I tried to respond to this thread http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=42131 on the Ixda list with the following comment, but I got an error (to long I guess!). So just thought I would put it here instead. The question was about whether design could be research, and unsurprisingly the range of responses on Ixda and the Phd Design list where this question was also posted reflect the complexities raised in such a question that in fact that has many different answers depending on how you perceive the world.
Here is the comment more or less in full:
I definitely agree with Andy that design + research together are slippery terms. There is a lot of debate about the term design research, and the use of the term research in design.
At risk of wading into something ugly, I have some loose “working definitions” from my own work which I share below with the qualifier that these are attempts to simplify the various areas of emphasis and uses of the terms, so as to get some traction on what I meant when I used them in my own research. I cannot hope to reflect the complexity and I apologize in advance for omissions, misrepresentations and over simplifications.
Based on the literature there seems to be three main areas of emphasis:
1. Design Research about design
Firstly there is what I crudely call (big) Design Research (in capitals for the purposes of differentiation) – which refers to the academic discipline. When we do (big) Design Research we are generally doing research about the discipline of design. Most often that’s the domain of academia – (lots of people on this list work across both though).
2. design research for design
Secondly there is (little) design research commonly done as part of the design process, usually project specific. It appears accepted by many that all design practitioners do this kind of design research in some form, explicit or implicit. As part of doing design we naturally explore things, investigate the problem space etc. Some times it’s just looking around us, sometimes it’s a full program of user research, interviews, cultural probes, whatever, that can be clearly labeled “my design research bit” and potentially charged to the client as such. I don’t think there really is design without research, (depending on your definition of research :).
So the same term “design research” is used to refer to both.
Some people wish that the term design research was not used to talk about this aspect of design practice, as it confuses things. Rather, these activities should just be understood as the standard exploratory, investigative things that designers do to understand the design space/question/problem. Regardless, that seems to be the common term we use.
(Note – Buchanan defines 3 levels of design research, basic (which to me maps to big Design Research), clinical (which to me maps to little design research), and applied, which falls somewhere in the middle.
Archer defines research as being about practice (big DR), for the purposes of practice (little dr), or through practice – see below.
3. design practice as (part of) research practice
The third area of emphasis is the relationship and similarity between research and design as actual practices. (This is a prickly conversation place, especially for Design Researchers).
It can be, and is, argued by some people that the practice of design and research can be understood as very similar.
For example Action Research is iterative and intends to change the world as a result of the process. When the models and descriptions of design and action research are side by side, it is hard to see a difference between them. Though there are certain things that we have to do to be able to claim that we are doing Action Research, the processes have a lot of similarities.
Also, lots of Design Researchers use practice-led research as their method. This often translates to “doing design” as a method of research (which might result in an artefact) – but there are other things that have to be done for that to be research in the academic Design Research sense. As Andy mentioned, publishing is important, making it available for scrutiny by others. So certain things qualify it to be research. Exactly what, is a subject for debate, and depends which school of thought you belong to. An interesting resource for this (for me anyway) is Scrivener – who has developed a model for practice-based research for art and design.
The idea of “research-through-practice” which can be interpreted to mean design practice as a process for research – is also extended by some to suggest that design could be applied as a research process outside the field of design. (See both the Frayling and Archer references).
So that to me is the three areas.
(This conversation has continued on the Phd Design list e.g https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0905&L=PHD-DESIGN&D=1&T=0&O=D&P=90335 and https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0905&L=PHD-DESIGN&D=1&T=0&O=D&P=95057 )
References
For a far more sophisticated break down on perspectives on design research, here are some references.
Ken Friedman “Creating design knowledge: from research into practice” (This has Buchanan’s definitions in it) http://guilhermo.com/ai_biblioteca/referencialink.asp?referencia=122
Archer’s The Nature of Research which Chris already gave on the Phd List http://chrisrust.wordpress.com/1995/12/31/archer-the-nature-of-research/
Lunenfield gives a brief overview of the diverse use of the terms design and research in Brenda Laurels book “Design Research”. Lunenfield, P. 2003, ‘The Design Cluster’, in B. Laurel (ed.), Design Research: Methods and Perspectives, MIT Press.
Also see
Buchanan, R. 1992, ‘Wicked Problems in Design Thinking’, Design Issues, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 5-21.
Cross, N. 1999, ‘Design Research: A Disciplined Conversation ‘, Design Issues, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 5-10.
Moggridge, B. 2008, ‘It’s getting so complicated! Design research methods to change the vector of change in an increasingly complex world. ‘ paper presented to the Changing the change, Milan, Italy. www.changingthechange.org/invited-speakers/CTC-Bill-Moggridge.pdf
Rust, P.C., Mottram, P.J. & Till, P.J. 2007, Practice-Led Research in Art, Design and Architecture
Scrivener, S. & Chapman, P. 2004, ‘ The practical implications of applying a theory of practice based research: a case study’, Working Papers in Art and Design, vol. 3. http://sitem.herts.ac.uk/artdes_research/papers/wpades/vol3/ssabs.html
Scrivener, S.A.R. 2000, ‘Towards the Operationalisation of Design Research as Reflection in and on Action and Practice’, in D. Durling & K. Friedman (eds), Doctoral Education in Design: Foundations for the Future Staffordshire University Press, Stoke-on-Trent pp. 387-394.
Swann, C. 2002, ‘Action Research and the Practice of Design ‘, Design Issues, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 49-61.
Zimmerman, J., Forlizzi, J. & Evenson, S. 2007, ‘Research through design as a method for interaction design research in HCI’, paper presented to the Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, San Jose, California, USA.
Note, there is a lot more references on this topic, this is just the ones that I had to hand in responding to the initial list post.
