Design Research

Synergies from Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Jesper Simonsen, Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt, Monika Büscher, John Damm Scheuer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135145927
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design General

Design Research is a new interdisciplinary research area with a social science orientation at its heart, and this book explores how scientific knowledge can be put into practice in ways that are at once ethical, creative, helpful, and extraordinary in their results.

In order to clarify the common aspects – in terms of features and approaches – that characterize all strands of research disciplines addressing design, Design Research undertakes an in-depth exploration of the social processes involved in doing design, as well as analyses of the contexts for design use. The book further elicits 'synergies from interdisciplinary perspectives' by discussing and elaborating on differing academic perspectives, theoretical backgrounds, and design concept definitions, and evaluating their unique contribution to a general core of design research.

This book is an exciting contribution to this little explored field, and offers a truly interdisciplinary approach to the treatment of design and the design process. It is valuable reading for students in disciplines such as design studies and theory, participatory design, informatics, arts based education, planning, sociology, and interdisciplinary programmes in humanities and technology.

1
Perspectives on design research

Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt, Monika Büscher, John Damm Scheuer and Jesper Simonsen

The aim of the book

History shows that humans are capable of designing remarkable things: bridges, skyscrapers, dams, cities, the Internet and, less glamorously, sewers and transport systems spring to mind immediately. There are also more subtly extraordinary achievements, including bureaucracies, organizations, IT systems and processes that allow people to work better together. All of these innovations involve, and are driven by, research. Yet a clear definition of the relationship between design and research is elusive. It is certainly not linear.

The complexity and potential impact of contemporary problems, from societies’ difficulty in designing and implementing IT systems through defining economic policies for the maintenance of welfare ideals to climate change, cry out for a better understanding of the relationship between design and research. Such understanding may enable designers and their ‘users’ to conduct research and inform design more effectively. However, again, the relationship between understanding and action is not linear.

One of the reasons is the emergent nature of design. While humans are able to achieve extraordinary things, they are equally capable of producing incredible waste, destruction and injustice. Indeed, extraordinary ambition and destruction often go together, as is illustrated by innumerable examples. A case in point is the car, designed to provide amazing automobility and flexibility for people, based inter alia on research into fuel systems, aerodynamics and driver psychology. Yet, at the same time, cars are now choking our cities and countrysides with air pollution, CO₂ emissions and congestion, contributing to 1.2 million road deaths annually (WHO 2004) and climate change. According to Thackara (2005: 1), ‘[m]any of the troubling situations in our world are the result of design decisions’. This is, in no small part, because design is producing multiple effects in complex systems with intended but also many unintended consequences. Nevertheless, Thackara is optimistic, seeing design and designers as part of the solution: ‘if we can design our way into difficulty, we can design our way out’ (ibid.: 1). This is far from simple, of course, since any attempt at design will be appropriated in unanticipated ways, and with unpredictable ‘systemic’ intended and unintended consequences.

Environmental problems urgently point to a need for new sustainable research-based designs, such as zero energy housing, more sustainable forms of production and consumption, and ‘intelligent’ technologies for mobility. This must be synchronized with social innovation in everyday practices, with policies and politics (Urry 2008). All such efforts involve and depend on research from many disciplines – from the social sciences and the humanities to the technical and natural sciences. Design decisions mean a lot to how societies change, and there is a widespread expectation that insights from research are key to ‘good’ design decisions and outcomes. However, just placing knowledge from research before design is insufficient. It is misleading to conceive research to be external to design, only providing insights into contexts for design, informing design, or controlling design. To base design on research is not enough; more critical involvement in designing is needed. History is full of examples where design based on research has been harmful, sometimes in matters of life and death, such as the failure of the computeraided despatch system that created chaos for the London Ambulance Service in 1992 (Shapiro 2005). The relationship between design and research is complex, but also promises just and sustainable social transformations. Critical enquiry into this relationship is needed. This is what this book is about.

Types of design research

Most design processes involve very many different actors and perspectives. It is therefore not surprising that a huge diversity of actors talk about doing design but find it difficult to identify shared aspects of their practice. In a co-citation analysis comprising design literature cited within the period of 1990–2000, Atwood et al. (2002) conclude that one of the most cited resources of modern design literature is Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial (1996) in which he describes design as devising ‘courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’ (p. 111). There are also alternative views on design that are often cited in the literature (as described in Atwood et al. 2002: 126ff.): Christopher Jones (1970), for example, describes design as ‘initiating change in man-made things’, while Christopher Alexander (1964), who discusses design in architecture, characterizes it as ‘the process of inventing physical things which display new physical order, organization, forms, in response to function’. From the point of view of urban planning, Horst Rittel (1984) describes design as ‘structuring argumentation to solve “wicked” problems’, while Donald Schön (1983, 1987), who studied how designers work and learn, views design as ‘a reflective conversation with the materials of a design situation’, and Pelle Ehn (1989), representing a Scandinavian approach to Participatory Design, describes design as ‘a democratic and participatory process’; while Jens Rasmussen et al. (1994) and Kim Vicente (1999), with a background in Cognitive Systems Engineering, characterize design as ‘creating complex sociotechnical systems that help workers adapt to the changing and uncertain demands of their job’.

Paradoxically, the influence of research on design and design done by researchers is widespread, but studies on how research works in designing are not. Across different disciplines, this book is in search of a deeper understanding of the relations between design and research. Broadly speaking, we discuss three different types of design-research relations and, building on Cross (1995, 2006, 2007), we argue that much can be learned from exploring and, in some cases, combining these three perspectives:

• Research for design (research-based design).

• Research into design (research analysing how design works).

• Research through design (design-based research) – which also include design through research.

First, research for design has perhaps the longest tradition, for example in engineering, product or industrial design, computer science, and informatics, where investigations of materials, mechanics and function have long informed design. This tradition dates back to inspirations from scientific design and Le Corbusier’s ideas of ‘modern architectural science’ (de Vries et al. 1992: 20). This form of research for design is especially strong in design science, which appeared as part of 1960s attempts to build systematic knowledge applicable to design. Simon’s classic work The Sciences of the Artificial (2006) is central to this tradition, which is represented in this book by Pries-Heje and Baskerville in Chapter 5. Across several disciplines and application fields, design science seeks to provide universal models for rational responses to specific design situations. The relationship is usually instrumental and only loosely connected with reflection on how research works in designing. More qualitative approaches that cut across other forms of design research are found in ethnographically informed design, for example in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (Randall et al. 2007).

Secondly, Cross argued that the 1980s and 1990s opened up interesting avenues of research into design, with approaches that he later labelled as ‘science of design’, studying how design processes work (Cross 2006: 98f.). This trend has continued, shifted and expanded to include new theoretical resources such as phenomenology and actor-network theory, and several chapters in this book contribute to this field, for example Binder and Nickelsen in Chapter 3, Olsen and Heaton in Chapter 6 and Lindstrøm in Chapter 8.

A separation between design and research is characteristic for the more ‘scientific’ types of this approach. While research for design is functionalist in the way that research is seen to provide knowledge, models and input for designers, in research into design, researchers study, describe and analyse how design is done. In both approaches research and design, researchers and designers are held apart, although studies of design practice may inform research for design, and we can imagine a bi-directional move across and between the two forms of design research.

However, in the third kind of design research we discuss in this book, design and research cannot be kept separate. Research works through design and design works through research. This is, for example, the case in Chapter 2 by Simonsen and Hertzum and Chapter 10 by Ingemann. Research and design come together, and this becomes central to contemporary design challenges and opportunities, as we will argue below with reference to, among others, Schön’s (1983, 1987) influential work on the reflective practitioner, Buchanan’s (2001) design revolution, Cross’ (2006) designerly ways of knowing, and Nowotny et al.’s (2001) observation of the growing integration of the social, the material and the scientific in Mode-2 (knowledge) production. Design-based research is about the complex and multi-directional integrations of research and design, where design becomes as much a medium and process of research, as a result. We argue that this move carries inspiration and implications for both the critical enquiry into design and the ambitions of making a difference with research for design.

How design research takes place

Design draws together actors who want to change something or create something new. Attractive and wished-for effects are sought; aesthetic experiences in art, architecture, music, design, performance, a new product that satisfies new needs or desires, a new material or technology that alleviates dull or difficult tasks or makes something new possible, a new service or process, a reduction in people’s environmental footprints, higher quality, reduced costs, heightened employee or customer satisfaction, pleasure in experience – the list is endless. Some science and research-based knowledge about how to obtain such results is available but how this knowledge is folded into design effectively, and how it can be synchronized with everyday innovative practice is often unclear.

With this book we would like to contribute to efforts of taking design beyond Design (the creative genius kind). What scholars and practitioners refer to as design facilitation (Buchanan 2001, Thackara 2005) informs our exploration. But we wish to show how designers and researchers are practically going beyond traditions, mobilize different scientific disciplines and address extremely complex design challenges in different contexts in and through idiosyncratic combinations of design and research. The book looks for common characteristics of design processes across disciplines and for how different design perspectives and practices cross-fertilize each other, devising design processes to pursue wished-for effects and outcomes. The book studies examples of how analytical and prescriptive approaches can inform each other.

Our focus is on how interdisciplinary scientific knowledge is put into practice in ways that are helpful for practitioners and others and that make extra-ordinary results possible. Our objective is to explore common aspects that characterize a diversity of relations between research and design. Our focus on research through design and design through research raises questions of how design and research practices are integrated and feed each other. This form of design research shapes up as Mode-2 design. Nowotny (2004) observes an ever deeper integration of knowledge and society, where research ‘is increasingly carried out in the context of application, that is, problems are formulated from the very beginning within a dialogue among a large number of different actors and their perspectives’. Building on this, Mode-2 design research acknowledges that research, design and society are heavily integrated, since research contributes to assembling society and society is a constant field of testing and experimenting in research and design.

A central point of the book is to focus on the processes involved in doing design. Another central point is that designs emerging from analysis of the contexts for design use are much more likely to be successful and of lasting value. Although some designs arises ‘out of the blue’, research into the various aspects of context for a design-in-the-making are a common starting point. From the analyses of processes and contexts in this book, we learn about the various ways in which research is increasingly being used in the field and how this works in practice in a society where science is deeply embedded (Novotny et al. 2001). However, as we will explain fu...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Perspectives on design research
• 2 Iterative participatory design
• 3 Designing as middle ground
• 4 Designing pathways
• 5 Design and management
• 6 Knowing through design
• 7 Makeshift users
• 8 Deep translations
• 9 Design and sustainable transition
• 10 Designing an exhibition
• 11 Joyful, collective design processes
• 12 The becoming of urban space
• 13 Tourist experience design
• 14 Synergies
• Index