Design & Knowledge Generation

A term that I have recently added to my knowledge is Research Through Design (RTD). Fortunately I read the research ‘Developing a Dialogical Platform for Disseminating Research through Design’ before attending a Communication Design thesis jury as a judge. ‘Design a knowledge based activity’ is a different and important perspective to judge a design project. As designers we tend to focus on execution and display sometimes ignoring the outcome or post design insights of a project. Communication of research understanding is a vital feature of a whole design process.

One of the interesting thesis projects was ‘One Dimension’, a graphic elaboration of Einstein’s theory relating idea, space and time. The project was designed by Mudassir Khoso final year design student at CEAD (Centre of Excellence in Art & Design). It effectively communicated the whole phenomenon of one dimension in an interactive way, which otherwise would have taken a much longer time to understand in conventional way. Ultimately a good experience to judge a project based on knowledge generating activity.

You can reach Mudassir at maddykhoso@gmail.com for further information or for some words of appreciation. :)

Further readings;
 Wallace, J., Yee, J. S., & Durrant, A. (2014). Reflections on a synergistic format for disseminating research through design. Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the 32nd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — CHI EA ‘14.