Design research

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Design research was originally constituted as primarily concerned with ways of supporting and improving the process of design, developing from work in design methods. The concept has been expanded to include research embedded within the process of design and research-based design practice, research into the cognitive and communal processes of designing, and extending into wider aspects of socio-political, ethical and environmental contexts of design. It retains a sense of generality, recognising design as a creative act common to many fields, and aimed at understanding design processes and practices quite broadly.

Contents

Origins

Design research emerged as a recognisable field of study in the 1960s, initially marked by a conference on Design methods [1] 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 Society has always stated its aim as: ‘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 [4] 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 architectural design [5] and industrial design. [6] 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. [7] These developments were especially strong in Germany [8] [9] and Japan. [10] In the USA there were also some important developments in design theory and methodology, [11] 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: Design Studies in 1979, Design Issues 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’. [12] This view was developed further in a series of papers by Nigel Cross, collected as a book on 'Designerly Ways of Knowing'. [13] [14] Significantly, Donald Schön [15] 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 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

See also

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Action research</span> Methodology for social science 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 reflection. Kurt Lewin, then a professor at MIT, first coined the term "action research" in 1944. In his 1946 paper "Action Research and Minority Problems" he described action research as "a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action and research leading to social action" that uses "a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action and fact-finding about the result of the action".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Methodology</span> Study of research methods

In its most common sense, methodology is the study of research methods. However, the term can also refer to the methods themselves or to the philosophical discussion of associated background assumptions. A method is a structured procedure for bringing about a certain goal, like acquiring knowledge or verifying knowledge claims. This normally involves various steps, like choosing a sample, collecting data from this sample, and interpreting the data. The study of methods concerns a detailed description and analysis of these processes. It includes evaluative aspects by comparing different methods. This way, it is assessed what advantages and disadvantages they have and for what research goals they may be used. These descriptions and evaluations depend on philosophical background assumptions. Examples are how to conceptualize the studied phenomena and what constitutes evidence for or against them. When understood in the widest sense, methodology also includes the discussion of these more abstract issues.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donald Schön</span>

Donald Alan Schön 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 of organizational learning.

Second-order cybernetics, also known as the cybernetics of cybernetics, is the recursive application of cybernetics to itself and the reflexive practice of cybernetics according to such a critique. It is cybernetics where "the role of the observer is appreciated and acknowledged rather than disguised, as had become traditional in western science". Second-order cybernetics was developed between the late 1960s and mid 1970s by Heinz von Foerster and others, with key inspiration coming from Margaret Mead. Foerster referred to it as "the control of control and the communication of communication" and differentiated first order cybernetics as "the cybernetics of observed systems" and second-order cybernetics as "the cybernetics of observing systems".

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 definition it involves "paying critical attention to the practical values and theories which inform everyday actions, by examining practice reflectively and reflexively. This leads to developmental insight". A key rationale for reflective practice is that experience alone does not necessarily lead to learning; deliberate reflection on experience is essential.

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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 regarded as design methods, but since the 1950s new procedures have been developed that are more usually grouped together under the name of "design methods". What design methods have in common is that they "are attempts to make public the hitherto private thinking of designers; to externalise the design process".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Design management</span> Field of inquiry in business

Design management is a field of inquiry that uses design, strategy, project management and supply chain techniques to control a creative process, support a culture of creativity, and build a structure and organization for design. The objective of design management is to develop and maintain an efficient business environment in which an organization can achieve its strategic and mission goals through design. Design management is a comprehensive activity at all levels of business, from the discovery phase to the execution phase. "Simply put, design management is the business side of design. Design management encompasses the ongoing processes, business decisions, and strategies that enable innovation and create effectively-designed products, services, communications, environments, and brands that enhance our quality of life and provide organizational success." The discipline of design management overlaps with marketing management, operations management, and strategic management.

Design education is the teaching of theory and application in the design of products, services, and environments, and focuses on the development of both particular and general skills for designing. It is primarily orientated to preparing higher education students for professional design practice, and based around project work and studio or atelier teaching methods, while general education uses design methods to improve materials for teachers and students.

Leonard Bruce Archer CBE 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 academic discipline.

Design thinking refers to the set of cognitive, strategic and practical procedures used by designers in the process of designing, and to the body of knowledge that has been developed about how people reason when engaging with design problems.

Systems-oriented design (SOD) uses system thinking in order to capture the complexity of systems addressed in design practice. The main mission of SOD is to build the designers' own interpretation and implementation of systems thinking. SOD aims at enabling systems thinking to fully benefit from design thinking and practice and design thinking and practice to fully benefit from systems thinking. SOD addresses design for human activity systems and can be applied to any kind of design problem ranging from product design and interaction design through architecture to decision-making processes and policy design.

The Design Research Society (DRS), founded in the United Kingdom in 1966, is an international society for developing and supporting the interests of the design research community. The primary purpose of the DRS, as embodied in its first statement of rules, is to promote ‘the study of and research into the process of designing in all its many fields'. This established the intention of being an interdisciplinary learned society, taking a scholarly and domain independent view of the process of designing. Membership is open to anyone interested in design research, and members with established experience and a strong background in design research may apply to be elected as a DRS Fellow.

Nigel Cross 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 the early 1970s. He was an editor of the journal Design Studies from its inception in 1979, Editor in Chief 1984-2017 and Emeritus Editor in Chief 2018-23. Cross helped clarify and develop the concept of design thinking related to the development of design as an academic discipline. He is one of the key people of the Design Research Society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Design studies</span> Academic field

Design studies can refer to any design-oriented studies but is more formally an academic discipline or field of study that pursues, through both theoretical and practical modes of inquiry, a critical understanding of design practice and its effects in society.

David Gordon Ullman is an American author, professor, and a specialist on product design and decision making best practices. Ullman is best known for his textbook The Mechanical Design Process, used by universities globally. To date, Ullman's work has been cited more than 7,000 times with 2,000 citations. Ullman has a PhD in mechanical engineering from The Ohio State University and was professor of mechanical design at Oregon State University for 20 years. He is a Life Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and founder of its Design Theory and Methodology committee.

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Design prototyping in its broader definition comprises the actions to make, test and analyse a prototype, a model or a mockup according to one or various purposes in different stages of the design process. Other definitions consider prototyping as the methods or techniques for making a prototype, or a stage in the design process. The concept of prototyping in design disciplines' literature is also related to the concepts of experimentation, and Research through Design (RtD).

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.
  4. ↑ Simon, Herbert Alexander (1969). The sciences of the artificial. Karl Taylor Compton lectures. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. OCLC   4087.
  5. ↑ Broadbent, G. and A. Ward, (eds) (1969) Design Methods in Architecture. London, Lund Humphries
  6. ↑ Archer, L. B. (1965) Systematic Method for Designers. London, The Design Council
  7. ↑ https://www.designsociety.org
  8. ↑ Pahl, G. and W. Beitz (1984), Engineering Design. London, The Design Council
  9. ↑ Hubka, V. and W. E. Eder (1987), A Scientific Approach to Engineering Design, Design Studies 8(3):123-137
  10. ↑ Hongo, K. and N. Nakajima (1991), Relevant Features of the Decade 1981-1991 for Theories of Design in Japan, Design Studies 12(4):209-214
  11. ↑ Moore, G. T., (ed.) (1970), Emerging Methods in Environmental Design and Planning. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press
  12. ↑ Archer, Leonard Bruce (1979). "Whatever Became of Design Methodology?". Design Studies. 1 (1): 17–20. doi:10.1016/0142-694X(79)90023-1. ISSN   0142-694X.
  13. ↑ Cross, Nigel (2006). Designerly ways of knowing. London: Springer. ISBN   978-1-84628-300-0. OCLC   63186849.
  14. ↑ Cross, Nigel (2007) [2006]. Designerly Ways of Knowing. Basel [u.a.]: Birkhäuser. ISBN   978-3-7643-8484-5. OCLC   255922654.
  15. ↑ Schön, Donald Schön (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books. ISBN   978-0-465-06874-6. OCLC   8709452.
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