How design professionals learn within collaborative research projects

Collaborative research projects are great opportunities for the involved design professionals to learn. Many design professionals join in such collaborations to contribute with their existing professional expertise, but also to further develop and extend that expertise. However, learning by individuals is usually not the main aim, and we lack...

Connecting the PhD in Design: How PhDs label their Thesis Research

As design research matures, more designers pursue a PhD. In its turn, the PhD itself is changing from a solitary preparation for a career in academia toward an increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary and international experience and a greater variety of jobs. These developments call for greater opportunities for PhD candidates to build their...

Constructing and storytelling: accommodating different play orientations in learning spatial thinking

Spatial ability is malleable and belongs in the preschool. For preschoolers, many analytical activities with one correct answer such as tangram have been developed. Less is known about employing open-ended design assignments to creatively practice spatial thinking. Little attention has been paid to the mutual qualitative differences between...

Using co-creation methods for research integrity guideline development: How, what, why and when?

Existing research integrity (RI) guideline development methods are limited in including various perspectives. While co-creation methods could help to address this, there is little information available to researchers and practitioners on how, why and when to use co-creation for developing RI guidelines, nor what the outcomes of co-creation...

What makes design research more useful for design professionals?: An exploration of the research-practice gap

Academic design research has developed a rich collection of knowledge and tools, but often the results fail to land in design practice. We conducted an interview series with experienced design professionals to study how the knowledge that they derived from research projects was of use to them. They used tools, papers, books, and their own...

Making design research relevant for design practice: What is in the way?

Knowledge from academic design research projects does not always help design professionals to actually strengthen their work. Based on a multi-case study, this paper describes how researchers view the impact of their design research projects on design practice and what they do to achieve this. Even in projects where impact on design practice...

Grappling with Diversity in Research Through Design

Since its introduction, Research through Design (RtD) has taken on a wide variety of forms. Currently, there is a lack of clarity about what connects and separates different RtD approaches. Several attempts have been made to clarify these matters, often in the form of a top-down categorization. Here we start on a different path, one that is open...

Design Strategies for Promoting Young Children’s Physical Activity: A Playscapes Perspective

This paper develops a set of design strategies for promoting young children’s physical activity. These strategies are developed by taking the design perspective of Playscapes as a starting point. Playscapes suggests that three play qualities are key in promoting young children’s physical activity: free, bodily, and dispersed play. We present two...

Framework for Policy and Governance on Research through Design: Seeding document for panel session RTD2019 Conference ‘Method & Critique”, Thursday 21/3/2019 at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

The wardrobe as a system: Exploring clothing consumption through design fiction

This study offers a new perspective on clothing consumption by uncovering the systemic nature of the wardrobe. The research builds on systems theory and aims at drawing a map of the wardrobe as a system with particular structure and behaviour. By co-designing fictional 'smart wardrobe' services with experts and discussing these services with...

Ambiguity and Open-Endedness in Behavioural Design

Design is increasingly concerned with changing people’s behaviours. A common characteristic to behavioural design approaches is their directionality: products<br/>provide clarity about or guidance towards the designer’s intended behavioural outcome. In this paper we propose an alternative perspective that emphasizes<br/>ambiguity (i.e. affording...

Cultura: A communication toolkit for designers to gain empathic insights across cultural boundaries

Designing successful products and services that people like, requires an understanding of the context and the aspirations of those people. Over the past decade, a range of methods has been developed to help designers gain such empathy. These have worked well when designer and target user share a cultural context. However, designers often find it...

Children as co-researchers: More than just a role-play

Co-research is a method that engages participants in contextual user research by giving them the role of researcher. This method aids to capture their input in the fuzzy front end of the design process. A previous study [5] showed that children can act as co- researchers to gather contextual knowledge. In that study 20 children aged 9-12...

Meta-levels in design research: Resolving some confusions

Doing design and doing research are related activities. When doing design in a (PhD) research project, a number of confusions pop up. These confusions stem from the fact that most of the basic terms, such as ‘designer’, ‘research’, and ‘product’, have many connotations but not a shared definition. Because design research often happens in a multi...

Friends sharing opinions: Users become co-researchers to evaluate design concepts

The role of users in design is diversifying and increasing. Besides product evaluations and idea-generation sessions, users can collaborate in research that aims to find requirements for design by acting as researchers themselves. Earlier studies have addressed a variety of reasons why giving users the role of co-researcher makes sense: users...

Teaching principles of qualitative analysis to industrial design engineers

Doing qualitative field research has become a standard part of academic human-centered design education. Part of the challenge is to bring design students a thorough understanding of research methods, and practical skills in performing small scale user research as part of design projects. This involves understanding and ability at interpreting...