Design Research
How can we write academically about design?
Design is in the process of becoming recognized within academia. It is an umbrella of fields that is distinct from, yet related to, the umbrellas of Art and Science. In order to join the academy, designers need ways of talking about their work in an academic way! This post is an exploration of what that might look like.
What is design?
When I asked Rebecca Fiebrink how she thinks about design when teaching her students, she told me that she tells them:
- Decide what you want to do.
- Decide how you will know when you’ve done it.
And that those things can change as your understanding of the project changes, but you need to have them laid out for yourself at the beginning.
I really like Rebecca’s definition because it recognizes that the design process is deeply contextual to the specific project and to the designer’s specific situation.
Many definitions of design frame it as an N-step process to follow, or a set of methods that should be used in various situations. While that framing can be helpful for the set of projects that are aligned well with those methods, it can be dangerous if a community advertises their specific, contextualized process as a universal way of practicing design.
But! Within a design community, it’s actually really helpful to capture the community’s knowledge of how to design well. And communities do this!
All of the design communities I’ve come across capture their collective knowledge in short phrases that designers should keep in mind while they are designing.
In the music instrument / interface design community, these are called design principles (the seminal example being Perry’s Principles). In Education, they’re often called precepts (e.g. Emboldened by Embodiment: Six Precepts for Research on Embodied Learning and Mixed Reality, in Educational Researcher). In Design Thinking, they can be called mindsets or core abilities.
What do I mean by “a community’s knowledge of how to design well”? Well, each design community has a set of goals that drive them to do design work, fueled by underpinning values. For example, the music interface design community might have a goal of reducing amateur musician’s inhibition to make music, fueled by the values of artistic expression and play.
Research and Design
Why do we need research in the process of designing? My advisor Ge Wang has said,
Design as a field is trying to understand itself.
Our design communities, their goals, values, craft knowledge, and design principles are not set in stone, but ever-changing. And, when designers and their goals are embedded in an academic context, it makes sense to orient their academic community around its own evolving understanding of design.
How can we do this? Let’s look at one attempt that comes from the UK…
Research Through Design
Research Through Design is a way of framing research-y design and design-y research. In a 2015 provocation, Christopher Frayling discusses the origin of the term as something that would try to capture the messiness of how designers work, compared to earlier attempts that were too linear and logical. (Side note — a way of thinking being messy or distributed rather than linear and logical doesn’t make it invalid! Check out some epistemological pluralism; this paper calls it a “soft” approach to knowledge.)
Frayling identifies 3 kinds of research involving design:
- Research Into Design — “historians, psychologists, economists, you name it, looking at design from outside the discipline”. This research involves archives, etc. and is merely about describing how designers work from the outside.
- Research Through Design — “taking a problem outside design and using design to address it”, generating knowledge of something outside the design process by using design methods. This is kind of like the converse of Research Into Design: rather than using non-design methods to study design, we use design methods to study not-design. An example would be learning something about how people socialize with each other through the process of making a popular phone app (design methods, anthropology result).
- Design as Research — “the knowledge is embodied in the artifact, but it’s not just an instantiation of an idea. It is the idea.”
This last idea is intriguing and apparently very controversial. As a designer, it’s very clear to me that knowledge and values are embedded into the things I create. At the same time, I can understand why someone might not consider a designed artifact as research in the traditional academic sense.
Toward a new understanding of Design Research
None of the three kinds of research laid out by Frayling involve designers producing research about the design process itself, yet I believe that this kind of research is the central activity that maintains an academic design community.
The impulse for designers to find ways to talk about design is not new.
Bruce Archer is famous for saying:
There exists a designerly way of thinking and communicating that is both different from scientific and scholarly ways of thinking and communicating, and as powerful as scientific and scholarly methods of enquiry when applied to its own kinds of problems.
and
Design research is systematic inquiry whose goal is knowledge of, or in, the embodiment of configuration, composition, structure, purpose, value, and meaning in man-made things and systems.
Despite this, much talk about Design Research has actually been Research Into Design, Research Through Design, or too focused on methods that are only applicable to a niche community. (Like I said before, I think it is always especially dangerous when someone tells you that their way of thinking about design is universal. Almost no knowledge about design is applicable to all kinds of design.)
A Working Definition of Design Research
Let’s create a new working definition of Design Research.
In Design Research, the ultimate goal is to learn more about and refine the design process. Why the process and not the created artifacts? Because the path you took, the successes you had, the mistakes you made, and what you learned from your mistakes, are all what is most useful for someone else in your community looking to do similar work. Plus, the artifacts can speak for themselves (they are Design as Research).
The best way to orient a design process is through a set of design principles. When they design, designers choose what they want to do and how they will know they have done it, then work toward it while keeping in mind their orienting set of design principles.
Remember: a set of design principles arises from a particular community, working toward a particular goal, with a particular set of underlying values.
Let’s talk about how a design community can become an academic field. An academic field is a community of people all having a common conversation about a topic. They collectively (and sometimes implicitly) decide what counts as knowledge and what counts as interesting knowledge. More mechanically, an academic field also needs a common terminology to have its conversation, and an established way of structuring writing.
In order for a design community to become an academic field, it needs a common conversation. This can be “how do we design what we value?” (the design process) and “what do we value?” (the philosophy of design and the goals of the community).
Now let’s talk about the writing structure, or the typical format of papers in the field. It might be fruitful to model this after another academic field.
Let’s take the neuroscience of music. The established format for papers writing about the neuroscience of music that I am familiar with is:
- Background: explain your central question, its motivation, and relevant research that you are building upon.
- Methods: explain your experiment, including equipment, participants, etc., with enough rigor that anyone with access to the right equipment could replicate your results.
- Results: explain the nuts-and-bolts results of what you observed in the experiment; this is separate from
- Discussion: explain what you believe you can extrapolate from your observed results toward your central question.
- Conclusion: summarize your contributions to the broader field and its central questions; point out potential limitations in the study and any other potentially fruitful directions for future work.
If the basis of an academic design community is its value system (philosophy of design) and design principles (design process), then an academic paper contributing to the goals of that community might look something like this:
- Introduction: establish the philosophy / values of design and design principles that you started with.
- Design Case Study: establish the context of a thing you designed. Establish your goal for the design process, and how you would know if you accomplished the goal.
- Design Narrative: write the narrative of your design process, emphasizing relevant successes, failures, and learnings along the way.
- Design Principles: extrapolate from your narrative what are potential new design principles that might be valuable to your community.
- Conclusion: summarize your contributions to the broader field and its central principles; point out potential limitations in your viewpoint and any potentially fruitful directions for future work. Also point out potential changes to the community’s values; add critical nuance to existing values and propose new ones.
We can also add the valuable practice of design critique to this model. Papers could replace the Case Study and Narrative sections with:
- Design Goals: establish a subset of goals that are relevant to some part of your community.
- Design Critique: introduce a suite of designed artifacts and critique each one according to whether it meets the aforementioned goals
(whether it was trying to or not).
The critique can then be used to develop design principles for future work much in the same way as a narrative of your own design process.
People actually do this!
At least in my academic design community, people actually do have the impulse to generate knowledge by referring to existing design principles and proposing new ones. Check out these clips from Dan Trueman’s keynote at the Artful Design Manifestival, bitKlavier: A Design Etude:
Here he identifies 8 existing design principles that informed the work, or are useful lenses in retrospect.
And here he proposes a new principle: 9.1. Collaborate! and explains why it aligns with and adds nuance to the values of the community.
Following this, he adds nuance to several more existing design principles.
Communities engage in multiple kinds of research
An academic community doesn’t have to engage in research-y design in only one way. Almost all communities engage in a mix of several of the above approaches.
Ge would say that Artful Design is:
- 50% Design as Research: producing sublime artifacts that speak for themselves and hold within them some understanding of humanity.
- 40% Design Research: ever evolving our notions of how to design well and what are our values.
- 10% Research Through Design: using the design process and our designed artifacts to understand better how the world works, to explore ethical and moral questions, and to learn more about ourselves.
Lightning Recap
- Design is an umbrella of fields, just like Art and Science.
- Almost no knowledge about how to design is universal; it is nearly all highly contextual to specific design communities.
- A design community is linked together by its commonly held goals, values, and design principles. These together form their design philosophy (what to value) and their design process (how to design what they value).
- Design Research is designers contributing academic knowledge to their community’s understandings of its own design philosophy and design process.
- Design Research is different than Research Through Design, which is designers using the design process to learn about some external topic.
- Design Research is different than Research Into Design, which is non-designers using methods of other disciplines to learn about the design process.
- Design Research is different than Design as Research, which holds that valuable knowledge is embedded within designed artifacts. (Design as Research might become Design Research if you spend time teasing out some of that knowledge into design principles, design critique, or other written work that can fuel an academic design community.)
- In an academic Design Research article, both design critiques of finished artifacts and narratives of design processes can be used as academic research material for proposing evolutions of a community’s values and design principles.
- Research communities of academic designers can engage simultaneously in all these forms of research-y design.
I look forward to hearing any thoughts you might have after reading this! What are your community’s goals and values?
What do design principles look like in your community?
