Designing: A new era for design research

Abstract

Design research is the outcome of more than 60 years of growth, yet many still seem to regard and approach it as an emerging discipline. We set out to answer whether we are still an ‘emerging’ discipline, and if an emerging mindset is still productive. We take stock of the discipline, explore some of its most salient challenges, and examine what they could mean for our future. We come to two conclusions. First, we contend that we have emerged, and it is time to adopt a maturing mindset. Second, our historically emerging mindset, while valuable in the past, now challenges maturation by fostering (i) conceptual ambiguity and empirical ambiguity, (ii) satisficing insights, (iii) methodological imbalance, and (iv) prescriptive leaps. We propose a call to action, encouraging a doubling down on designing; taking responsibility for our impact and treating ourselves and our research with the respect that this deserves and demands.

The current state of design research is the outcome of more than 60 years of growth and development (Andreasen, 2011; Cross, 2007). Yet many still seem to regard and approach it as an under-developed or emerging discipline. Of course, some disciplines do have much more substantial histories, but they all began somewhere and somehow: they all arose from modest beginnings and took many decades to mature. Design research ¹ is no different.

But are we still in a stage of under-development: still an ‘emerging’ discipline, and is this emerging mindset still productive for design research? Are we not yet mature? To address this, we need to look back at where we came from, consider where we are now, and conjecture on where we might – and more particularly where we want to – be going. We need to take stock of the discipline, explore some of its most salient underlying challenges, and examine what they could mean for our future.

Approach

In this work we build on a basic theoretical lens that relates discipline maturation to the development of a distinct (i) body of knowledge, (ii) area of impact, and (iii) methodological landscape (Wang, 2018). To reflect on maturation, we draw together inputs and perspectives to gain an understanding of the mindsets (the values, principles, and beliefs, that inform action (Daalhuizen and Cash, 2021)) across the discipline. This was based on many conversations – some more formal, others more informal – with fellow researchers from all career stages, as well as data from the workshops and discussions around the Research Notes project ² (Cash et al., 2022). In this way, we have sought to balance clarity of narrative with representation of diverse perspectives.

Where have we come from?

Disciplines begin to emerge when a few pioneers start to recognise some common interests that suggest possibilities for new approaches, methods, and interpretations (Christensen and Ball, 2019). They develop, usually, from within established university departments and traditional ‘parent’ disciplines. That’s why these emergent disciplines can initially create frictions and attract criticisms, can be difficult and challenging, and can take some time to become established. These features were clearly present in the early history of design research (Cross, 2007).

The starting points for our current conception of design research were in the early conferences and societies that appeared in the 1950s and 1960s. The Japanese Society for the Science of Design was founded in 1954, and the 1962 Conference on Design Methods (in London) led to the 1966 founding of both the Design Research Society in the UK and the Design Methods Group in the USA. ³ Later, a group of Scandinavian, German, and Czech scholars and engineers founded the informal WDK (Workshop Design Konstruktion), which become the International Conference on Engineering Design in 1981 and contributed to the formation of the Design Society in 2000. ⁴ At the core of these initiatives was the perception of design as a process – the activity of designing – that could be common to and conceivably extend beyond the boundaries of individual areas of design practice. This perception provided the foundations for design research as a discipline: an academic subject, as well as and more than a practical art (Cross, 1982).

Emerging disciplines are characterised (in hindsight) by their initial novelty and challenges, with slow apparent progress to begin with. A period of more rapid growth follows, marked by increases in publications, with new journals and outlets (especially conferences) for presentation, discussion, and dissemination of new research (Wang, 2018). This eventually leads to the emerging discipline establishing its own internal coherence, which connects to and influences other disciplines (including its ‘parents’), with both internal and external recognition of the new discipline. Growing from our foundations, this trajectory is clearly evident across the early and more recent history of design research (Christensen and Ball, 2019). Further, this helps draw a distinction between maturation of the research discipline and maturation of practice. This is significant because many aspects of design practice are almost continuously emerging, with the development of new technologies, application areas, and techniques. Yet, by developing underlying knowledge and methodological practices the research discipline can mature whilst still responding to and incorporating these dynamic shifts in practice.

Within our own circles this trajectory has been associated with a struggle for recognition of design research as a distinct body of knowledge, underpinning, and establishing a specific area of impact, and building a set of research methods combining traditional approaches with more designerly ways of knowing. This has been further stressed by the rapid and continued development evident in practice as well as the ongoing relationship between practice and research approaches in design. In many ways these struggles have invited implicit questions of legitimacy: is design research knowledge distinct; do design methods and theory offer insight and impact; are design research methods ‘valid’? Such questions are asked as much by ourselves as by our partner disciplines in management, healthcare, education, and so on. Together with many other subtle influences, this has led to an emerging mindset that is often, broadly outward-focused – looking for recognition – rather than inward-focused – looking for deeper understanding of the discipline.

Yet the legitimacy of design research as a distinct body of knowledge has been largely demonstrated, with its own theory, perspectives, and insights. The value of design research insights is recognised across our focal subject areas as well as by our peers and collaborators in other disciplines. We have seen the articulation and consolidation of core concepts and strategies of design thinking around conjecture-based framing and progression, as well as applications of design theory at various levels. We have multiple productive process models and approaches, and multiple effective methods; they may not all be fully evidenced and validated but they are certainly used and valued. We have also seen the emergence of design out of parent, area-specific departments into self-standing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary departments, schools, faculties, and colleges. Our value has been demonstrated in designerly ways of knowing and thinking, design-based research in synergy with research-based design, and robust framing of these forms of design research (Stappers and Giaccardi, 2017). More generally, our value has been established in how design research insights have been developed through, not in spite of, a diversity of views and voices.

So, are questions of emergence and legitimacy still valid, or is it time to think of ourselves as a maturing discipline? We contend that design research is on the cusp of transitioning to a mature discipline. We now need to acknowledge that we have emerged, and it is time to address ourselves to questions of maturation.

Where are we now?

To answer such questions, we must first ask what aspects of our emerging mindset are still productive for design research, and which should be reconsidered?

Ambiguous knowledge

While a degree of ambiguity around design research knowledge and insights has contributed to the discipline’s emergence by fostering broad appeal, it now undermines maturation by hampering the development of a ‘distinct’ body of knowledge.

Design concepts, theories, and claims have typically been discussed in general terms, focussing on capturing cornerstone ideas about design. For example, co-evolution (Crilly, 2021a, 2021b) and (re)framing (Dorst, 2011) both strive to describe something essential about designing. Yet, the very breadth of these ideas means that it becomes ambiguous what they really are, where they might (not) apply, and what might differentiate them from similar ideas in other disciplines. For example, (re)framing has grown out of work in sociology (Bateson, 1972) and psychology (Tversky and Kahneman, 1981), and hence is characteristic of design (from artistic to engineering) but also creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, management, and many more. This ambiguity also invites other disciplines not just to build on our ideas but to rebuild them wholesale, whilst often leaving the link to design research behind, as has been the case in areas of design thinking and innovation (Cross, 2023). While conceptual ambiguity has allowed us to establish points of commonality across a diverse, emerging discipline and promote design research contributions, it also raises questions about how we develop design knowledge, the actual scope of this knowledge, and how it might be distinguished from that in other disciplines.

Exacerbating this are two elements of empirical ambiguity. First, while conceptual scope is broad, empirical scope is much narrower and typically reflects a specific – often implicit – interpretation of the underlying knowledge. Second, when narrowing the empirical scope, boundary conditions and their relationships with theory are rarely discussed. For example, no one study can examine (re)framing across all its possible interpretations and applications. Yet it is also not typically possible to combine studies because their individual interpretations and boundary conditions are themselves ambiguous, as has been found in work on design fixation, for example (Crilly and Cardoso, 2017). While this empirical ambiguity makes sense in an emerging discipline where many boundary conditions or conceptual elements are unknown this is no longer the case in much of design research. Even when practices might be dynamic many of the underlying research perspectives remain somewhat more stable, as evidenced by the consistency of research topics such as design cognition (Hay et al., 2020), design creativity (e.g. Goldschmidt and Tatsa, 2005), and co-evolution of problem and solution (Crilly, 2021a, 2021b). Hence, empirical ambiguity creates barriers to both resolving conceptual ambiguity and moving toward more mature answers about the actual scope of the discipline.

These ambiguities contribute to a consistent perception, in design research and beyond, that we are insight rich but theory poor. This not only invites other disciplines to (re)invent their own design theory but hinders our ability to move beyond our founding ideas. Thus, we need a new maturing mindset in our approach to conceptual and empirical ambiguity if we are to further grow and distinguish ourselves as a discipline.

Satisficing insights

A ‘good enough’ or satisficing approach to insights, while valuable in establishing the early significance of design research, now undermines maturation by impeding development of fundamental design understanding.

Design insights are routinely applied but rarely severely challenged or substantially updated. We typically ask weak questions of our insights, either ones that we broadly know the answers to, or that do not reveal something new about or truly challenge the underlying ideas. For example, a great deal of design research asks if or how things can be applied, if things descriptively correlate, or if an insight ‘beats’ a control or baseline condition. Many of our major theories have not significantly progressed across decades, often despite the explicit invitation of the originating or popularising authors (Beck and Chiapello, 2018; Love, 2002). Essentially, we have almost routinised asking uncritically about known-knowns and – to some degree – unknown-knowns in terms of design insights (Cash, 2020). Yet to remain relevant and mature as a discipline we must also challenge our ideas in such a way that we might reveal known-unknowns or unknown-unknowns. While the ability to quickly get to the gist of an idea and popularise it has been essential to our emerging discipline, maturation now requires questioning these ideas and moving beyond them.

Further, our application of insights often also does not contribute to more basic design understanding (Smeenk et al., 2024). This is despite the fact that most design insights require us to ‘fill in the blanks’ in applications, adapting descriptive ideas into prescriptive methods, elaborating explanations for contextual practices, or simply facilitating them tacitly. For example, there are many applications and methods building on co-evolution in design, management, healthcare, and many other disciplines, each adapting the idea in some way or overcoming some contextual issue. Yet co-evolution itself has remained largely unchanged (Crilly, 2021a). We typically ask our insights to be just ‘good enough’ to ‘beat’ doing things as they have always been done or for an expert researcher/practitioner to fill in the gaps and make them work in practice. Critically, this approach to application also creates tension between research and practice because description-based prescriptions only remain relevant as long as the application context is stable. Hence, such prescriptions can falter in the face of the rapid changes in practice found in almost all aspects of design, from the integration of AI in engineering design to the recent developments of service design, interaction design, designing for transition or codesign (and so on). This makes explanation building essential to maturing our research discipline in relation to a dynamic practice. Thus, while direct application is appropriate for an emerging discipline where ‘what has always been done’ is the baseline to surpass, it is poorly suited to a maturing discipline where there are multiple potentially relevant and valuable insights (from design research and other disciplines).

By maintaining a satisficing emerging mindset, we run the risk of becoming irrelevant as we either exhaust applications of our current knowledge or face paradigm shifting changes, for example in context, that invalidate this knowledge. As one conversation partner rather bluntly put it ‘perhaps design research has simply run its course’. Thus, we need a new maturing mindset towards the questions we ask as well as how we can balance impact and understanding in our applications.

Methodological imbalance

A methodological landscape weighted towards exploration has long made sense in a discipline needing to define and describe its constituent parts. However, this imbalance now jeopardises maturation by hindering stocktaking and sensemaking efforts.

Across the discipline there is a general leaning towards descriptive and exploratory work that serves to expand the scope of design research (Cash, 2020). Yet, this has not been counterbalanced by work synthesising these explorations to consolidate and deepen our understanding. This is illustrated by the general lack of conceptual synthesis, theory testing, conclusive research, refutation and falsification, or more general features of handover between knowledge building and knowledge testing (Cash, 2018). For example, there is a substantial discrepancy between the number of propositional frameworks, models, and methods in comparison to work evaluating or elaborating these. Further, as in Section Satisficing insights, there is a preponderance of exploratory applications of design insights, without the corresponding work required to synthesise basic understanding from these. Finally, despite much of design research being concerned with explanation and prescription-based change in some form or another, explanatory insights are relatively sparse in comparison to descriptive accounts (Briggs, 2006; Dorst, 2008). Hence, while exploratory and descriptive work has been, and remains, extremely valuable it needs a more substantive counterpart if the discipline – as a whole – is to move forward.

In addition to this imbalance, there is a general homogenisation of the methodological discourse in design research. Specifically, there is still substantial tension surrounding how design research can accommodate different research paradigms (Clemente et al., 2019; Cross, 2001; Stappers et al., 2024). This is exacerbated by a general lack of reporting of methodological issues and ambiguities in the links between the conceptual and empirical dimensions of design research publications, that is, it is often not clear what the research methods are doing in relation to knowledge in the discipline and how their quality should be discussed. For example, authors rarely differentiate descriptive and explanatory knowledge building, exploratory or conclusive testing, and research is often insight rich but theory poor (Cash, 2020; Love, 2002; Toh et al., 2022). This is compounded by an ambiguity in our discussion of design knowledge and design methodology. For example, leaps from gist-like ideas and descriptions to prescription are still common (see the next section), hindering coherent explanation building. This is associated with a general lack of clear norms around how we differentiate and integrate diverse ways of knowing, developing knowledge, research methods, and prescriptions. While these issues have remained somewhat limited as various branches of design research have emerged in parallel (e.g. engineering, industrial design, human computer interaction (HCI), socio-technical systems (STS), UX design, and so on), they now pose a threat to bringing together insights across the discipline and appreciating and leveraging our diversity in maturation.

Despite the need to continue exploratory and descriptive work of all types, retaining an imbalanced emerging mindset endangers wider knowledge building and diversity within the discipline. In many ways we are still adopting emerging methodologies and getting emerging answers, despite increasingly having mature questions that demand mature methodologies. Thus, we need a new maturing mindset that rebalances our methodological landscape and helps build synergy across a diverse discipline.

Design methodology for the sake of design methodology

A propensity to leap from exploratory or descriptive research insights to prescriptive design methodologies ⁵ (in various forms) has contributed to a close link between design research and practice as well as the early and rapid professionalization of the discipline. However, such prescriptive leaps now hinder maturation by limiting consolidation, comparison, and quality assessment.

Across the discipline, as well as in disciplines that draw on design methodologies, there is a consistent concern regarding our proclivity to leap from insight to prescription (Cash et al., 2022). This can be seen in the huge number of design process models, methods, templates, recommendations, and other guidance, compared to the startling lack of research evidence for most of them. Here again, we observe a satisficing approach where design methodologies are routinely proposed but rarely severely challenged or substantially updated. There is a prevailing view that proposed methods or methodologies are good enough if they demonstrate some improvement in practice within the context where they were developed, without the need for deeper explanation. In addition, we lack efforts to develop standards for establishing quality, efficacy and effectiveness common in disciplines like implementation science (Gottfredson et al., 2015). Working in this way means that while we can often describe before/after impact in specific contexts, we often struggle to explain how and why they work, change, or don’t work, when translated to other contexts. This becomes a design methodology microcosm of the challenges outlined in the prior sections and leaves lingering questions regarding the long-term legitimacy of design methodologies, especially as more and more methodologies are proposed.

In addition to these lingering questions, leaping from description to prescription undermines wider knowledge building in the discipline. The combination of description-based methodologies and a tendency towards descriptive, correlational demonstrations/testing (rather than causal) short-circuits the development of deeper, crosscutting explanations and knowledge. For example, it is still common to find a lack of distinction between theory and methodology, which although interconnected and mutually enriching, are fundamentally different in nature and purpose. This limitation in explanation also links to an acknowledgement that our view on methodologies in educational and practice contexts is still relatively underdeveloped. For example, the differing role and form of methodologies in education versus levels of expert practice is tacitly accepted but little explained, resulting in a homogenisation of methodological reporting and presentation. Further, unlike many of our related disciplines, our discussions of methodological assessment still lack nuanced differentiation between tests of coherence, efficacy, effectiveness, and impact (Cash et al., 2023). More generally, we still lack effective norms and standards for the development and evidencing of design methodologies that respect the often-abductive logic, co-evolutionary and situated, contextual nature of design work (Cash et al., 2022). Here it is salient to contrast our trajectory of maturation against that in, for example, the equally new discipline of implementation science (e.g. Damschroder et al., 2009), where such discussions are comparatively substantial. In this way, methodology focused design research has both blossomed and now stagnated in large part due to the emerging mindset.

If we accept that design methodologies are impactful, then we must also accept the need to treat their research basis with a commensurate degree of respect. This raises the question of whether we should consider methodological competence alongside design competence. Thus, we need a new maturing mindset that takes a greater research responsibility for the potential impact of design methodologies in a way that overcomes the often-mentioned concern of over-formalizing and rationalizing design.

Where might we want to go? ‘Doubling down’ on designing

Despite the arguments of the prior section, rather than seeing a discipline of challenges we in fact see a discipline bursting with unrealised potential. Maturity is something that can be embraced as a positive call to action rather than something to be avoided as a constraining burden. This fundamentally means ‘doubling down’ on our discipline, accepting that design research is valuable and impactful, and treating our research with the respect that it both deserves and warrants if even a fraction of our claimed significance is true.

Doubling down on maturing design research means taking the scope of our research and its claims more seriously, differentiating the development of basic and applied design knowledge, and moving beyond satisficing to kick-start the next generation of exploration, knowledge development, and methodology in our discipline. This also means embracing, but differentiating, the methods we use and the claims we make to support growth in all areas of understanding.

Doubling down on maturing our relationship with practice means accepting that ‘with great power comes great responsibility’; design research has the power to shape understanding of design identity and skills, outcomes, and methodologies across disciplines, but we need to treat that power with the appropriate respect. We need to establish how we can take responsibility and hold ourselves to account without compromising what makes design research design research or becoming a poor reflection of other disciplines. We also need to clarify how we can mature our research discipline whilst embracing the dynamic nature of practice itself. We are not defined by an emerging mindset and can, and must, find a mature way forward.

Almost as importantly as what it means, doubling down on maturation does not mean falling into the trap – as has been widely discussed in related disciplines (e.g. Eisenhardt et al., 2016)–of over-focus on rarified theory, replicability, and rigour (mortis), or filtering out all those ambiguous and exploratory areas, practices, or methodologies that do not fit some ‘standard template’. Rather it means embracing when things are truly emergent and exploratory vs when they are more mature and creating an ecosystem of development and growth; not denying our core principles but rather turning them into strengths.

Conclusions

We set out to answer the question of whether we are still an ‘emerging’ discipline, and if an emerging mindset is still productive for design research. In answer, we offer two resounding responses. First, we contend that we have emerged, and it is now time to address ourselves to questions of maturation through a maturing mindset. Second, our historically emerging mindset, while valuable in the past, now significantly challenges this maturation by fostering (i) conceptual ambiguity and empirical ambiguity, (ii) satisficing insights, (iii) methodological imbalance, and (iv) prescriptive leaps. However, while these challenges are real and substantial, we see a maturing mindset as a fundamentally positive call to action. Doubling down on designing means taking responsibility for our, very real, impact, and treating ourselves and our research with the respect that this deserves and demands.

In terms of submissions to Designing, we would like to see well-founded, more theoretically ambitious research articles bringing together and challenging, as well as extending, design research knowledge; research notes further consolidating and extending the scope and quality of our research methods and approaches to theorizing; and both research articles and research notes advancing our understanding of design methodologies and their impact as well as the tools we use to develop and evaluate these.