From practices to matter: Social science and new materialist reorientation of ways of knowing,being and becoming-with in design research

Abstract

This article examines design research’s evolving relationship with the social sciences, specifically, how the turn to practice and the more recent shift to new materialism continue to shape our understanding of designing, as well as inform the methods and practices that are routinely part of design research inquiry. Presented is a review of the principles of practice theory and new materialism, with reference to notable design research that has been informed by each shift. The social sciences, especially practice theory and ethnography, have reoriented design research towards situated, socio-cultural contexts. New materialist research nudges design towards entanglements, vibrant matter and ethico-onto-epistemological accountability and views design as world-making, not problem-solving. There has been an onto-epistemological shift from representation to knowing through becoming, not observing. This review draws attention to the possibilities and potential that new materialist perspectives offer for design research.

Since the mid-twentieth century, there have been distinct phases to the study of design. Each connects design research with different methods and particular understandings of human conduct in the material world. While there has been progression in the methods applied and the theoretical underpinnings of design research, there has been no paradigm shift in a Kuhnian sense (Kuhn 1970 p.12), that is, where one method or practice supersedes another. Instead, many different theories and methods co-exist contemporaneously. This broadening of the field was also enabled by an expansion in the academic subject domains and practical work which now recognise that designing – the acts and practices that bring new things into being – are integral to the work they do. There is also a better understanding by industry, policy-makers, professionals, in academia and by the public(s) of design’s entangled impact on everyday life. The act of designing ‘things’ – products, services, environments, as well as new ways of being and political framings – is what humans do when they anticipate the future and bring new realities into being. With this expansion in understanding of what designing entails, the field of design research, its potential research subjects, questions and impacts have diversified, and continue to evolve, which is why further knowledge and understanding of designing continues to be vital.

Given the plurality of approaches to study design, the purpose of this article is to examine how shifts in the social sciences have shaped design research methods and practices, and from this, propose directions for future research. To engage with the question, how the social sciences have shaped our understanding of designing, two notable shifts in the social sciences are examined. The first shift is the turn to practice, and the second is the turn to new materialism. Presented in this paper is a structured review of the key principles of each turn, followed by notable design research that has been informed by each shift. With particular attention to the characteristics of new materialism, the design research that these theories have enabled is discussed in the reflection section of the paper. This review opens up debate on the most recent ontological and epistemological directions in design research and invites further research on ways of knowing, being and becoming through designing.

The cognitive and user-centred roots of design research

The pioneers in the field of design research approached the study of design with questions, insights and understandings informed by their own disciplinary perspectives. What is noticeable is the broad scope of research questions that were being examined: the potential of computing in architecture and how non-professional designers can participate in design, amongst other ideas, as reflected in the papers presented at early Design Research Society conferences (Cross 1971). As the field developed, there was specialisation and sub-fields emerged with their own conference series: in architectural computation, HCI, design cognition and engineering design, although still with design as a core concern. Despite this specialisation, a remarkable characteristic of design research is its methodological pluralism.

The core concerns of early design research were grounded in rationalist problem-solving informed by advances in management science and cognitive science research traditions. There was emphasis on the user, usability and function. Design researchers predominately studied what was going on in a designer’s mind, in the mind’s eye and in a conceptual design space, with gestures viewed as cognitive artefacts. Lines of research enquiry including analogical reasoning, design computing and cognition, which although founded on twentieth century studies, continue to be relevant in the twenty-first century.

The turn to practice

In the twenty-first century design research inquiry, as well as understanding of the working practices of designers, has been influenced by the practice turn in the social sciences. The turn to practice marked a shift away from the cognitive sciences towards the study of social interaction and the routine embodied actions, activities and practices through which life takes place – including design. The practice turn redirected attention away from internal cognition, representational thinking and abstract problem-solving models towards the embodied, socially organised and materially mediated nature of human activity. It redefined design not as a linear or rational activity but as a situated, iterative and practice-based process.

Central to this shift was the move to view knowledge not as something within individual minds but as enacted and shared through everyday practices. In the social sciences, prominent sociologists including Pierre Bourdieu (1977), Theodore Schatzki (2001), Harold Garfinkel (1967; 1984) and Harvey Sacks (1992) laid the foundation for understanding practices as routinised patterns of activity that involve interconnected elements – bodily movements, material engagements and social meanings. This perspective reshaped studies of design, encouraging researchers to see design not merely as a cognitive task but as an embodied, performative and context-dependent activity.

Before the practice turn, ethnography in design was influenced by traditional anthropological methods that were predominantly used to extract user insights, to inform user needs and ideation processes (e.g. input for design briefs, requirements elicitation, product development, personas or scenarios). Ethnographic work was interpretivist, where the goal was to model user needs and behaviours for later design stages. Observations could be instrumental and detached, focussing on what users do, not how practice is constituted. After the practice turn ethnographers began to treat design contexts as practices in themselves, not merely as sources of data. Design ethnography and research-through-design posed ways to engage with, and to reflect on practices in action, for example, Zimmerman and Forlizzi (2007) use speculative artefacts to reveal new insights about the world. Koskinen et al. (2011) constructive design research blurs the boundaries between research and practice, where knowledge is not applied but generated through the act of designing. Rather than positioning design research as methodologically fixed, Krogh and Koskinen (2020) rethink knowledge generation and propose that design drifts with purpose across epistemic traditions. The notion of ‘drifting’ encourages epistemic reflexivity and validates the adaptive, situated nature of design practice (Krogh and Koskinen 2020 pp. 9-15). Knowledge emerges through entangled processes shaped by practice, a position that is developed further in Pedgley’s discussion of research through design (Pedgely 2025). This epistemic shift challenges views of design as a problem-solving process, emphasising instead the iterative, exploratory nature of design practice.

The practice turn reoriented ethnography towards understanding design as a form of practice. This shift was informed by the work of Lucy Suchman, whose critique of plan-based models of action argued that human activity is inherently situated, contingent and emergent. Suchman’s seminal critique of cognitive models, based on her work at Xerox, was pivotal. Her concept of ‘situated action’ argued that human behaviour is improvisational, shaped by unfolding circumstances rather than guided by pre-existing plans (Suchman 2007). Donald Schön’s (1983) idea of the ‘reflective practitioner’ similarly characterised design as a form of reflection-in-action, emphasising the experiential aspects of professional design work. Together, their work laid the ground to view design as a social practice involving gesture, talk, posture, drawing, spatial arrangement and material manipulation.

This re-orientation led to a richer appreciation for how designers, users, artefacts and spaces co-constitute design outcomes in real time and had implications not only on how to develop methods and practices to co-design but also advanced understanding of the nature of design as a series of actions, activities and as a practice itself. This orientation has influenced how design researchers study and intervene in design contexts, prioritising methods that capture the unfolding nature of practice. Studying design in practice, through interactions, materials and settings, and applying theory and methods informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis studies, fine-grained analyses reveal how gestures, talk, gaze and spatial positioning all contribute to the shared construction of design reasoning and outcomes (Donovan et al., 2011; Oak 2011; Luck 2012). These communicative actions are not supplementary but are constitutive of knowledge production. The act of drawing a line, pointing to a detail, or orienting a body in space is not merely illustrative but a performative act – it is designing – to be able to see designing in action (Luck 2014). By tracing these actions, researchers have revealled the micro-practices through which design unfolds, enabling a deeper understanding of how collaboration, creativity and decision-making are organised in practice. The development of digital video tools has enabled researchers to capture and analyse these interactions with greater precision (Buur et al., 2000), which has changed not only the research object but also the methodological skills of designers, as well as researchers.

The practice turn has also reshaped design methodologies, particularly in the areas of design ethnography and theories of situated action by shifting analytical focus away from cognition, representation and internal mental models towards socially organised, embodied and materially mediated activities, using ethnographic methods for capturing routines and embodied activities (Crabtree et al., 2012). Consequently, design ethnographers began to investigate the performative and relational dimensions of design practice. Rather than treating the ethnographic field as a site for data collection, it became a site for co-production, where designers and researchers engage with participants through shared material and social practices. Ethnographic studies now emphasise how meanings, problems and possibilities emerge through doing, not simply through planning or ideation. This has informed the rise of ethnographic design methods that are collaborative, open-ended and experimental – often blurring the line between research and design practice itself (Blomberg and Karasti 2013). Ethnography and the analysis of social interaction, instead of being the preserve of social scientists or design researchers, are now core skills for all designers.

The practice turn changed how design is conceptualised and studied. Design is no longer seen merely as a problem-solving process but as a situated practice embedded in the rhythms, spaces and interactions of everyday life. By emphasising embodiment, materiality and sociality, it has pushed design research towards more grounded, reflexive and relational methodologies. In design practice there has been a methodological shift to ethnography, co-design and longer-term context-rich engagement and field-based interventions, with an epistemological shift from needs to practices and increased ethical-political emphasis on participation and reflexivity.

A new materialist shift in design

In recent years, new materialism has emerged as a significant theoretical orientation that is offering fresh perspectives on materiality, agency, ontology and ethics. Unlike traditional approaches that treat materials as passive elements subordinate to human intention, new materialist thinking foregrounds the active participation of matter in design and is beginning to reshape key assumptions in design theory and practice.

Material agency and distributed assemblages

One of the defining features of new materialism is its emphasis on the agency of matter. The notion of ‘thing-power’ (Bennett 2010 p.125) argues that materials possess a kind of agency that influences human actions. This has been particularly influential in fields that engage directly with material properties, prompting researchers and practitioners to consider materials as co-designers rather than inert resources (Binder et al., 2011; Marenko 2015).

Posthumanism, intra-action and entanglement of nature and culture

New materialism is deeply entwined with posthumanist thought, which challenges anthropocentric perspectives and calls for a decentering of the human subject in design processes (Braidotti 2013). Rather than treating the natural and the cultural as separate domains, new materialists emphasise their mutual entanglement. This challenges binary oppositions like nature/culture, subject/object and mind/body. There is a focus on assemblages, networks and relations, often exploring how things come together in complex, dynamic networks of human and non-human entities. The theory of intra-action (Barad 2007 p.33) posits that entities emerge through their relations, rather than existing as discrete pre-formed actors. This view challenges conventional human-centred design frameworks, inviting instead a relational ontology in which both designers and materials are constituted through mutual becoming, for example, in biodesign projects involving living materials such as fungi, algae and bacteria (e.g. Chittenden 2025; Ginsberg and Chieza 2018) in a design process of co-emergence, where biological life forms participate in aesthetic and functional decision-making.

Emergence, generative systems, affect and craft

New materialist approaches prioritise process over product, foregrounding the ongoing, emergent and relational nature of design. Ingold (2013 p.21) describes making as a mode of ‘correspondence with materials’ which not only blurs the boundary between maker and material but also extends design agency to the broader ecological system. Willis (2006) underscores the reciprocal nature of ontological designing by acknowledging that we are shaped by what we design. These perspectives support methodologies that are iterative, speculative and open-ended, aligning with experimental and participatory design practices, as well as further studies of research through practitioner actions.

Recent explorations in digital-material hybrid systems, where computational design engages with material feedback in emergent ways, such as Neri Oxman’s work in material ecology, exemplify a new materialist shift by integrating biology, computation and architecture. Explorations foreground the ecological, temporal and affective dimensions of materiality, positioning design as an embedded and co-adaptive practice, where design emerges from the interplay of material behaviour and environmental responsiveness (Oxman and Rosenberg 2012; Smith et al., 2020). This reflects an ontological commitment to process over product and encourages an understanding of design as processual, emergent and open-ended, with less emphasis on final outputs and more on evolving systems and interactions.

Ethics, ontology and epistemology

Ethical and epistemological concerns are also central to new materialist design thinking. Barad posits that ethics, ontology and epistemology are inseparable, coining the term ethico-onto-epistemology (Barad 2007 p.90). This framework has informed a growing movement in design research towards reflexive, responsible and situated practice. Haraway’s (1988) theory of situated knowledges reinforces this orientation by highlighting the partial and context-bound nature of all knowledge production, challenging the objectivist assumptions that have long dominated design research. From this understanding, there will be an account for how knowledge is produced through practice and how that production carries ethical consequences, not just in what is designed but how and with what. Indeed, all accounts of what is the case carry the values of the communities from which they issue (Gergen 2023).

There is an ethics of entanglement that is known in anthropology, in Haraway’s (2016 p.28) concept of response-ability, which emphasises being accountable within the mesh of relations that constitute the world. This ethic moves beyond abstract ideals to foreground situated responsibility, affective engagement and care in design practices. Akama’s participatory and speculative design practices with Indigenous communities demonstrate how design can be a co-creative, responsive process rooted in local ecologies and histories (Akama 2014) and by treating materials as active agents in shaping design outcomes reflects (Bennett 2010 p.171) notion of vibrant matter.

New materialist ways of knowing are also embraced in design anthropology, an emergent field in design research. Debates at the seminal DAF Design Anthropological Futures symposia (Smith et al., 2016) and as described in the DAIM design anthropological innovation model (Halse et al., 2010) draw attention to ethico-ontological and epistemological shifts in design research and practice – away from observers or problem-solvers, towards embedded participants in uncertain, material worlds where outcomes are co-produced and contingent. Design anthropology has reconceptualised the co-creation of knowledge, treating materials as participants in ethnographic encounters, shifting attention from what people say about objects to what objects do in practice (Otto and Smith, 2013). This shift chimes with Haraway’s (2016 p.28) response-ability and Barad’s intra-action (Barad 2007 p.14) proving ethical and ontological foundations to position designing as a form of worlding rather than problem-solving. For example, Smith’s speculative ethnographies emphasise the entanglement of material and social worlds to understand how technologies, environments and human experiences co-constitute one another (Smith et al., 2020).

Evolving ways of knowing, being and becoming with design

Through this review of two more recent shifts in the social sciences, new materialism can be seen to offer a robust theoretical foundation for rethinking the ontological, epistemological and ethical dimensions of design research. New materialism is beginning to reshape the landscape of design research. By recognising the agency of matter, decentering the human and emphasising relational, situated practices, it offers a framework for ethically engaged, materially attuned and ecologically responsive design. Through the contributions of theorists like Barad, Haraway and Bennett and design researcher-practitioners including Akama and Smith, design is no longer seen as a detached, interpretivist activity but as an entangled process of becoming, care and co-creation.

By decentring the human and foregrounding the agency of materials, new materialism has challenged conventional binaries between subject and object, theory and practice, human and non-human. Together, these strands articulate a design philosophy grounded in entanglement, emergence and ethical responsibility. Design becomes world-making and not problem-solving. There is a shift from representation to onto-epistemology: knowing through becoming-with, not observing.

The fields of design research that have most notably engaged with new materialist informed ways of knowing, being and becoming-with to date include design anthropology, relational design and participatory design. It is also in exploratory research areas, including the biodesign, ecological aesthetics and digital-material hybridisation projects that are reported in this paper, where new materialist perspectives show potential. What this review suggests is that some specialist fields of design research, such as computational design and biomimetic architecture, may also offer important insights for the broader design research community.

Building on this review, what are the critical questions for design research now? What is the research that we need?

• What can new materialist ways of knowing, being and becoming reveal, to better understand designing?

• What impact does new materialism have on participatory design or user-centred thinking?

• What are potential conflicts in new materialist ways of knowing, for example, in relativism and ethical ambiguity?

Given the potential of new materialist perspectives to further our knowledge and understanding of designing, I would like to encourage research in this journal that engages with these ethico-onto-epistemological debates – research that asks questions that reveal something novel about designing, which could not have been known in the twentieth century. In this way, studies of designing will continue to evolve.

Conclusion

A characteristic of design research is its theoretical and methodological pluralism; however within a broad spectrum of approaches, two notable shifts informed by the social sciences have ground design in context, culture and power. The first is the turn to practice, which changed how design is viewed as a practice and how the actions, activities and practices of design are constructed through embodied actions in situ. The second shift is the more recent influence of new materialism, which has introduced divergent ways of being, knowing and becoming through design. New materialist design research pushes design towards entanglements, vibrant matter and ethico-onto-epistemological accountability and views design as world-making. There has been an onto-epistemological shift from representation to knowing through becoming-with, not observing. The call to action is for more research to advance design knowledge(s) and understanding of designing through new materialist inquiry.