Join us for Industry Day at PDC 2010 : supporting collaborations between research and practice in the area of participatory design.

As part of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference
Sydney, Australia
29 November – 3rd December 2010
University of Technology, Sydney
www.pdc2010.org @pdcSydney #pdcsyd

Participation by people in the design of the systems they use is integral to the way we do business, support civic engagement, collaborate and connect with clients, constituents and community. The Participatory Design Conference is an important venue for international discussion of the collaborative, social and political dimensions of technology innovation and use.

Join us for the first ever Industry Day at Participatory Design 2010 to support collaboration between research and practice in the participatory design of products, services and systems.

Participate:
Industry Day, held on the 2nd of December, will include a keynote address, case studies of the application of participatory design approaches within industry, a cross disciplinary panel, a “pitch fest” where ideas for innovative products and services will be presented to a panel of judges, and opportunities for informal discussion.

We are excited to invite submissions from industry practitioners across commercial, government and not-for-profit sectors to present as part of the special industry track. We also encourage practitioners who are working with participatory methods or interested in introducing such approaches to attend, learn, share and collaborate around the topic of participation and methods for co-designing where ‘users’ become active participants. Participants will have the opportunity to hear practitioners from various fields report on new research, methods and approaches.

We are now seeking submission for:

Case study presentations
- that report on the use of participatory design (PD) methods, tools, and/or practices within commercial, non-profit and governmental organisations.

The PDC Pitch Fest
- where representatives from not-for-profit and academic sectors “pitch” design ideas to ‘industry’ in a short, lively format.

Submissions Due: August 13 2010
Notifications Due: Mid September

Visit www.pdc2010.org/industry for more info and see
www.pdc2010.org/industry-day/industry-day-submissions/ for submission format and process.

Enquiries to industry (at) pdc2010.org

What is Participatory Design?
Participatory Design is a diverse collection of principles and practices aimed at making technologies, tools, environments, businesses, services and social institutions more responsive to human needs. A central tenet of Participatory Design is the direct involvement of people in the co-design of things and technologies they use.

Participatory Design has its roots in the Scandinavian labour movement of the 70’s and over the years has broadened its impact to areas such as health care, international development, civic engagement, local government, education, communications, agile software development, new media, architecture, and the arts. Methods that are becoming common in industry today such as co-operative prototyping, future workshops and scenarios had their origins in early Participatory Design research.

The Participatory Design conference
PDC is an international conference for research on participatory design of systems, services and products. The conference has been held every two years since 1990 and it attracts over 300 researchers and practitioners from around the world. This year PDC is in the Southern Hemisphere for the first time and will be hosted by the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

I’ve pasted the slidecast to my own presentation below, but I hope also to get a chance to do a summary of take-aways from the conference shortly.

The discipline of design is in a constant state of change. As noted in the previous post one of the most significant trends currently impacting on design practice is the opening up of the design process. Design is moving out from the studio and into the wild, taking place where people live [1].  Users are being re-cast as co-designers, co-creators and co-developers. Trends such as ‘open design’, ‘crowdsourcing’, designing for design in use, post-release iterations and ‘emergent design’ provide new ways for people to participate in the design process,  and challenge some of our traditional models of design.

The paper Dissolving boundaries: social technologies and participation in design [Preprint_Pdf] being presented at OZCHI this November is an attempt to provide a ‘lay of the land’.  We look at key trends and opportunities for supporting participation in design from across industry and research and point to some of questions about roles and responsibilities they raise for design practitioners. The paper, and the proposed discussion at Interaction10 (submission pasted below for prosperity), are an attempt to promote and contribute to ongoing discussion on how these shifts are changing design practice.

The sketches (scribbles) in this post were fundamental for thinking through, conceptualising and communicating the various ways design is being reshaped, and for starting to think about models of participation. I recently also came across these (much more refined!) sketches that also visualise emerging co-creation and codesign models.

Discussion Proposal submitted to IXD10.

Design in the wild: the practitioners new playground

Design is moving into the wild, propelled in part by the participatory nature of social technologies. Trends such as ‘open design’ which supports mass participation in the design process, ‘crowdsourcing’ of design ideas and skills from the public, ‘design after design’ or ‘design in use’ where design is iterated post-release and ‘emergent design’ where seed prototypes are shaped through use, challenge some of our traditional models of design.

In this shifting design landscape boundaries between design and use, and designer and user begin to blur. Not for the first time, but for the first time on this scale, design is moving out of the studio and taking place in more public forums. These shifts in design practice and process are generating questions about roles, responsibilities and appropriate frameworks for participation and decision-making.

In this session we’ll sketch out some of the challenges and opportunities currently facing us as practitioners. The discussion will be framed around the following topics:

- The suitability of existing methods to cater to this emerging design space
- The directions of emerging methods
- Potential frameworks for supporting participation and decision-making
- The impact these changes are having to our roles, responsibilities and skill-sets as design practitioners.

This session will be an opportunity for practitioners to share their ideas, concerns and thoughts, as well as explore what shifts are already happening, or may be necessary, to support these emerging forms of participation and collaboration in design.

References

1. Lee, Y., ‘Design participation tactics: the challenges and new roles for designers in the co-design process’, CoDesign, vol. 4, no. 1, (2008) pp. 31 – 50.

I’m giving a talk tomorrow as part of the UTS Design Masters -  Future Design Strategies lecture series. While it covers course material (this time Personas and Scenarios) it’s also open to the public. Feel free to come along.

Nudies (personas freestyle)

Title: Design and Use: Tools and Trends in Design

When:  Thursday, 10th September
Time:  6pm – 7pm
Venue: DAB Building, Rm 716  (That’s on the 7th Floor)

Design and use are inherently entwined. Questions about how people will be able to use and appropriate our designs sit at the centre of a human focused design process. This lecture will introduce Personas and Scenarios, two design methods that help connect us to the context of use during the design phase, and to the people who will use, wear, or live in our designs. Such tools help us to think through and communicate about design with users, clients and team members and this lecture will show examples of Personas and Scenarios being adapted to various contexts. Design tools that support collaborative exploration and communication between stakeholders are becoming more and more important as the nature  of design changes and traditional boundaries between design and use, and designer and user shift. This lecture will also touch on some of these emerging design spaces into which our existing tools are being adapted and extended.

Recently I sat down with the marvelous chris gaul for a co-sketching session, the aim was to work through visually some of the key concepts in my research into participatory methods and social technologies. I’d worked closely with cg before and knew he had a great talent for taking ideas, concepts and my random scribbles and translating in them into a visual language. In doing so he would identify key aspects that had been missing from the existing representations, but were central to the telling of the story.

In under two hours and in less than 2 beers, we had developed 3 draft concept sketches that conveyed the main points of my thesis well beyond my initial sketches. The catalyst to the breakthrough was Chris immediately introducing the concept of time, exactly the type of shift I hoped to make through a collaborative sketching session.

All of these sketches are start points, their role was to make available, capture and reveal key aspects of the concepts being discussed. I’ll be drawing on these to develop the concepts as well as guide how they are articulated in my thesis. (Thanks Chris!). I share here some our  cafe sketches and very briefly outline the points they were capturing.

Designing a design research method

This image denotes the steps we go through in designing a design research study. My empirical research focus has been on the design and evaluation of digital self-reporting studies, and this sketch provided a background and context to the indepth investigation in my thesis on the  “devise a methodology” step (longer post to come). Importantly it put my work in a bigger context/process and showed how I would need to break out certain bits and support some aspects with more detail.

Seeding social technologies early in design

Figuratively, to seed something is to cause something to begin to develop or grow.  This image captured the important aspect of time in the seeding process, the connection between the tools we use early in the design process,  where they are located (real world/abstract design space) and their connection to the ‘final design’.  Early design methods like interviews and observation are generic.  Social technologies as early design tools (e.g through digital self-reporting) create a different and potentially more continuous connection between the activities of design research, design and use. Our design research methods (social technologies) have a contextual relationship the subject of your design (social technologies). We were trying to work out how to convey that greater connection between the initial seed and later use, as well as indicate that the ‘in context’ nature of self-reporting as a method importantly locates the “design research” in the real world.

Oscillating transitions of “ownership”

The metaphor of a ‘seed’ or seeding gives us a way to describe and strategise about engaging and moving between the abstract space of design and the concrete places where people live (Lee 2008). Seeding in the context of designing social technologies can describe a strategy for transitioning the project state from “abstract” to “concrete”; to transferring ownership from the designer to user community; to ingratiating the project with potential users; and to creating conditions and hooks for participation. This sketch was just trying to capture the way in which the transition of “ownership” doesn’t occur at one point in time, but rather oscillates back and forth at different times; though the ultimate goal in social and community projects is usually a complete handover eventually. You can see we had a few goes at this to get the emphasis right, and in one of them I’m going over chris’s big arrow with lots more little ones to emphasis that “handover” is never clean and continuous, rather there can be lots of stops and starts.

1.    Lee, Y.: Design participation tactics: the challenges and new roles for designers in the co-design process. CoDesign 4 (2008) 31 – 50

Methods can be a bit like a black box. Embedded within them are particular assumptions about design and participation that can be unwittingly projected into our design process and outcomes. If we hope to privilege sociability, flexibility and openness in our designs, these values can be better supported through some tools and techniques more than others. In my thesis I have drawn attention to particular qualities and concepts relevant to design in the context of social technologies. I’m in the process of making these available to others in different ways such as maps, vocabularies and considerations.

mapping goals, experiences, enablers and qualities in early design research

Design tools like concept maps and sketches  allow us to analyse and visualise things in different ways. In this context they can make visible important, though often implicit, aspects of methods. The (draft) map above describes the use of social technologies as a self-reporting/live prototyping tool in early design research. It takes into account goals of the design method, experiences that are of value in this context and qualities of the tools and technique that become enablers for these experiences. By mapping a relationship between design goals, qualities and enablers (methods) the intention is to make more visible connections between the tools, techniques and the values they embody.

The first two goals, immersion and intervention, take into account the perspective and experiences of the designer and participant. The third goal, seeding, represents the relationship between them, and between design and use. The qualities of digital self-reporting e.g over-time, in situ, visually rich, personal, mobile and so on enable the kinds of experiences (e.g reflection, inspiration) that support these desired goals.

The map is not meant to be prescriptive or exhaustive. Rather it is meant as a tool for encouraging discussion, reflection and decision-making. The map and its explanation are still very much works in progress.

Immersion, intervention and seeding are three key concepts that have emerged out of my work on participatory and designerly design methods that name things important (but at times implicit) to our practice^.

^ Designerly methods embody the creative, visual and exploratory nature of design, while participatory methods embody a commitment to active participation by users in design.

References: (A full literature review a reference list can be provided, in the mean time here are some selected key texts that have been instrumental in my work).
1.    Robertson, T.: Ethical Issues in Interaction Design. Ethics and Information Technology 8 (2006)
2.    Visser, F.S., Stappers, P.J., Lugt, R.V.D., Sanders, E.B.-N.: Contextmapping: experiences from practice. CoDesign 1 (2005) 119-140
3.    Visser, F.S., Lugt, R.v.d., Stappers, P.J.: Sharing User Experiences in the Product Innovation Process: Participatory Design Needs Participatory Communication. Creativity and Innovation Management 16 (2007) 35-45
4.    Botero, A., Kommonen, K.-H., Oilinki, I., Koskijoki, M.: Codesigning Visions, Uses, and Applications. TechnE Design Wisdom” 5th European Academy of Design Conference, Barcelona (2003)
5.    Botero, A., Saad-Sulonen, J.: Co-designing for new city-citizen interaction possibilities: weaving prototypes and interventions in the design and development of Urban Mediator. PDC’09. ACM, Bloomington, USA (2008)
6.    Hulkko., S., Mattelmäki, T., Virtanen, K., Keinonen, T.: Mobile Probes. NORDICHI 04, Tampere, Finland (2004)
7.    Gaver, B., Boucher, A., Pennington, S., Walker, B.: Subjective Design for Everyday Life. CHI 2003 (2003)
8.    Merkel, C.B., Xiao, L., Farooq, U., Ganoe, C.H., Lee, R., Carroll, J.M., Rosson, M.B.: Participatory Design in Community Computing Contexts: Tales from the Field PDC’04. ACM, Toronto, Canada (2004)
9.    Kensing, F., Blomberg, J.: Participatory Design: Issues and Concerns. Computer Supported Cooperative Work 7 (1998) 167-185
10.    Näkki, P., Antikainen, M., Virtanen, T.: Participatory Design in an Open Web Laboratory Owela CHI08. ACM, Florence, Italy (2008)
11.    Stolterman, E.: The Nature of Design Practice and Implications for Interaction Design Research. International Journal of Design 2 (2008)
12.    Dourish, P.: Where the Action Is. MIT Press (2001)

Emerging a User Experience Strategy: people, pencils and post-its is the title of the presentation @michellegilmore and I will be giving at UX Australia at the end of August. The conference is happening for the first time this year and there is an excellent range of speakers. The event will be a much appreciated addition to Australia’s calendar of UX and HCI events. A brief outline of our presentation is provided below based on our submission.

Michelle and I will be talking about the process of emerging a User Experience Strategy (or getting from fluffy to something). The approach we’ll be sharing emphasises collaborative and light-weight design methods (people, pencils and post-its). Drawing on a recent case study we’ll highlight experiences and techniques evolved over a number of projects and influenced by IxD and agile development methods.

The motivation for the presentation is a desire to capture, describe and make available for discussion aspects of the re-framing and translating that takes place as part of the process of developing a project-level User Experience Strategy.  Early project information and documentation often takes an organisational or technical perspective in describing the future system. A UX strategy on the other hand takes as its start point the perspective of those who will use the system. For the purposes of this presentation we define the development of a UX strategy as the process through which project information (e.g scope, project objectives, business requirements, user research, content analysis, comparative analysis, brand information) are critically translated and interpreted into a description of the future system from the perspective of the user experience.

The outcome is an agreement in principle to the objectives, the opportunities, the constraints, the scope (scale) and key principles of the design. It privileges the intended user experience whilst appropriately taking into account the various interests of the project such as business, brand, content and technology.

In the approach we’ll be sharing, the process starts by taking existing project information and translating it into relevant user stories. User stories are valuable for a number of reasons. They are versatile and accessible to all stakeholders. They become a common form of language across the design and client team and they can be prioritised as a way of making design decisions in relation to the user experience.

In our process groups of user stories are used to expose themes and activities that provide an initial (loose) structure. Prioritised user stories are then formed into key scenarios and  mapped out to expose the core user pathways, which are then iteratively refined. The structure of the system is allowed to emerge through this process of mapping the user experience and priorities for content and functionality fall out along the way. This can be challenging for members of the design team otherwise used to defining such aspects upfront (or top-down). Similarly various methods are needed to promote collaboration, trust and visibility of project process to the client throughout the process.

In our presentation we’ll be highlighting:

• How user stories are generated and then themed
• The process of prioritising user stories with clients to identify key complex scenarios
• How we collaboratively map the priority scenarios out and expose the core user pathways
• How these processes inform information architecture and user interface designs and
• Our choice of rapid and collaborative tools (e.g post – its, and pencils)
• Communicating the process to the client

The work upon which this presentation draws was completed on behalf of Digital Eskimo, a social design agency in Sydney whose Considered Design methodology makes embracing these methods and approaches possible. Our wonderful client was UNSW and we worked with other great team members from Zumio and Redrollers. Our presentation wouldn’t be possible without their generous committment to sharing the design experience and process, a big thank you to them and to the generous participants that gave their time to this project  (still in production).

Scott suggested we might think of this of this as -  ‘very’ direct manipulation’. I have to say I like the idea of VDM as an objective for future interfaces and modes of interaction.

For me this kind of physical cut and paste process is necessary to sort, structure and think through a large amount of information – like a thesis chapter. It works pretty much in the same manner and for the same reasons that other physical sorting/analysis and spatial thinking techniques do (i.e post it notes and index cards). I’ve not seen the theory behind why covered in any detail in literature on analysis methods that I can recall, so without further research and a more in-depth literature search I can only speculate on why it is important based on my own experience and brief conversations with colleaguesˆ.

[edit]- after publishing this I read Jon Kolko’s article Information Architecture and Design Strategy presented at the 2007 Industrial Designers Society of America Conference which actually covers this well, I have inserted a relevant quote from it below about this important process of “externalising data”:

Thus, one of the most basic principles of making meaning out of data is to externalize the entire meaning-creation process. By taking the gathered data out of the digital realm (the computer) and into the physical (the wall) – and by including it all on one cohesive visual structure – the designer is freed of the artificial limitations of technology. Content can now be freely moved and manipulated, and the entire set of data can be seen at one time. Implicit and hidden meanings are uncovered simply by relating otherwise discrete chunks of data to one-another.

[As Jon suggests in his paper] the combination of physical manipulation and moving ideas around in space is important, as is the ability to to see everything at once. There is a relationship between the objects we are working with and the space we are working within and our physical body. These relationships aren’t available when working through interfaces of keyboard and mouse. The physicality and tangibility of the representations, the fact that we can pick them up and manipulate them with our hands, allows us to make sense of things (and share things with others) in ways that aren’t possible on current computer monitors or tools like spreadsheets.

It is possible that gestural interfaces and tangible interfaces like shiftables will be places and tools where digital data and this kind of ‘VDM’ cross over. I look forward to being able to provide a better articulation of these issues and the related potentials in the future – tbc…

ˆOne of these conversations was with Dr Toni Robertson on how data analysis can be a visceral and felt experience, this makes it hard to explain and hard to teach, but something the philosophy of phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty could assist us in articulating.

‘Seeding’ refers to activities which enable or encourage the transfer of ownership from the designer to the user, and points to the moments in which which abstract design space engages with or shifts into concrete use space (for more info on these terms see references in this post)

Social technologies for prototyping

The term ’seeding’ can be used to refer to a range of activities but the approach that I am most interested in currently makes use of existing social technologies such as blogs and mobile phones as prototyping tools.  Social technologies are rapidly being adapted into the repertoire of design researchers, Mobile Diaries (Digital Eskimo), Digital Etho (Cheskin, News Digital Media) and Digital Diaries (Frog) are all examples of  designers exploiting the mobile, digital and connected nature of these tools for early design research. However, it’s possible to move beyond the boundaries implied by “research”, and get straight into design. An example of this is the patchwork prototyping being done by Jones et al. [1]. In these projects existing technologies are configured as prototypes and deployed into the community. The tools themselves become the material through which early design exploration and research occurs, and potential uses emerge. A snip from Jones et al. in Handbook of Research on Open Source Software on Patchwork Prototyping:

the combining of open source software applications to rapidly create a rudimentary but fully functional prototype that can be used and hence evaluated in real life situations. The use of a working prototype enables the capture of more realistic and informed requirements than traditional methods that rely on users trying to imagine how they might use the envisaged system in their work, and even more problematic, how that system in use may change how they work. [1]

While this particular quote perhaps doesn’t capture the openness, flexibility and participatory nature of the process, the potential is there. Other researchers also using these kinds of online tools for early, participatory co-design are Owela (at VTT in Finland see also [2-5]) and Arki (Media Lab in Finland see also [6, 7]).

Design ‘in the wild’

There is a growing sense that some of our traditional UCD methods – that rely in large part testing during the “design phase” – prior to release – fall short in the context of social technologies that require participation and contribution by people to take their form e.g .[8].  Many development companies have been adopting a beta approach (or even perpetual beta) in part in response to this issue where the emphasis is ‘getting stuff out there’ in order to gain feedback (discussed in [9-11]). As part of this (and other changes to traditional design practices) design practitioners, UX in particular, are  finding ways to integrate with agile development processes. While I think there are a heap of positives about this, I see prototyping “in the wild” [12] as another exciting, design driven approach where seeding becomes a central design activity.

This was a very quick and oversimplified overview of some pretty complex shifts in practice, and I hope to provide a fuller account of these emerging  approaches and their relationship to our concepts of design and use in a different forum, for further references that tackle the issue of co-design and PD ‘in the wild’ see also [13-18]:[19, 20]

Reading/References

1.    Jones, M.C., Floyd, I.R., Twidale, M.B.: Patchwork Prototyping with Open Source Software. In: St.Amant, K., Still, B. (eds.): Handbook of Research on Open Source Software: Technological, Economic, and Social Perspectives. Information Science Reference, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA (2007) 126-140
2.    Näkki, P., Antikainen, M., Virtanen, T.: Participatory Design in an Open Web Laboratory Owela CHI08. ACM, Florence, Italy (2008)
3.    Näkki, P.: Owela: Open Web Laboratory for Innovation and Design. ERCIM News Vol. 2009 (2008)
4.    Owela. Vol. 2009
5.    Näkki, P., Antikainen, M.: Online Tools for Co-design: User Involvement through the Innovation Process. In: Karahasanović, A., Følstad, A. (eds.): NordiCHI 2008 workshops: Requirements Elicitation & HCI and Social Media Development Lund, Sweden (2008)
6.    Botero, A., Kommonen, K.-H., Oilinki, I., Koskijoki, M.: Codesigning Visions, Uses, and Applications. TechnE Design Wisdom” 5th European Academy of Design Conference, Barcelona (2003)
7.    Botero, A., Saad-Sulonen, J.: Co-designing for new city-citizen interaction possibilities: weaving prototypes and interventions in the design and development of Urban Mediator. PDC’09. ACM, Bloomington, USA (2008)
8.    Isbister, K., Höök, K.: On being supple: in search of rigor without rigidity in meeting new design and evaluation challenges for HCI practitioners. Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, Boston, MA, USA (2009)
9.    Merholz, P.: Embrace the chaos – designers and systems with emergent behavior. Vol. 2008 (2006) <http://www.peterme.com/archives/000793.html
http://www.peterme.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/499>
10.    Porter, J.: The Freedom of Fast Iterations: How Netflix Designs a Winning Web Site. Vol. 2008 (2006) <http://www.uie.com/articles/fast_iterations/>.
11.    Holzapfel, N.: An unsuitable match: social media and User-Centred design. Johnny Holland (2008) http://johnnyholland.org/magazine/2008/11/an-unsuitable-match-social-media-and-user-centred-design/
12.    Hutchins, E.: Cognition in the Wild. MIT (1995)
13.    Battarbee, K., Cabrera, A.B., Mattelmäki, T., Rizzo, F.: Designed for Co-designers: Workshop Call for Participation. PDC 2008 (2008)
14.    Brereton, M., Buur, J.: New challenges for design participation in the era of ubiquitous computing. CoDesign 4 (2008) 101 – 113
15.    Rehead, F., Brereton, M.: Getting to the Nub of Neighbourhood Interaction. PDC’08. ACM, Bloomington, USA (2008)
16.    Cabrera, A.B.: Emerging Digital Practices of Communities In: käytännot, A.A.d. (ed.):  (2006)
17.    Karasti, H., Syrjänen, A.-L.: Artful Infrastructuring in Two Cases of Community PD Participatory Design Conference. ACM, Toronto, Canada (2004)
18.    Dittrich, Y., EriksénII, S., HanssonI, C.: PD in the Wild; Evolving Practices of Design in Use Participatory Design. CPSR, Malmö, Sweden, (2002)
19.    Merkel, C.B., Xiao, L., Farooq, U., Ganoe, C.H., Lee, R., Carroll, J.M., Rosson, M.B.: Participatory Design in Community Computing Contexts: Tales from the Field
. Participatory Design Conference. ACM, Toronto, Canada (2004)
20.    Merkel, C., Farooq, U., Xiao, L., Ganoe, C., Rosson, M.B., Carroll, J.M.: Managing technology use and learning in nonprofit community organizations: methodological challenges and opportunities. Proceedings of the 2007 symposium on Computer human interaction for the management of information technology. ACM, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2007)

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.