Design Research - Development

Development

The development of design research has led to the establishment of design as a coherent discipline of study in its own right, based on the view that design has its own things to know and its own ways of knowing them. Bruce Archer again encapsulated the view in stating his new belief that ‘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’. This view was developed further in a series of papers by Nigel Cross, collected as a book on 'Designerly Ways of Knowing'. Significantly, Donald Schön promoted the new view within his book The Reflective Practitioner, in which he challenged the technical rationality of Simon and sought to establish ‘an epistemology of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes which practitioners bring to situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflict’.

It might be said that design research ‘came of age’ in the 1980s, since when there has been a continuing period of expansion. This was helped by the development of a research base, including doctoral programmes, within many of the design schools located within new institutions that were previously art colleges, and the emergence of new areas such as interaction design. More new journals have appeared, such as The Design Journal, the Journal of Design Research, and CoDesign. There has also been a major growth in conferences, with not only a continuing series by DRS, but also series such as Design Thinking, Doctoral Education in Design, Design Computing and Cognition, Design and Emotion, the European Academy, the Asian Design Conferences, etc. Design research now operates on an international scale, acknowledged in the cooperation of DRS with the Asian design research societies in the founding in 2005 of the International Association of Societies of Design Research.