There are perhaps others on this list better qualified to relate the notion
of "Thinking through Making to the movement in academic circles called
"Research Through Design. To my mind, they are the same thing.

So there are many academic articles on this topic.

I look at it this way.

The traditional human0centered design approach has these stages:

   1. Observation.
   2. Ideation
   3. Prototyping (Building)
   4. Testing
   5. Reflection

There are variants of this, but they all have the same spirit. However,
they assume that the stages are done in the order I listed, with the final
stages repeated until some resolution is reached (usually, when time runs
out and/or someone pronounces the result "good enough")

The way I see it -- and I am working on a paper to explain this -- we can
do the stages in any order we wish.

Do them in numerical order and that's traditional HCD.

Start with 3, and that is research through Design (or if you like, build
something and see where it leads).  or maybe it should be called "Thinking
through making."

A lot of us tinker, which means we play around and build something. Ah --
the creation leads to new reflections and new ideas.

Personally, we could equally start elsewhere:

   1. Start with 1 and jump to 2 or to 3.
   2. Start with 2. and jump to 1, 3 or 4.
   3. start with 3, and jump to 1, 2 or 4/
   4. You can't start with4: you need something to start with -- an idea (1
   or 2) or a model ( 3)
   5. start with 5, but that is like starting with 2

*References*
=====

Stappers, P., & Giaccardi, E. (2017). 43. Research through Design. In M.
Soegaard & R. F. Dam (Eds.), *Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction*:
Interaction Design Foundation.
https://public-media.interaction-design.org/images/books/hci/hci.pdf


For a long time, design and research have been regarded as separate
endeavors – the former residing in industrial practice and craft, the
latter in academic experiments and re¢ection. In the past decades, as areas
such as interaction design and other forms of design were growing their
academic basis, became more widespread as subjects taught at universities,
and grew a research culture, two things happened. First, doing research
became a recognized part of designing products (and later services).
Second, design activities, along with designed artifacts, would become
established as the chief elements in the process of generating and
communicating knowledge. Ever since Frayling’s in¢uential speech (1993,
2015), these two have become referred to as research for design and
research through design (RtD), respectively.


Zimmerman, J., Forlizzi, J., & Evenson, S. (2007, April 28–May 3). Research
Through Design as a Method for Interaction Design Research in HCI. Paper
presented at the CHI 2007: Computer-Human Interaction, San Jose, CA.

Zimmerman, J., Forlizzi, J., & Evenson, S. (2007, April 28–May 3).


For years the HCI community has struggled to integrate design in research
and practice. While design has gained a strong foothold in practice, it has
had much less impact on the HCI research community. In this paper we
propose a new model for interaction design research within HCI.

Following a research through design approach, designers produce novel
integrations of HCI research in an attempt to make the right thing: a
product that transforms the world from its current state to a preferred
state. This model allows

interaction designers to make research contributions based on their
strength in addressing under-constrained problems.

To formalize this model, we provide a set of four lenses for evaluating the
research contribution and a set of three examples to illustrate the
benefits of this type of research

Glanville, R., & Jonas, W. (2007). Research through DESIGN through research.
 *Kybernetes, 36*(9/10), 1362-1380.


Purpose – The paper seeks to make a substantial contribution to the still
controversial question of design foundations.


Design/methodology/approach – A generic hypercyclic design process model is
derived from basic notions of evolution and learning in different domains
of knowing (and turns out to be not very different from existing ones). The
second-order cybernetics and evolutionary thinking provide theoretical
support.


Findings – The paper presents a model of designerly knowledge production,
which has the potential to serve as a genuine design research paradigm. It
does not abandon the scientific or the hermeneutic or the arts & crafts
paradigm but concludes that they have to be embedded into a design
paradigm. “Design paradigm” means that “objects” are not essential, but are
created in communication and language.


Research limitations/implications – Foundations cannot be found in the
axiomatic statements of the formal sciences, nor in the empirical
approaches of the natural sciences, nor in the hermeneutic techniques of
the humanities. Designing explores and creates the new; it deals with the
fit of artefacts and their human, social and natural contexts. Therefore
foundations for design (if they exist at all) have to be based on the
generative character of designing, which can be seen as the very activity
which made and still makes primates into humans.


Practical implications – The hypercyclic model provides a cybernetic
foundation (or rather substantiation) for design, which – at the same time
– serves as a framework for design and design research practice. As long as
the dynamic model is in action, i.e. stabilized in communication, it
provides foundations; once it stops, they dissolve. The fluid circular
phenomena of discourse and communication provide the only “eternal” essence
of design.


-- 
Don Norman
Prof. and Director, DesignLab, UC San Diego


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