in fact the clients were the examiners.

You will see, if you try to read the thesis ‘straight through’, that it has an awkward structure, with the methodology separated from the work that was actually done, also meaning a lot of repetition; equally, very little of the actual content of the toolkit, or the multidisciplinary background to it, is discussed within the thesis.

So here’s one possible suggestion for the bits to read if you want to read some of it, in an order that actually reflects how the work was done – I think it makes most sense to treat it like a kind of open product development process. Not sure if it will save time on reading it, though!: