Design as Research: Positions, Arguments, Perspectives

The proliferation of research degrees in the subject of design reflects the growing importance of research-based approaches in this discipline. However, it is not unreasonable to suggest that design (being a creative, subjective and artifact-based activity) does not naturally lend itself to the scientific, objective and knowledge-based activity of research. As a result, design researchers who have practised as designers are still rare within the design research community. Of those that do make the transition from practice to research (and back), they often enter with a misinformed notion of ‘research’, which ranges from a view that design research consists of a large-scale design project, to one of scientific experimentation only. This paper draws from the experiences of the author who has undertaken and completed a research degree in the subject of Design. It is a response to difficulties faced by the author during her PhD experience and proposes to address the questions: Are there any similarities between practice and research that can be highlighted to enable designers to understand the requirements of research? What skills and knowledge can be derived from research, which can be brought back into design practice? How can we better prepare designers to undertake research? It is hoped that the issues expressed here will be a basis for continued discussion on how design education can begin to incorporate a research-based curriculum, and for professional bodies to promote the value of research to practitioners.

proceeding of the International Association of Societies of Design Research Conference 2013, IASDR'13, 2013

In this paper we review existing literature in design research to see to what extent it provides a basis for meeting the methodological challenges that we encounter in our own practice- based design research. Seemingly, much attention is given to describing the results and types of knowledge that design research may provide, the purposes those may serve and by what yardsticks those results may be evaluated. Another focal area seems to be the form(-ats) in which the results of design research are presented and disseminated. What is often missing, however, are detailed accounts of the roles that design practice plays that can be picked up and used by others doing design research. This is unfortunate, as it is often such methodological structures that we struggle with. The emergence of ‘design research practices’ entails something more than mere combinations of design practice and academic research. Research typically has the objective of knowledge production; practice has the objective of creating the right thing by solving a set of problems. Considered a ‘new’ kind of design practice, design research practice seems to be more about problem finding through the design and creation of things that bring knowledge to expression. Thus, the process by which it achieves this must be uncovered and articulated.

DAT Journal, 2018

This special issue of DAT considers thinking in the South. It asks, ‘Where practice is constituted as inquiry, what might Southern voices look like in Art & Design research?’ In compiling this special issue of DAT, we asked 13 doctoral candidates in Brazil and New Zealand to consider these issues in relation to their current practice. The majority of the authors are currently pursuing research through two universities: Universidade Anhembi Morumbi in Sao Paulo, Brazil and AUT University in Auckland, New Zealand. In writing these articles, they adopted the position of first author and, supported by a supervisor/ mentor, they considered the question of practice-led inquiry in relation to a current research project. All of these researchers push at parameters to activate distinctive ways that practice might resource knowledge. They draw on cultural, geographical and ideological positions shaped by their locations in the South. Thus, in offering these considerations of practice-led research, we propose that we might learn ‘from’ rather ‘about’ emerging scholarship that generates knowledge beyond the emphases of the Global North. The collection proposes both convergences and divergences with established thinking. It emanates from an acknowledgment that the “peculiar histories that generate social and artistic practices, form dialogic encounters with voices on the peripheries of authority and loop back and forth in an iterative process to generate theory from the ground.” In so doing, DAT offers a collection of distinctive voices that speak from, and into, a renegotiating world. These voices question through practice, Connell’s ideas of a traditionally pure and authoritative Global North but, they also reassert the nature of practice-led research in Art & Design as something both culturally formed and self-responsible. Summary New Thinking & Emerging Thoughts: Practice As Research In Design, Art And Technology - Sérgio Nesteriuk, Welby Ings; Navigating artistic inquiry in a creative-production thesis: the narrative and illustrative potentials of realismo maravilhoso - Tatiana Tavares, Welby Ings; Interactive digital images: from simulacrum to immersion - Leonardo Lima, Gilbertto Prado; Mourning Songs: signing practice-led research in everyday life - Emily O’Hara, Maria O’Connor; Heuristics – A framework to clarify practice-led research - F. Derek Ventling; The artist’s book as a space for discourse - Cristiane Alcântara, Monica Tavares; Police, Criminal, Dog, Dentist: An Interactive Audiovisual Installation - Júlio Jackson Marinho, Suzete Venturelli; SEE BEYOND: contributions to the project-based practice of sighted and visually impaired students in the context of higher education in Design - Geraldo Coelho Lima Júnior, Rachel Zuanon; Undoing the Academic Self: Performing Critique and Uncertainty within Practice-led PhD - Rumen Rachev, Dr. Janine Randerson; Pūrākau: He Mahi Rangahau - Robert Pouwhare, Hinematau McNeill; Moana Nui Social Art Practices in Aotearoa - John Vea, Christopher Braddock; Rehearsing Practice as Research - Olivia Webb, Christopher Braddock; Challenges of Open Design: from theory to practice - Rodrigo Argenton Freire, Evandro Ziggiatti Monteiro, Claudio Lima Ferreira; Practice-led doctoral research and the nature of immersive methods - Marcos Steagall, Welby Ings.

The main objective of this paper is to argue about the emergence, in the master of research and PhD programmes in design, of an approach to design research distinct from research in the sciences and humanities. Two empirical works were developed. The first was the case studies of ten PhD programmes in design from different geographical-cultural contexts. The second was the case studies of thirteen research processes that included design project(s) as an integral part of the research. The main findings demonstrated the existence of three different approaches to design research in the master of research and PhD programmes in design. The characteristics of one of these approaches, the practice-based approach, were found very distinct from the characteristics of research in the sciences and humanities. In this paper I will describe these main characteristics with reference to concrete examples of research cases. I will also argue why the main aspects of the practice-based approach to design research are leading towards the definition of a designerly way of researching.

She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 2019

Bloomsbury Publishing describes Practice-Based Design Research as "a companion to master's and PhD programs in design research through practice." But the companionship offered is one where many conflicting perspectives, presented as replicable methods, are uncomfortably woven into a tradition that has often found its strength in isolated moments of genius. This volume includes chapters that move design toward the synthesis of theory and artifact. Even so, core claims fall short on many points, especially when authors rush to find solutions without support from evidence. These inconsistencies seem to reflect external demands, which the authors suggest are not impossible to overcome.

Inmaterial, diseño, arte y sociedad, 2021

The current issue of Inmaterial, diseño, arte y sociedad, opens a conversation and addresses methodological, formal, and technical aspects involved in design and art research. Engaging with new forms and practices of academic research, we consider this formal and pragmatical format as a line of flight that gives place and explores a multiplicity of exploratory territories based on practices, on experiences, and forms of living.

acuads.com.au

We find ourselves at an interesting intersection. As supervisors of practice-led research higher degree students in both art and design, we find ourselves consciously using different vocabularies when we teach our postgraduate students research methods. We encounter stark differences in project designs and we find ourselves switching hats as we alternate between draft exegeses and consider, for example, the poetic goals of an installation artist one day and the pragmatic aims of an interaction designer the next. The contrasts are quite apparent on the ground, yet when we turn to the literature on practice-led research, we find that the fields of art and design are largely undifferentiated. While considerable work has been undertaken to articulate the research paradigms of creative practice (Gray and Malins 1993; Sullivan 2005; Haseman 2005; Biggs and Büchler 2008), and to exemplify it through multidisciplinary case studies (Barrett and Bolt 2007; Bourke et al. 2005; Brien and Williamson 2009), much of the available literature does not distinguish between the approaches of art and design. Research processes, outcomes and knowledge contributions are often undifferentiated and are discussed through reference to incommon traits. At times they are bracketed together as a single term (art-anddesign) or treated as interchangeable terms (art/design) and discussed as if one domain encompasses the other. We can trace the conflation of art and design research back to the mid 1990s and early attempts at formulating practice-led research for the academy. For example, cultural capital' in Proceedings of Speculation and innovation (SPIN)

2016

volume 1 contents journal home page conference home page copyright editorial This conference has been convened to discuss practice-based research in art and design, and the relationship of doctoral degrees to professional practice in the discipline. Back in the 1980s conference delegates were thirsting for completed examples of doctoral degrees in art and design to use as models of research. In the last couple of years there have been conferences using completed degrees as models on which to base the philosophy and methodology of art and design research. This development has been very welcome, and I thank the London Institute "Matrix " conferences, for example, for their contribution in this area. But this approach brings with it a number of disadvantages: l in practice, how comprehensive has the range of methods used actually been? l are these models creating precedents that risk fixing art and design methodology within a particular range? We wanted to step back from the ...

Design principles & practices, 2009

The view of the world from different subjects is quite distinct, resulting in a different view of what it is to know, and what it is that is known about. Scientists are stereotypically Realists who seek objective facts about an independent external world. Literary theorists are stereotypically Constructivists, seeking insightful interpretations that are relevant to their community. Each overarching set of values and beliefs about the world is called a worldview, which determines the ontological, epistemological and methodological attitudes of the researcher to the object of investigation. These attitudes form a research paradigm within which certain activities are regarded as appropriate by peers and, as a result, produce relevant responses to perceived research questions. This paper presents an investigation that was funded by the Swedish Institute into architectural research as evidenced in Swedish doctoral theses. The sample was mapped and analysed in terms of clusters of interest, approaches, cultures of knowledge and uses of design practice. This allowed the identification of the ontological, epistemological and methodological attitudes of the researchers, and hence a glimpse of the implicit worldview. The authors claim that the relationship between values and beliefs (worldview), and actions (paradigm), in emerging areas of design research such as architecture is often under-scrutinised, resulting in a disjunction between actions and aims. One outcome of the project was a diagrammatic representation of various approaches evidenced in the theses. This representation made explicit the similarities and differences between the researchers' attitudes to the ontological, epistemological and methodological issues; and exposed distinct roles for practice in academic research. The responses to these issues in architectural research reflect the different values and beliefs regarding the roles of design practice in research. The project concluded that research in areas of design practice may constitute a new worldview requiring its own, more appropriate, research paradigm. Prefatory comment A funded research project has formal deliverables that can be described in terms of its intellectual components such as applications for funding, reports and responses to formal questions. In these terms, the format of the project is predetermined-there are clear questions, methods and an anticipation of the sort of contribution it will make to the area (cf. AHRC 2009: 29). A research project also consists of an informal speculative process of investigation and discovery which grounds and executes the formal project in terms of the particular reasoning, iterations, interim outcomes and stages that lead to the structuring of consequential questions (Guba & Lincoln 1994: 11). In the case of the Swedish Architectural Theses project, the latter description is the one that characterizes the main contribution of the research. The speculative process of investigation rather than the statistical findings are at the core of the contribution made by this study. Therefore in this paper, the research will be described in terms of the questions that the research raised and the structure within which fruitful discussion on these significant questions occurred and can continue.