Abstract
In this chapter, we call into question the nature of academic design research. A reconstruction of the debate over the role of academic research in the field of design shows that its origins created the bias of attempting to model design research on the historically contingent form of scientific research rather than on its deeper reason. Indeed, design academics often imitate what scientific disciplines do when they do research (i.e. applying codified methods), yet the discussion about why such disciplines behave that way is still limited. According to science studies the answer to this why lies in scientists’ habit of making the results of their research public, thus building what we refer to as the Great Archive of Science (GAS). By analyzing the dynamics of the GAS, we show that the rules, methods, and models typical of the research environment have as their main purpose to make the reliability of researchers’ knowledge claims as durable as possible. Regarding design research in general, and research through design more specifically, we thus argue that what turns designers’ work into academic research is not just the application of scientific methods but primarily the participation in the grand game of the GAS, whose dynamics enables a circumscribed corpus of knowledge to be held reliable by a community.
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Notes
- 1.
Jonas (2012, 29) cites this reconstruction by John Langrish: “Late on the scene were the art colleges, absorbed into ‘Polys’ and then becoming universities and finding themselves with the research assessment exercise. Within present people’s lifetimes, this sector had to work out what is an honors degree, then what is a Master’s, and then cope with PhDs against the background of an educational activity which encouraged creativity and discouraged scholarship. So you still find people arguing about what is research and getting very confused about research and practice.”
- 2.
To be precise, it is the ‘design milieu’ (i.e. the designer, the design studio, etc.) who is the agent, while design as planning activity is the tool of research through design.
- 3.
On the basis of a series of interviews with design professionals, Roedl and Stolterman (2013, 1954) found that “the most commonly mentioned sources of learning were coworkers, Twitter feeds, blogs, and practitioner-focused online magazines.”
- 4.
For an overview of examples of what is meant by “research through design”, see the proceedings of the RTD conference series: researchthroughdesign.org/2015proceedings/
- 5.
In the last decade, the epistemological implications of this practice-oriented research approach has attracted a great deal of attention within a broad scholar community, encompassing both the design and the HCI field. A number of new definitions have thus emerged, aimed at stressing different features of research through design. It is worth mentioning: exemplary design research by Binder and Redström, (2006); experimental design research, by Brandt and Binder (2007); concept-driven interaction design research by Stolterman and Wiberg (2010); constructive design research by Koskinen et al. (2011). The latter is often employed as a synonymous of research through design. With the term “constructive”, Koskinen et al. intend to stress that this kind of research is aimed more at imagining new worlds and building them than at exploring the existent one.
- 6.
States of things encompass aspects of nature as well as culture: everything that can be enquired by natural, life or human sciences. This includes, for instance, pieces of literature that are considered not for their reliability, as it happens in secondary literature, but for other features like their textual structure (e.g. in semiotics) or aesthetic qualities (e.g. in the history of literature).
- 7.
Specifically, eight complete examples are considered (where by complete we mean that the research through design is described in an article or paper whose authors conducted the research): Lambourne et al. (1997), Petersen et al. (2004), Keller (2007), Frens (2007), Ross and Wensveen (2010), Andersen et al. (2011), Hobye and Löwgren (2011), Visser et al. (2011). Moreover we consider 21 examples mentioned in texts devoted more generally to the issue of research through design (one from Keyson and Bruns 2009; six from Bang et al. 2012; three from Binder and Redström 2006; three from Zimmerman et al. 2007; three from Zimmerman et al. 2010; five from Mattelmäki and Matthews 2009). In the latter group, the authors of the article often do not coincide with the research-project leaders.
- 8.
It is worth noting that in two of the eight complete examples we analyzed, there is no systematic description of the research process. This shows how heterogeneous the research-through-design phenomenon is.
- 9.
In July 2017 the ActiveBadges system reached the sizable amount of 5118 citations.
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Volonté, P., Rampino, L., Colombo, S. (2018). The Specificity of Design Research: How Practice-Based Design Knowledge Can Enter the Great Archive of Science. In: Vermaas, P., Vial, S. (eds) Advancements in the Philosophy of Design. Design Research Foundations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73302-9_15
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