“Active tense” stems from a collaborative research project “designing, writing”, which aims to disseminate current knowledge and best practice on the relationships between designing and writing and their mutual interest in speculation, expression and research. This paper builds on preliminary findings to the various ways that design practices and design processes contextualize and explicate an intellectual proposition, i.e. how design contributes to advancing knowledge. While most discussions around this topic adopt one of two distinct positions-- that where authority is given to written text and that where design work has the ability ‘to be read’-- our investigation looks at various media of design articulation directly linked to design as a system of inquiry , such as comics, storyboards, diaries, diagrams and choreographic notation. Each of these identify an ability to ‘write’ through design. These media expand design research as non-linear, theoretical and yet practical tools.