Abstract
The development of design theory has been at the core of design scholarship since the 1960s. However, this theoretical and philosophical development has often been artificially separated from critical contexts where designing occurs: in design education and design practice. In this perspective paper, I propose that researchers build links across theory, practice, and education, recognizing that the complexity of designing can be enriched through an ecological view that accounts for design knowledge, design praxis, and the various actors involved in this ecosystem. I conclude with provocations to encourage this integration of design education, design practice, and design theory.
Keywords
The development of design theory has been at the core of design scholarship since the 1960s (Alexander, 1964; Archer, 1968; Jones, 1970). Even in the early moments of the design methods movement, Jones (1970) argued that design should be understood not merely as an intuitive craft but as a systematic process that was explainable and could be supported through the addition of new, purpose-built tools. He emphasized the interplay of knowledge and process, insisting that methods could help structure and communicate design activity and, crucially, could be taught. This perspective, later developed by Cross (1980, 1982), opened up the possibility of treating education as a central site for developing designing capability—and developing new forms of knowledge to better support the education of designers.
Jones’s project leaned heavily toward systematization—codifying design into a formal repertoire of methods that could be applied across situations. What was less visible in his framing were the messy, adaptive, and performative aspects of practice, or the ways in which design education itself might serve as a site of knowledge production rather than a delivery mechanism for pre-defined methods. While Cross (1980) referred to the “teachable” and “learnable” qualities of design knowledge (i.e., methods), the situated details of how that learning occurs or can be measured were often under-theorized or under-described.
To address this longstanding interest of the design research community, I propose the need to explicitly link design practice and design education. Discussions of design theory have often taken place in ways that are separate from one or both of these critical contexts of design activity, which risks either theorizing about an idealistic or disconnected view of design behavior (when lacking connections to practice; Roedl and Stolterman, 2013; Rogers, 2012) or assuming designers have certain capacities, competencies, or skills without questioning where or how these are developed (when lacking connections to education; Crismond and Adams, 2012). When theory loses touch with practice, it risks constructing an idealized or mythical “designer”; when it ignores education, it risks assuming abilities and competencies without asking where they come from.
Building links across theory, practice, and education
The design studio has long served as a bridge between students and practitioners, offering a natural site for student and professional design identities to be contested, constructed, and realized (Brandt et al., 2013; Gray, 2014a, 2014b). However, most theory-building has bypassed this bridge, treating education and practice as separate domains rather than intertwined contexts. For instance, when studying design identity, most work is cleanly divided as either pertaining to design practice (Björklund et al., 2020; Kunrath et al., 2020) or design education (Gray, 2014a, 2014b; Tracey and Hutchinson, 2018)—with virtually no work connecting a student’s design identity to their future professional identity. Even within these siloes, complexity has frequently been reduced to make things easier to parse. Schön (1983) highlighted the importance of reflection in the studio but overlooked the wider ecology and range of actors in design education (Webster, 2008). Jones (1970) emphasized the importance of considering the complexity of process and design knowledge, but many guides that inform practice still rely on “cookbook”-like conceptions of methods that underemphasize performance, adaptation, and attention to ecologies of use (Gericke et al., 2020; Gray, 2022). This leaves design scholars with a central challenge: how might design theory be reimagined to account simultaneously for education, practice, and their respective entanglements?
Practice: Grounding theory in lived design work
In the last decade, there has been a surge of research that seeks to explore the complexity of actual design practices, particularly in the domain of human–computer interaction. 1 Much of this work builds on what Stolterman (2008) describes as the “design complexity” of the situation that is experienced first-hand by designers. This articulation of complexity subsumes “all kinds of decisions and judgments [the designer must make], such as, how to frame the situation, who to listen to, what to pay attention to, what to dismiss, and how to explore, extract, recognize, and choose useful information from all of these potential sources” (Stolterman, 2008: 57). This acknowledgment of complexity has led to a recognition that practice is not simply a repetition of codified design knowledge but rather a situated performance that brings its own sense of personality, adaptation, and creation of new knowledge (Goodman et al., 2011; Gray, 2016). As examples of this practice-led work, Goodman (2013) and Reeves (2019) have provided rich ethnographic accounts of how common design methods are realized through complex, situated performances in industry contexts. Similarly, Wong (2021), Lindberg et al. (2020, 2021), Rattay et al. (2025), and Gray et al. (2024, 2019) have demonstrated how design practitioners identify and seek to address ethical issues in their work through various forms of design and organizational knowledge, bringing a value dimension to Stolterman’s initial account of design complexity (see also Öz et al., 2025).
There are important opportunities to build on these accounts of practice complexity. Authentic accounts of complexity are still rare in many fields of design and could lead towards a broader base of empirical work that can inform further theorization of design processes and knowledge. Design theory often still appeals to abstractions of what designers do or “should” be rather than recognizing how and what they actually do. Designing encourages more situated accounts of practice—whether through ethnographies, reflective accounts, or narrative methods—that can enrich theory and make it more accountable to lived experiences of designers.
Education: Building design ability and explaining knowledge acquisition
The educational experience is where foundational design ability and skill are cultivated, often through the signature pedagogy of studio (Brandt et al., 2013; Jones et al., 2025; Salama and Wilkinson, 2007). While many elements of design education still have their basis in the Bauhaus or even earlier École des Beaux-Arts roots of studio (Cennamo, 2016), other elements of how design ability is learned are still contested or under-theorized (Coso Strong et al., 2019; Gray, 2014a, 2014b; Siegel and Stolterman, 2008). At the center of this relationship is a consideration of the role of design theory in evaluating or expanding design education practices. As one rare example, Parsons et al. (2023) used the theories of design judgment and problem framing to consider the development of student capacity engaging in wicked design problems. In parallel, Kou et al. (2018) have demonstrated the increasingly volatile nature of inter- and trans-disciplinary design fields, recognizing that contested knowledge bases lead to questions about how disciplinary-focused forms of education might struggle to train designers in these emerging areas of practice. What design theory knowledge might be useful to both describe current design education practices and engage educators in problematizing or generating new forms of design education praxis (as a means of adapting and stabilizing) to address these current and future needs?
Accounts of design education often lack connections to formal educational literature, leaving this work divorced from theories of instruction and learning that could help us better explain what designers do and how they acquire these competencies (Jones et al., 2025). If we are to better understand design ability, we must theorize it as something learned and nurtured—rather than assumed as innate or mysteriously developed. And in doing so, there are opportunities to connect learning theories or paradigms (e.g., constructionism and constructivism) with design theories to better situate what is being learned, how that learning is being supported, and the conditions through which learning might be improved.
Toward integration across contexts
While the literature bases of design theory, education, and practice are often disconnected, what might be gained if we treat these areas as a mutually reinforcing ecology of design knowledge and praxis?
As one example of these connections, design researchers might ask how patterns of professional knowledge and practice are created, stimulated, or transformed. Are industry practices merely a repetition of declarative or procedural knowledge (e.g., methods, principles, or other intermediate-level knowledge; see also (Höök and Löwgren, 2012; Löwgren, 2013)) or are there new embodied, tacit, or judgment-related forms of knowledge that should be equally the focus of design theory? In contrast, are the flexible and volatile forms of knowledge that practitioners use to inform their work the only blueprint by which design education “success” can be measured or evaluated?
Designing is an ideal venue to welcome scholarship that foregrounds these connections across design education and practice, using design theory as a bridge to form integrative accounts of design expertise, knowledge, and praxis. Viewed in a bi-directional way, existing design theory might be tested against existing practices to identify gaps and opportunities for additional theorization, while under-determined or under-theorized practices might benefit from attention by design theorists. This bi-directional integration would not only enrich theory but also clarify its implications for pedagogy and professional design practice.
This leads me to offer a few provocations for future work: • How might we better connect theorizing about design practice with the learning processes through which design ability is developed? • Can we imagine new ways of democratizing design knowledge—expanding who can construct, legitimize, and translate it? • What value might we unlock if education were treated not as a precursor to “real” design but as a key site of design activity in its own right? • Could new forms of design knowledge—precedents, heuristics, and principles—emerge if we began from the educational process itself?
Conclusion
In this perspective paper, I have called attention to areas of design scholarship that have historically been distant and disconnected. By realizing connections across design theory, education, and practice, there are opportunities to build more robust accounts of design activity and design cognition. In doing so, as a research community we can strengthen the foundations of design scholarship and its impact on how future designers learn, work, and create.
