2nd Edition
The Routledge Companion to Design Research
This new edition of The Routledge Companion to Design Research offers an updated, comprehensive examination of design research, celebrating a plurality of voices and range of conceptual, methodological, technological and theoretical approaches evident in contemporary design research.
This volume comprises thirty-eight original and high-quality design research chapters from contributors around the world, with offerings from the vast array of disciplines in and around modern design praxis, including areas such as industrial and product design, visual communication, interaction design, fashion design, service design, engineering and architecture. The Companion is divided into four distinct sections with chapters that examine the nature and process of design research, the purpose of design research and how one might embark on design research. They also explore how leading design researchers conduct their design research through formulating and asking questions in novel ways, and the creative methods and tools they use to collect and analyse data. The Companion also includes a number of case studies that illustrate how one might best communicate and disseminate design research through contributions that offer techniques for writing and publicising research.
The Routledge Companion to Design Research has a wide appeal to researchers and educators in design and design-related disciplines such as engineering, business, marketing, and computing, and will make an invaluable contribution to state-of-the-art design research at postgraduate, doctoral and post-doctoral levels and teaching across a wide range of different disciplines.
Notes on the contributors
Introduction to the second edition
Paul A. Rodgers and Joyce Yee
PART I
Exploring design research
1 The sometimes uncomfortable marriages of design and research
Ranulph Glanville
2 A cybernetic model of design research towards a trans-domain of knowing
Wolfgang Jonas
3 Inclusive design research and design’s moral foundation
Jude Chua Soo Meng
4 “Redesigning design: On pluralizing design”
Adam Nocek
5 Decolonizing design research
Frederick M.C. van Amstel
6 Politics of publishing: Exploring decolonial and intercultural frameworks for marginalized publics
Rathna Ramanathan
7 Phoneticians, Phoenicians and mapping design research around a Medidisciplinary Sea
Graham Pullin
8 Four analytic cultures in design research
Ilpo Koskinen
9 Designing technology for More-Than-Human futures
Paul Coulton and Joseph Lindley
PART II
Designing design research
10 What is a researchable question in design?
Meredith Davis
11 Foundational theory and methodological positioning at the outset of a design research project
Rachael Luck
12 Challenging assumptions in social design research undertaken in the Global South–India
Alison Prendiville, Delina Evans and Chamithri Greru
13 Respectfully navigating the borderlands towards emergence: Co-designing with Indigenous communities
Lizette Reitsma
14 An emancipatory research primer for designers
Lesley-Ann Noel
15 From theory to practice: Equitable approaches to design research in the design thinking process
Nneka Sobers and Stephanie Parey
16 Re-articulating prevailing notions of design: About designing in the absence of sight and other alternative design realities
Ann Heylighen, Greg Nijs and Carlos Mourão Pereira
17 The soul of objects, an anthropological view of design
Luján Cambariere
Exploring research space in fashion: A framework for meaning-making
Harah Chon
PART III
Conducting design research
19 Drawing out: How designers analyse written texts in visual ways
Zoë Sadokierski and Kate Sweetapple
20 A photograph is still evidence of nothing but itself
Craig Bremner and Mark Roxburgh
21 Action research approach in design research
Beatrice Villari
22 Woven decolonizing approaches to design research: Jolobil and Mahi-Toi
Diana Albarrán González and Jani K. T. Wilson
23 Participation Otherwise: More than southerning the world, designing in movement
Barbara Szaniecki and Zoy Anastassakis
24 The role of prototypes and frameworks for structuring explorations
by Research Through Design
Pieter Jan Stappers, Froukje Sleeswijk Visser and Ianus Keller
25 Imagining a feeling-thinking design practice and research from Latin America
María Cristina Ibarra
26 Hacktivism as design research method
Otto von Busch
27 Software Ate Design: Creation and destruction of value through design research with data
Chris Speed
28 Working with patient experience
Alison Thomson
PART IV
Translating design research
29 Physical thinking: Textile making toward transdisciplinary design research
Elizabeth Gaston and Jane Scott
30 People-centred engagement for inclusive material innovation in healthcare
Laura Salisbury and Chris McGinley
31 Seeing the invisible: Revisiting the value of critical tools in design research for social change
Laura Santamaria
32 Practice-based evidence for social innovation: Working and learning in complexity
Penny Hagen and Angie Tangaere
33 Collective dreaming through speculative fiction: Developing research worldviews with an interdisciplinary team
Daijiro Mizuno, Kazutoshi Tsuda, Kazuya Kawasaki and Kazunari Masutani
34 Drifting walls–learning from a hybrid design practice
Ruth Morrow
35 Bridging gaps in understanding between researchers who possess design knowledge and those who do not
Michael R. Gibson and Keith M. Owens
36 Probing and filming with strategic results: International design research to explore and refine new product-service concepts
Geke van Dijk and Bas Raijmakers
37 Museum in our street: Social cohesion at street level
Emiel Rijshouwer, Dries De Roeck, Nik Baerten and Pieter Lesage
38 GeoMerce: Speculative relationships between nature, technology and capitalism
Giovanni Innella and Gionata Gatto
Celebrating the Plurality of Design Research
Paul A. Rodgers and Joyce Yee
Biography
Paul A. Rodgers is Professor of Design in the Department of Design, Manufacturing and Engineering Management at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. He holds undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Design from Middlesex University and a PhD in Product Design from the University of Westminster, London. His research interests explore the discipline of design and how disruptive design interventions can enact positive change in health and social care and elsewhere. From 2017 to 2021, he held the post of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Priority Area Leadership Fellowship in Design in the UK.
Joyce Yee is Professor of Design and Social Innovation at Northumbria University, UK. She co-founded the Designing Entangled Social Innovation in Asia-Pacific network (www.desiap.org) in 2015 with Dr Yoko Akama, RMIT in Australia, as a peer learning network for designing social innovation practitioners. Her research focusses on culturally diverse and locally relevant practices that challenge the dominant industrialized and Western-centric models of design.
