Dear all,
when we are discussing constructive research or research through design, we sometimes forget that these things are nothing new. Good that Kari points us to AI (I'm personally a cognitive science and design guy at a AI-heavy computer science department) and Terry to R&D and general engieering research.
I recently got a qualitative methods course that I suddenly had to give and chose Creswells book Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing among Five Approaches. A very good book by the way. Creswell outlines a few different mindsets that qualitative research can be made with and they are post-positivsm, social constructionism, transformative research and pragmatism. Both critical research and participatory action research (and hence participatory design) falls within the transformative mindset. But research through design that aims to understand and improve design practice falls instead in the pragmatic mindset.
Another source for inspiration on how to do research through design is to look at organisational learning and education and similar areas, and how they have (in practice-led research) made use autobiographical methods. Such methods include autoetnography, autobiographical phenonmenology, and autobiographical case studies. For example, I ran across this rather good paper yesterday: http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR8-1/tenni.html
So, conclusion: We are not as unique as we sometimes tend to think in the field of design research.
Now it's time for me to go and talk to my graphic design students about design qualities in interaction design.
Cheers,
// Mattias
--
Mattias Arvola, Ph.D. in Cognitive Systems.
Director of Studies for the Undergraduate Programme in Cognitive Science.
Sr. Lecturer in Interaction Design.
Linköping University.
www.arvola.se
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