Marianne Markowski asked,
how to apply 'constructive research' or 'research through design' correctly. This is an acute and important question although pretty difficult to answer. Let's ponder the 'research through design' part a bit further.
'Research through design' is rather high on the list of current hot buzzwords, and it is used for a wide variety of ways and for different purposes, and quite often with such a flavor as if there would already exist a well-defined stepwise *method* of 'research through design', so any confusion is understandable.
The term or phrase itself has been criticized and indeed it is no good, but with respect to design research as academical discipline there is a healthy core concept hiding under it: an approach to do academical research where design, development, and use of an artifact is utilized for creation of data for that research. In the "pure" form the developed artifact has no other use; it is a research prototype that has fulfilled its purpose when the data has been extracted. In the "piggyback" form the research effort is sitting on the shoulders of a real development project that tries to create something useful for real world.
('Academical' is here just an index to such research where the goal is the communication of results to a research community.)
Now this is probably the "native" form of doing academical design research, and our core strength when compared to other disciplines: instead of taking an outsider observer position, we go "in" and purposefully change our research subject, and by that changing have much better possibilities to see also the hidden connections. And in the end of the day a considerable part of our new knowledge is condensed and crystallized in the form of the new artifact in principle much more easily analyzable and generalizable than, for instance, what action researchers in organizations (who also go "in") have in their hands: changed attitudes, work habits, forms of interaction.
So far so good: we have an unique foundation any discipline could be proud of; if there were a solid methodology for 'research through design', our disciplinary turf would be secure forever. (We are anyway going to need a bunch of different methods, say, one for studying development processes, other for artifacts in use, and so on, and a discussion about their coverage and validity, and a justification why they work and the totality of such bunch and discussions is called a methodology...). But then there is the problem that we do not yet have such methodology in fact, we do not yet really have the particular methods either... Of course such work has been practiced since long, and various experiences have been collected and recorded, but honestly: nobody has yet an idea how to 'correctly' do 'research through design'.
I think that there is now a general awareness that operationalizing 'research through design' would be a good idea, and most astute members of the community, such as John Zimmerman, Jodi Forlizzi and Erik Stolterman (as cited in previous messages) have been already a while outlining a research program to start such work. The development of a methodology, however, is not a work of a single researcher but the whole community. And it is not an armchair job either; the empirical experience of doing research has be brought to bear in all phases of the community discussion. This discussion has started, but it could be more prominent and more systematical, a persistent subtheme whenever design researchers publicly (or privately) meet.
Method development is not enough alone: the eyeglasses we have inherited from arts, human and social sciences or technology development are probably not sufficient for the new purpose. When we do 'research through design', we need a point of our own, where to look at, and how to conceptualize what we see. Our current understanding of the artifact-practice relationship is not yet distinctive enough. In this respect there already has been interesting recent openings, for example John Bowers' and Bill Gaver's trilogy of papers on 'annotated portfolios' is an attempt to generate a new way to discuss about and evaluate artifacts.
So, Marianne, your question is excellent; my apologies that the answer is no better as a research community we should just work harder to get there... :-)
--Kari Kuutti
Univ. Oulu, Finland
PS. There is in fact a very illustrative example on "research through design" practiced by a research community over decades, and that is Artificial Intelligence research, where building new computer programs capable to do some novel trick has been always the major device for research. People have used artifacts as a way of elaborating their questions and answering them, and the scientific discussion took place around the artifacts. Phil Agre (an AI researcher that later become a social scientist) has written a couple of insightful pieces about that. Contentwise, I dare not suggest AI as the role model, but mutatis mutandis something a bit similar might happen in DR, and at least in HCI as well.
Gaver, W. W. (2012). What should we expect from research through design? CHI12 (pp. 937 946). Austin, Texas.
Bowers, John {2012} The logic of annotated portfolios: communicating the value of 'research through design'. Proceedings of DIS'12: Designing Interactive Systems, 68--77
Gaver, Bill & Bowers, John (2012) Annotated Portfolios. interactions vol19. no 4 pp.40-49
Agre, Phil: The Soul Gained and Lost: Artificial Intelligence as a Philosophical Project, Stanford Humanities Review 4(2), 1995, pages 1-19. http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/shr.html
Agre, Phil: Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI
in Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, William Turner, and Les Gasser, eds, Social Science, Technical Systems and Cooperative Work: Beyond the Great Divide, Erlbaum, 1997.
http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/critical.html
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