Histories of Design Research Failures (original) (raw)

The Redundancy of Design History. (with Guy Julier). 1998

At the inception of art and design as a degree subject in 1961, the 20% of historical and theoretical studies they incorporated was what was meant to give it its Honours status. Traditionally, then, design history, in particular at undergraduate level, has provided the contextualisation for research practice. Meanwhile design history itself has developed as an autonomous academic discipline. This in turn gave rise to the development of design history and the new art history in the early 1970s. By the the early 1980s design history had firmly established itself with the potential to be a stand-alone subject. The result of this development has been that the preoccupations of design historians have increasingly divorced themselves from design practice. Meanwhile, design practice has sought a more complex and challenging set of paradigms. This paper contends that whilst this autonomy may be advantagous for its own terms, it renders the subject no longer viable as either the provider of useful empirical data for or theoretical approaches to design practice and research. In short, design practice both as a field of academic enquiry and as a profession has outstripped the paradigms and critiques of design history. This paper was prompted by conversations with a member of the editorial board of a respected academic journal on design. He was dismayed to find that, according to the research we were presenting to the journal, no amount of radical design history was affecting the on-the-ground experience and practice of design undergraduates... Can the same be said for academic research in design at other levels?

Deconstructing Design Research

The Design Journal

This paper presents a novel conceptual framework for assessing design research projects. Present-day design research is typified by projects, which traverse disciplinary, methodological, and conceptual boundaries that often have wideranging social, cultural, and economic impact to industry, government bodies, and the wider public. Given design's application in addressing serious issues ranging from antimicrobial resistance to mobility, from ageing to migration it can be difficult to understand and unpick the exact nature and scale of design research and the roles that design researchers and designing (both processes and outcomes) play. The design research conceptual framework has been developed as a communicative tool for illustrating levels of design involvement in a project. The paper highlights the design input involved in current design research and provides a comparative measure of design's role in a wide range of projects that fall under the umbrella term of "design research" in the UK.

Design Research – History, theory, practice: histories for future-focused thinking

Writing soon after the 1962 Conference on Design Methods at Imperial College - the event that led to the founding of the Design Research Society in 1966 – J.C. Jones and D.G. Thornley described the Conference’s purpose as twofold. Firstly, the event determined the parameters of a collective agenda and, secondly, it enabled discussions that would catalyse future developments in design methods work (Slann, 1963). On the occasion of the Design Research Society (DRS)’s fiftieth anniversary, this conference strand continues this dialogue with a specific agenda: to assess histories of future-focused thinking and to consider the histories, theories and practices shared between design researchers. What emerges from evaluations of the Design Methods Movement and of Design Research is the continuous search for a common language and common methods and an interest in problem solving, by bringing scientific methods to bear on design. If we understand the history of Design Research in generational terms, this panel suggests a new era: a generation of rigorous interdisciplinary collaboration. This stretches to include practice methods, research, writing and diverse collaborations across academic colleagues from various disciplinary enclaves. Victor Margolin echoed this vanguard at the DRS2010 conference, noting that design research today “pursues its interests based on its own criteria for best practice and meaningful results” (Margolin, 2010, p.1). We interpret this as pursuing meaningful discourse on shared- and dual-inspirational, creative work in design developments. As part of this collaboration we ask: what can design historians contribute to the understanding of design research as a process comprised of history, theory and especially practice? And what can design research contribute to design history’s interest in critical, reflexive and inclusive investigations into past design contexts and developments, in order to ensure sound, future-focused thinking?

Design research – Its 50-year transformation

Design Studies, 2019

Over the past half century, how we conceive of design research has changed significantly, as indeed have the boundaries of influence of the design profession. This paper takes an entirely personal perspective of the author and will discuss the change in the nature of design research through the lens of a career in design education and, especially, in the author's endeavours to develop design research as a respected discipline working with and alongside, science, social sciences and the arts and humanities. It will look at the social, economic and political drivers that have influenced design research in the UK but also globally, and at where this has taken design, in terms of research both within and beyond the design profession.

Design Research: Off the Rails or on the Right Track?

Design Management Journal

If research findings remain unknown, they are unlikely to improve design processes and outcomes. While design scholars have lamented the lack of research utilization by practitioners, some designers have derided their efforts. While scholars have outlined strategies to decrease the research utilization gap, these are largely one-sided suggestions and have lacked widespread implementation and testing. As such, a great deal of information likely remains out of the hands of those who could use it when making decisions that have realworld implications. To determine a common understanding and collective direction surrounding design research utilization, this article synthesizes existing literature from social science, business, and information management, along with relevant findings from two national surveys. Using this evidence, this article proposes a model framed by economics and aimed at decreasing the research utilization gap prevalent in design. It calls for action on the part of both research producers and consumers and highlights specific issues, including topic selection, information translation, dissemination efforts, increasing awareness, value identification, and factors of action. The goal is for all parts of the design community to share in the responsibility for informing each other, thus growing our collective knowledge.

Introduction to Methodology: Virtual Special Issue for the Journal of Design History 2018

Journal of Design History

Design historians generally avoid extended self-reflection or discussion of how they conduct research. Typically, they use historical research methods, yet design historians have also used methods borrowed from art history, cultural and literary studies, anthropology, sociology or other social sciences. This Virtual Special Issue, comprising articles drawn from past issues of the Journal of Design History, addresses the state of design history’s methodology. While few authors in the Journal have focused specifically on the topic of methodology, their implicit adoption of an eclectic variety of research methods over the past thirty years is revealing. This Introduction seeks to contextualize a collection of twelve articles within a brief overview of methodologies in history, art history and design history. The articles are then linked to scholarship beyond the Journal of Design History, and the final section presents additional methodological possibilities for design historians.

Design Research Now: Essays and Selected Projects

If international design research is to continue to develop, we need to have fundamental discussions, not only on what we understand design research to be, but also on the most important questions and issues, on exemplary design projects, and on the most promising subject areas now and in the future. Rather than asserting unilaterally that a particular conception of research is the only valid one, or that a single type of approach is exemplary, however, our aim should be to present a diversity of viewpoints and research projects to a wider audience of design researchers, introducing specific research areas and giving reference points for more extensive debate on the focus, issues, objectives, approaches and methods of design research.

Perspectives on design research

2010

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. • 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.

Design Research Today: Challenges and Opportunities

Today research is fundamental to design practice and different models of design research exist. The paper begins with a brief historical review of design research and moves on to describe various contemporary research typologies. The author maintains that we live in an Age of Pluralism in which multiple perspectives on the problems that confront us compete for our understanding. The author does not advocate for one particular conception of design research but positions the discussion of different research typologies within a design research culture characterized by intellectual pluralism and disciplinary debates. Design research embraces more than problem solving through empirical testing of different potential solutions; research can identify genuine human needs and question existing practices and assumptions. Instead of asking which model is the correct one design researchers should ask how could such research typologies be used? Based on his thirty years of experience as an editor of the journal Design Issues the author offers practical advice on preparing research for publication and suggests how design researchers can participate in a pluralist conversation about the role of design research today. The author cites Herbert Simon's call for designers to leave the next generation with a better body of knowledge and a greater capacity for experience. The paper concludes with a discussion of the design agenda outlined in The Montreal Design Declaration issued in 2017 by the World Design Summit.

Discontented: Actions and Tactics of a Design Studies Practice

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), RMIT University, 2019

This dissertation focuses on and investigates how a practice of design studies affects the development of new and challenging frameworks in design history and design culture in Canada. Using methods of curation, writing, and public discourse in order to refute “how Westerners have distinguished, named, sorted, grouped, gathered, and subsequently deployed material things in order to make knowledge claims about both them and the emergent concepts their users have associated with them” (Ulrich et al, 2015), my research proposes a departure from the privileged spaces of Art Historical concepts such as originality, location, pedigree, and authorship in design history in order to build an inclusive and equitable approach to understanding design history. My research question guiding my work, asks: How might the use of unconventional theoretical frameworks disrupt existing structures used to critique design and establish networks of knowledge? In order to explore this proposed approach and methodology for a design studies practice I have used Canadian design history — a generally unrecorded and unacknowledged field — as a case study for my research. Combining the knowledge that can be captured through material biographies and autobiographies with a desire to include anonymous and everyday design creates a potential for a recorded history that contemporary designers understand and see a way in which to contribute. At the core of this interrogation is the ongoing tension and conflict between the need to redefine frameworks and paradigms to suit Canadian design, and the dominant forces of the political economy of design, which benefits from stasis, or status quo of traditional historical frameworks. I propose that theories from other fields, particularly literature and narratology, can be more useful than the paradigms of Art History to investigate the contributions of ordinary and anonymous design to histories and canons. More specifically, theories of adaptation as well as frameworks of folklore, borrowed from narratology and media studies, provide useful typology to position design within a historical context. “[Mobilizing] a wide vocabulary of active terms [including] version, variation, interpretation, continuation, transformation, imitation, pastiche, parody, forgery, travesty, transposition, revaluation, revision, rewriting, echo” (Sanders 2005), allows the much-needed conceptual space to discuss the contributions of Canadian design in its own way, within its own cultural context. My design studies practice is represented by a framework of five actions and tactics — piercing, consigning, pivoting, transmuting, and spamming — each applied to four goals of conceptual findings — de-trashing, consigning, filtering, and constituting. This framework is populated by twenty projects of varying scope, resulting in an ongoing and active contribution to a body of work. It is intended to be interpreted by other design studies practitioners, adopted or adapted in order to build future networks of knowledge to “[contend] with what we have made” (Dilnot 2015), and to subvert the problematic categorization of design into inflexible design history canons.