Dealing with diversity: Issues in design research and design research methods
Abstract
Design research is a timely topic, given the current movements in art and design institutions throughout the world towards articulation, conceptualization, and (academic) research, where labels such as practice-based research abound. It is also a challenging topic with many open issues concerning conceptual foundations and methodological practices. As the articles in this special issue will show, design research is marked by significant diversity in the sense that it engages researchers from many different disciplines: Philosophy, systems theory, social science, information science, architecture, and design are among the academic disciplines represented here, with all the diversity in epistemological and methodological traditions that they entail. However, design research is also marked by a distinctive ambition to deal with the diversity implied by the multidisciplinary nature of its research community. Different analytical and generative perspectives have engaged in common discourse on the nature and practice of design ever since the origins of design studies in the 1950s. Some 30 years ago, British scholars introduced a distinction between research- into -design, research- for -design and research- through -design (also called research- by -design) in order to characterize the field. Even though the concepts have been somewhat contested, they have proven to be