James,
I am also curious like you to understand if there are any published references on this very specific topic. My response here does not include any requested references, but shares a POV and a "practicing designer's perceptions" of design research, design practice and design education.
I am currently writing a paper that shares my data collected over the past 5 years of teaching design in Korea. The conference criteria for submitting such a paper is stated as being "double blind" and "peer reviewed" so I am including a vast collection of citations (names like, Friedman, Norman, Love, Faust, Kolko, Suh, Thompson et al) that support the thesis I have proposed in the paper. My aim in writing the paper is to share my empirical research and the results of my efforts to innovate and improve the teaching of design at the university level so that graduates are better prepared to enter practice and provide value as well as gain a return on their education investment. Explaining the new theories/methods of teaching the fusion of design research with industry practice being one of the primary thrusts the paper.
I am a industrial designer with over 20 years of practice in the field in the US, Singapore, China and Korea. I am relatively new to academia and am finding that there are very stringent rules (globally) for the sharing of research that could lead to publication. Now enrolled in a PhD program in Korea, I am learning the ins and outs of research and publication both in Korea and thanks to the internet, the rest of the academic world as I have some data and results to share.
What I find fascinating as I read the conference proceedings and position papers of the past 10 or so years is that as academics get on in their years they seem to grow complacent and their publishing includes less and less empirical research. (this might be different in the design journals which I have yet to get to) Many papers are submitted merely citing other academic arguments and doing little more that reporting on one another's previous writing and arguments without offering anything profoundly new or innovative to use in practice. This may be one reason why practicing designers fail to synthesize academic research into testable prototypes.
In my unpublished experience, practicing designers thrive on their own empirical research as the market is always changing on a daily basis. This is closely linked to intuition that many designers will claim along with their skill-set is their value that they bring to the project. Referencing published history does very little to prompt innovation thus research papers, although they may get read, are not leveraged because industrial designers are not trained to synthesize (other people's) published data into design solutions.
Bourgogne....
SNUST, MJC
Seoul Korea
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