No Comments Written by Robert on June 10, 2008 – 9:39 pm

Design research is vaguely defined; it includes theory and practice, process and drafting. There are various concepts of research manifested in different communities.

For several years the discussion in and around design research has grown enormously in importance: international symposia are organized where trends, methodical approaches and relevant research content are wrestled with and sometimes hotly debated. Design research is not pursued solely in academic environments and their communities but is gaining the attention of other institutions and companies as well.

Now design research has prevailed in the wider world as a necessary and self-evident component of the whole broad field of design. In contrast to the role of research in better-established academic disciplines, however, the concept of research in design is not clearly defined. It is increasingly evident how closely reflection and investigation about the profession areenmeshed with the concept and the design process.

There are few other well-established academic disciplines that question whether they can be justified as a field of scholarship which always logically implies research.

Art, possibly, would be the other exception, but because of the separation of art history and theory as an independent discipline, it can still justify itself through scholarship and research. The way design is viewed in the English-speaking world seems to deal most straightforwardly with the concept of research though one could also say that that is partly as a result of being largely unaware of its problems.

The question of the specifics of design research and other possible forms and approaches this research might take does not play an especially large role in this debate. The reasons for this are to be found in the tradition of the concept of design and the nature of educational and research institutions in the English-speaking world. The debate about design has a longer history in Britain than in other countries.

It must, however, be recalled that the English definition and use of the word “design” is much broader than its equivalent in German, where from about the mid-1970s it began to be used side by side with the German word Gestaltung (which has the meaning of shape and organization implicit in it) which was the common expression until that time.

The original sense of “design” in English covers numerous meanings, only a few of which relate explicitly to the German concept of Gestaltung. That is both an opportunity and a problem on the one hand, this breadth per se suggests multidisciplinary processes.

On the other hand, this reduces and obscures the precision of what is meant in each case. Sometimes imparting information about design is closer to the approach used in cultural studies that is to say, it does not seek to link competence in design theory or history with practical skills. In that sense design research remains too closely bound to cultural or social studies for a new concept of design research to emerge. This is also true in general of research and teaching at the university level in the English-speaking world, where their roles are often articulated differently than other countries, especially within continental Europe. Hence, although the meaning of design in English is, on the one hand, broader than in any other language, the field is then divided into many subdisciplines or perceived too narrowly.

Another reason for this perhaps too clearly defined concept of design in regard to research in the English-speaking world, lies in the long and enduring tradition of, on the one hand, mentioning design and art in the same phrase (Arts & Crafts), while also integrating engineering, computer science, psychology, and other disciplines into the canon of design theory and research. As little as there is to object about a multidisciplinary approach in a world that is already networked, it is nonetheless dubious to fuse all these things uncritically into a form of research dominated, or so it seems, by opinions about research from the hard sciences versus cultural or social studies.

This makes it more difficult for the young discipline of design to develop its own particular understanding of research. The productive ambiguity mentioned at the outset is a favorable outcome in other contexts of research (for example, in Germanspeaking countries). The concept of research in design is vague, and this vagueness has its correspondence in several areas: between theory, practice and Entwurf; between artifacts and their contexts; between the visible world and the world of ideas of traditional scholarship.

This lack of specificity is not always a disadvantage; on the contrary, the possibility of making the concept of research more fluid represents an opportunity to distinguish design from other forms of study. Where the latter can be seen to be burdened by their long history in the form of ossified norms and standards of scholarship, design studies and research can formulate a concept of research that can in its turn also stimulate other sciences. This fluid definition of research is, of course, by no means undisputed.

It should be reiterated that in terms of the quantity of discussion about design research, the dominant theoretical views are influenced by the English-speaking world. What is published and said in English can be understood in many parts of the world, since English is the established world language. Discourses, journals and books in French, German, Italian, Japanese, and so on, have a much harder time being noticed at all. Moreover, these linguistically diverse communities for design research are only now starting to come together.

Three networks on design research will be presented briefly here as examples of different approaches: & The Design Research Society (DRS), founded in the United Kingdom in 1966, sees itself as a multidisciplinary, international society whose members come from about forty countries. With just a few exceptions, the chair and other posts are all filled with English-speaking designer researchers. The DRS declares its common denominator to be supporting and communicating about “design in all its many fields.” & The European Academy of Design (EAD) was founded in 1994 as a loose association of various university and other educational institutions teaching design to support design research by linking of theory and practice, to improve international cooperation, and to issue publications and newsletters.

Every year an international conference is organized by one of the universities and, thus far, there have been meetings in England, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, and Germany. & The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Designtheorie und -forschung (German Society of Design Theory and Research, or DGTF) has existed since 2002. It should more accurately be called the German-speaking Society, since it includes Swiss and Austrian design researchers. The DGTF sees itself as committed to an open, deliberately vague concept of design research and considers itself neither subject to previously developed scholarly standards (a risk inherent in the concept of design in the Englishspeaking world) nor subsumed by scholarship in design but rather as exploring something in-between that is as provocative as it is productive.

These initiatives make it clear that, with the exception of the DRS, an awareness of the relevance of design research as a separate discipline is relatively new, but it is making itself heard through the committed work of individuals and a growing number of associations. Whatever concept of design is favored by these various research communities and conferences, all of them refer back however different their interpretations, adaptations, and critiques to the criteria formulated by Christopher Frayling in 1993 (then professor at the Royal College of Art in London and since 1996 its rector), which continue to define the debate. He distinguished between three types of design research: research into, for, and through design. Research into (or about) design is the easiest one to explain, since it corresponds to the conventional concept of research.

Design becomes the thematic object of analysis from the perspectives of history, sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, or technology. It is viewed retrospectively, from outside, from a distance and with the declared intention of not altering the object of analysis. (It must be said, however, that the conviction that this approach does not influence the object of research is at best illusory and at worst simply ideological.

At least since Immanuel Kant, it has been known that even so-called disinterested, objective viewing of an object will influence it as research represents an intervention and hence has an effect.) Research into or about design is the oldest and most widespread form of research, and the one most like research in other disciplines.

Research for design supports in specific ways the (practical, active) process of design whose product is an artifact; market and consumer research but also product semantics are examples of this form of research. It can be identified as a kind of preparatory empiricism or ancillary science for the practical process of design. It is a form of research that need not be manifested solely in written or oral forms of communication but also incorporates visual and analogous representations. Finally, research through design is perhaps the most original and distinctive approach to research in design, since it is characterized by a high degree of similarity between the process of design and that of design research. It is a research method unique to design that demands the direct involvement of design researchers in the very object of their research. In this approach, theory and research do not pursue the verification or falsification of preformulated hypotheses with the goal of consistency an approach better suited to positivist approaches.

Rather researchers feel their way into the field of research, interact with it and, if necessary, alter it through considered and deliberate interventions. Immediacy is desirable and areas of ambiguity are deliberately explored. Research through design presumes a hermeneutic understanding of design and this works when the design process is open to taking into account an interactive dialogue with the design situation. The particular situation should be perceived, even anticipated, in order to better acknowledge the object of research appropriately. That requires openness in the research process and readiness to engage in new, surprising situations in the course of research.

The different cultural understandings of design are manifested most clearly when considering “research through design.” Critics in English-speaking countries tend to doubt that this kind of research exists at all, instead simply equating research in general with design. Or they reduce the “through” to the trivial statement that it is a “vehicle” of research that merely serves as a means of communicating the results of research. The continued insistence by the proponents of research who claim that they can observe in a disinterested and non interfering manner from the outside has been explained by Jonas as a “flight to allegedly safe ground, but away from the questions that are really interesting. . . . You escape the paradoxes and swamps, but you abandon the familiar tools of the craft. That might be justified politically over the short-term, but over the long-term it hurts design.” Design research and theory at their most intelligent could perhaps best be described as “experience-based” judgment.