Dear Terence,

I think you may be missing my point. It is when designers do research through designing that isn't merely information gathering that we have a type of design research. 

A colleage of mine, is investigating ideas of 'cultural positioning' as embodied and expressed in the form of the chair. The project is about future possibilities in an aspect of the material culture. This is a creative investigation and will make its way into the public domain in archivable form to qualify as research (I believe an exhibition, catalogue and critical essays are planned.) 

This is not mere data gathering and it's not engineering research, social research, or any other instantly recognizable kind of research. It's not merely artistic practice either as there is an explicit research design and contribution to knowledge. It is design research conducted by a designer using a methodology based on designing. I am not suggesting that only this kind of research should be called design research. I am suggesting that it would be perverse not to call it design research. 

As Ken suggests the term 'design research' is best used to cover the broader field. If the study of the human activity of designing does need to be separately visible, and I am happy to concede that perhaps it does, then 'designing research' seems a good starting point to me. Judging by the contents pages of the key journals and the subject matter addressed by design conferences in the past twenty years, the work of the majority of researchers would appear to fall into the category 'study of the human activity of designing'. (I haven't done a statistical survey or anything like that, it's just an impression.) If the argument was from the history of the discipline this might help us with our delineation of terminology but as it is from epistemology it doesn't.

When we think of other disciplines where practice can be the methodological basis for research, such as say organic chemistry, then there are distinctions worth keeping between a) day to day lab work, such as testing production line samples for quality, which is not research, b) experimental lab work designed to test a hypothesis about a carbon-based chemical, which is organic chemistry research, and c) the study of organic chemists' work to try to understand the practice of organic chemists, which is research but not organic chemistry research. It would be called history of science, or ethonography of science, etc. depending on the object of the study, disciplinary base of the researcher (and possibly of the intended audience) and the methodology employed. We should consider preserving the same distinctions in design. I think this would avoid some confusion rather than creating more. 

Thinking epistemologically, designing can be the object of study but it can also be the method of study. The kinds of knowledge engendered are quite different. What it is possible to express about the human activity of designing isn't necessarily commensurate with and doesn't necessarily help us to understand what designing makes it possible to express about change in the material culture. So there is a possible point of confusion here to avoid.

Thinking about the longer term, I feel that the approach you are taking may be backing 'design research' into a space that excludes too many designers. The politics of this matter as much as the epistemological neatness we (both) dream of. From my admittedly limited experience of organization studies, I gather that epistemological neatness escapes researchers in that field also. Inclusiveness may be more important at this stage, particularly as so many academics in design come from a design practice background, are under pressure to develop research, and some are busy building on the starting point that connects with their experience and skills as 'investigators', i.e. designing. Some, like me and most people like me in the past, will 'step out of discipline'; my PhD was in Management Systems and Sciences. Others will find a way of staying 'in' discipline and becoming far more disciplined as investigators indeed by becoming researchers. 

Dr Geoff Matthews
Course Leader MA Interdisciplinary Design
Lincoln School of Architecture
University of Lincoln, UK



-----Original Message-----
From: Terence Love [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 18 August 2003 13:09
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: "Design research" and "designing research."


Dear Geoff,

I feel your suggestion results in increased confusion to the fierld of design research by increasing the confusion at the fields' boundaries unnecessarily. Currently, most of what designers do when they research is undertake datagthering in acalssic manner (for which there are already well established terms such as 'engineering research' and 'social research'). If you can demonstrate forms of research that do not lie in these or other well established classic domains I would like to hear of them.  I suspect that they are so few that the proposal to use the term 'design research'  to cover these 'acts of research that designers do through designing' is simply to introduce unnecessary terminological and conceptual duplication in a field that already has too many problems of these sorts of loose thinking.

Best regards,

Terry