Drawing on the everyday experience of collaborative design, and using ordinary language, I examine the nature of design practices and rules, how they come about, and how we use them. I offer some arguments to suggest that our conventional ways of thinking about rules are wrong. I conclude by arguing that the practice of designing and doing…

This paper examines the prominence of written English on shop signs in Japan. Based on data from a larger empirical study into multilingual signs in Tokyo, the most common ways of using English and the roman alphabet on Japanese shops signs are identified. It is argued that the ambivalent nature of English loan words plays a key role in the ever…