7r2ai2020 Design research - Wikipedia
‘WIKIPEDIA
Design research
Design research was originally constituted as primarily research into the process of design,
developing from work in design methods, 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.
Contents
Origins
Early work
Development
Further reading
See also
References
Origins
Design research emerged as a recognisable field of study in the 1960s, initially marked by a
conference on Design methods!"! at Imperial College London, in 1962. It led to the founding of the
Design Research Society (DRS) in 1966. John Christopher Jones (one of the initiators of the 1962
conference) founded a postgraduate Design Research Laboratory at the University of Manchester
Institute of Science and Technology, and L. Bruce Archer supported by Misha Black founded the
postgraduate Department of Design Research at the Royal College of Art, London, becoming the first
Professor of Design Research.!2)
‘The Design Research Soci s: ‘to promote the study of and research into
the process of designing in all its many fields’ Its purpose therefore is to act as a form of learned
society, 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 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!3] 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! 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 proce:
Early work
hitpsffen.wikipedia.orgiwikiDesign_research 197r2ai2020 Design research - Wikipadia
Early work was mainly within the domains of architecture and industrial design, 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. These
developments were especially strong in Germany and Japan. In the USA there were
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
National Science Foundation 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 initiated Design Studies (http://www.elsevie
r.com/locate/destud) in 1979, Design Issues appeared in 1984, and Research in Engineering Design
in 1989.
0 some
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’.!5! This view was developed further in a series of papers
by Nigel Cross, collected as a book on ‘Designerly Ways of Knowing’ !6ll71 significantly, Donald
Schén'*! 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 [design and other] practitioners 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 als 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. doi:10.1162/074793604772933739 (https://doi.org/10.1162%2F074793604
772933739)
= 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" (http:/;www.idsa.org/sites/defaullfiles/Faste.paf). In IDSA Education Symposium (Vol.
2012, p. 15).
hitpsffen.wikipedia.orgiwikiDesign_research 29earae20 Design research - Wikipedia
= Héger, 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. (2008). The Semantic Turn: 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. doi:10.1080/15710882.2014.888183 (https://doi.org/10.1080%2F 157 10882,2014.88
8183)
See also
= Action research
Contextual inquiry
Design Research Society
Design theory
Reflective practice
User-centered design
References
1, Jones, J C and D G Thornley (eds) (1963) Conference on Design Methods, Oxford, UK:
Pergamon Press
2, DRS2016 Online Exhibition http:/www.drs2016.org/exhibition/##ddr1
3. Archer, Leonard Bruce (1965). Systematic Method for Designers. London: Council of Industrial
Design. OCLC 2108433 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/2108433).
4. Simon, Herbert Alexander (1969). The sciences of the artificial. Kar| Taylor Compton lectures.
Cambridge: M.l.T. Press. OCLC 4087 (https:/www.worldeat.org/oclc/4087).
5. Archer, Leonard Bruce (1979). "Whatever Became of Design Methodology?". Design Studies. 1
(1): 17-20. ISSN 0142-694X (https://www.worldcat.orgissn/0142-694X).
6. Cross, Nigel (2006). Designerly ways of knowing. London: Springer. ISBN 978-1-84628-300-0
OCLC 63186849 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/63186849).
7. Cross, Nigel (2007) [2006]. Designerly Ways of Knowing. Basel (u.a.]: Birkhauser. ISBN 978-3-
7643-8484-5. OCLC 255922654 (https://www.worldcat. org/ocic/255922654).
8, Schén, Donald Schén (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New
York: Basie Books. ISBN 978-0-465-06874-6. OCLC 8709452 (https:/Awww.worldcat org/oclo/870
9452
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