Design Research
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Design research was originally constituted as primarily research into the process of design, developing from work in
design methods Design methods are procedures, techniques, aids, or tools for designing. They offer a number of different kinds of activities that a designer might use within an overall design process. Conventional procedures of design, such as drawing, can be reg ...
, but the concept has been expanded to include research embedded within the process of design, including work concerned with the context of designing and research-based design practice. The concept retains a sense of generality, aimed at understanding and improving design processes and practices quite broadly, rather than developing domain-specific knowledge within any professional field of design.


Origins

Design research emerged as a recognisable field of study in the 1960s, initially marked by a conference on
Design methods Design methods are procedures, techniques, aids, or tools for designing. They offer a number of different kinds of activities that a designer might use within an overall design process. Conventional procedures of design, such as drawing, can be reg ...
at
Imperial College London Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a cu ...
, in 1962. It led to the founding of the
Design Research Society The Design Research Society (DRS), founded in the United Kingdom in 1966,Tovey, M. (2011). Researching Design Education. In E. Bohemia, B. Borja de Mozota & L. Collina (Eds.)Proceedings of the 1st International Symposium for Design Education Resea ...
(DRS) in 1966.
John Christopher Jones John Christopher Jones (7 October 1927 - 13 August 2022), known professionally as John Chris Jones, was a Welsh design researcher and theorist. He was born in Aberystwyth, Wales, studied engineering at the University of Cambridge, went on to wor ...
(one of the initiators of the 1962 conference) founded a postgraduate Design Research Laboratory at the
University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology The University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) was a university based in the centre of the city of Manchester in England. It specialised in technical and scientific subjects and was a major centre for research. On 1 Oct ...
, and
L. Bruce Archer Leonard Bruce Archer CBE (22 November 1922 – 16 May 2005) was a British chartered mechanical engineer and Professor of Design Research at the Royal College of Art (RCA) who championed research in design, and helped to establish design as an a ...
supported by
Misha Black Sir Misha Black (16 October 1910 – 11 October 1977) was a British-Azerbaijani architect and designer. In 1933 he founded with associates in London the organisation that became the Artists' International Association. In 1943, with Milner Gray ...
founded the postgraduate Department of Design Research at the
Royal College of Art The Royal College of Art (RCA) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom, with campuses in South Kensington, Battersea and White City. It is the only entirely postgraduate art and design university in the United Kingdom. It offe ...
, London, becoming the first Professor of Design Research. The Design Research Society has always stated its aim as: ‘to promote the study of and research into the process of
design A design is a plan or specification for the construction of an object or system or for the implementation of an activity or process or the result of that plan or specification in the form of a prototype, product, or process. The verb ''to design'' ...
ing in all its many fields’. Its purpose therefore is to act as a form of
learned society A learned society (; also learned academy, scholarly society, or academic association) is an organization that exists to promote an discipline (academia), academic discipline, profession, or a group of related disciplines such as the arts and s ...
, taking a scholarly and domain independent view of the process of designing. Some of the origins of design methods and design research lay in the emergence after the 2nd World War of
operational research Operations research ( en-GB, operational research) (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often shortened to the initialism OR, is a discipline that deals with the development and application of analytical methods to improve deci ...
methods and management decision-making techniques, the development of creativity techniques in the 1950s, and the beginnings of computer programs for problem solving in the 1960s. A statement by Bruce Archer encapsulated what was going on: ‘The most fundamental challenge to conventional ideas on design has been the growing advocacy of systematic methods of problem solving, borrowed from computer techniques and management theory, for the assessment of design problems and the development of design solutions.’
Herbert A. Simon Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist, with a Ph.D. in political science, whose work also influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary ...
established the foundations for ‘a science of design’, which would be ‘a body of intellectually tough, analytic, partly formalizable, partly empirical, teachable doctrine about the design process.’


Early work

Early work was mainly within the domains of
architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...
and
industrial design Industrial design is a process of design applied to physical Product (business), products that are to be manufactured by mass production. It is the creative act of determining and defining a product's form and features, which takes place in advan ...
, but research in engineering design developed strongly in the 1980s; for example, through ICED—the series of International Conferences on Engineering Design, now run by
The Design Society The Design Society is an international non-governmental, non-profit organisation with a focus on engineering design. The Design Society is a charitable body, registered in Scotland under the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, number SC 0316 ...
. These developments were especially strong in Germany and Japan. In the USA there were also some important developments in design theory and methodology, including the publications of the Design Methods Group and the series of conferences of the
Environmental Design Research Association The Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) is an international, interdisciplinary organization founded in 1968 by design professionals, social scientists, students, educators, and facility managers. The purpose of EDRA is the advancement ...
. The
National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...
initiative on design theory and methods led to substantial growth in engineering design research in the late-1980s. A particularly significant development was the emergence of the first journals of design research. DRS initiate
''Design Studies''
in 1979, ''
Design Issues ''Design Issues'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering design history, theory, and criticism. The journal typically includes theoretical and critical articles, book reviews, and illustrations. ''Design Issues'' was established in 1984 and i ...
'' appeared in 1984, and ''Research in Engineering Design'' in 1989.


Development

The development of design research has led to the establishment of design as a coherent discipline of study in its own right, based on the view that design has its own things to know and its own ways of knowing them. Bruce Archer again encapsulated the view in stating his new belief that ‘there exists a designerly way of thinking and communicating that is both different from scientific and scholarly ways of thinking and communicating, and as powerful as scientific and scholarly methods of enquiry when applied to its own kinds of problems’. This view was developed further in a series of papers by
Nigel Cross Nigel Cross (born 1942) is a British academic, a design researcher and educator, Emeritus Professor of Design Studies at The Open University, United Kingdom, where he was responsible for developing the first distance-learning courses in design in t ...
, collected as a book on 'Designerly Ways of Knowing'. Significantly,
Donald Schön Donald Alan Schön (September 19, 1930 – September 13, 1997) was an American philosopher and professor in urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He developed the concept of reflective practice and contributed to the theory ...
promoted the new view within his book The Reflective Practitioner, in which he challenged the technical rationality of Simon and sought to establish ‘an epistemology of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes which esign and otherpractitioners bring to situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflict’. Design research ‘came of age’ in the 1980s, and has continued to expand. This was helped by the development of a research base, including doctoral programmes, within many of the design schools located within new institutions that were previously art colleges, and the emergence of new areas such as interaction design. More new journals have appeared, such as ''The Design Journal'', the'' Journal of Design Research'', ''CoDesign'' and more recently ''Design Science''. There has also been a major growth in conferences, with not only a continuing series by DRS, but also series such as Design Thinking, Doctoral Education in Design, Design Computing and Cognition, Design and Emotion, the European Academy, the Asian Design Conferences, etc. Design research now operates on an international scale, acknowledged in the cooperation of DRS with the Asian design research societies in the founding in 2005 of the International Association of Societies of Design Research.


Further reading

* Bayazit, N (2004). "Investigating design: a review of forty years of design research". ''Design Issues'', 20(1), 16–29. * Blessing, L. T. M. & Chakrabarti, A. (2009). ''DRM, a Design Research Methodology''. London: Springer. * Baxter, K., & Courage, C. (2005). ''Understanding Your Users: A Practical Guide to User Requirements Methods, Tools, and Techniques''. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. * Cross, N. (ed.) (1984). ''Developments in Design Methodology''. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons. * Curedale, R. (2013). ''Design Research Methods: 150 Ways to Inform Design''. Topanga, CA: Design Community College Inc. * Faste, T., & Faste, H. (2012)
"Demystifying 'design research': design is not research, research is design"
In ''IDSA Education Symposium'' (Vol. 2012, p. 15). * Höger, H. (ed.) (2008). ''Design Research: Strategy Setting to Face the Future''. Milan: Abitare Segesta. * Koskinen, I., Zimmerman, J., Binder, T., Redstrom, J., & Wensveen, S. (2011). ''Design Research Through Practice: From the Lab, Field, and Showroom''. Waltham, MA: Morgan Kaufmann. * Krippendorff, K. (2006). ''
The Semantic Turn The semantic turn refers to a paradigm shift in the design of artifacts – industrial, graphic, informational, architectural, and social – from an emphasis on how artifacts ought to function to what they mean to those affected by them – se ...
: A New Foundation for Design''. Boca Raton, FA: CRC Press. * Kumar, V. (2012). ''101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization''. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. * Laurel, B. (2003). ''Design Research: Methods and Perspectives''. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. * Sanders, E. B. N., & Stappers, P. J. (2014). "Probes, toolkits and prototypes: three approaches to making in codesigning". ''CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts'', 10(1), 5–14.


See also

*
Action research Action research is a philosophy and methodology of research generally applied in the social sciences. It seeks transformative change through the simultaneous process of taking action and doing research, which are linked together by critical refle ...
*
Contextual inquiry Contextual inquiry (CI) is a user-centered design (UCD) research method, part of the contextual design methodology. A contextual inquiry interview is usually structured as an approximately two-hour, one-on-one interaction in which the researcher w ...
*
Design Research Society The Design Research Society (DRS), founded in the United Kingdom in 1966,Tovey, M. (2011). Researching Design Education. In E. Bohemia, B. Borja de Mozota & L. Collina (Eds.)Proceedings of the 1st International Symposium for Design Education Resea ...
*
Design theory Design theory is a subfield of design research concerned with various theoretical approaches towards understanding and delineating design principles, design knowledge, and design practice. History Design theory has been approached and interp ...
*
Reflective practice Reflective practice is the ability to reflect on one's actions so as to take a critical stance or attitude towards one's own practice and that of one's peers, engaging in a process of continuous adaptation and learning. According to one defini ...
*
User-centered design User-centered design (UCD) or user-driven development (UDD) is a framework of process (not restricted to interfaces or technologies) in which usability goals, user characteristics, environment, tasks and workflow of a product, service or proce ...


References

{{Design Design Research by field