Tim, Welcome back!
I agree with your comment:
> Designing and researching are two quite different kinds of
> human endeavour. They can be combined, and usefully so, but
> doing so requires knowing how to do good designing and how to
> do good researching, in my view.
I have long been a supporter and champion of research by design, but to do so one needs to look beyond the normal sources of published research.
In my own field, information design, most of the research in our field had been done BY DESIGN, and predated science as part of a long established craft tradition. The fruits of this research are to be found in Style Guides and classics such as Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style. None of these works can be developed except BY DESIGN. It's the accumulated systematic and rigorous knowledge that comes from practice.
The fact that this research is ignored by many of today's academic researchers is sad, and frustrating, and can lead to designs which are dangerously unusable.
I have written a few papers on this, and I'm currently writing a series of short blogs which touch on this topic as part of review of the changes in thinking that I have undergone over the last few years. My most recent is probably relevant to any design researchers who are contemplating undertaking literature reviews in their field of interest.
Here are a couple of references:
Sless, D. 2007
Designing Philosophy
Visible language 41.2 pp. 101-126.
https://communication.org.au/blog1/
David
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