Design Research Society
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| Charity | |
| Founded | 1966 |
| Headquarters | United Kingdom |
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Area served
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Worldwide |
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Key people
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John Chris Jones, L. Bruce Archer, Nigel Cross |
| Website | www |
The Design Research Society (DRS), founded in the United Kingdom in 1966, is an international society for developing and supporting the interests of the design research community. The primary purpose of the DRS, as embodied in its first statement of rules, is to promote ‘the study of and research into the process of designing in all its many fields'. This established the intention of being an interdisciplinary, learned society, taking a scholarly and domain independent view of the process of designing. Membership is open to anyone interested in design research, and members with established experience and a strong background in design research may apply to be elected as a DRS Fellow.[1]
The origins of the Society lay in the first conference on design methods, held in London in 1962, which enabled a core of people to be identified who shared interests in new approaches to the process of designing.
Initially, the DRS promoted its aims through a series of one-day conferences and the publication of a quarterly newsletter to members. However, within a few years, unsuccessful attempts to establish a published journal and fruitless internal debate about the Society's goals led to inactivity. The Society was revived by its first major international conference, on design participation, held in Manchester in 1971. At that conference a meeting of DRS members led to a call for a special general meeting of the Society, and to changes of officers and council members. Subsequently, a series of conferences was held through the 1970s and 80s: in London (1973), Portsmouth (1976, 1980), Istanbul (1978), and Bath (1984).
In the mid-1970s DRS also collaborated with the Design Methods Group, based in the USA, including publishing a joint journal, Design Research and Methods.
By the late 1970s there was enough enthusiasm, and evidence of design research activity around the world, for the DRS to approach IPC Press (now Elsevier Science) with a successful proposal for its own journal. Design Studies, the international journal for design research, was launched in 1979. A monthly internet news bulletin DesignResearchNews was started in 1998 and has over 9000 subscribers. Between 2006 and 2009 the Society also published a quarterly newsletter, Design Research Quarterly.
A new biennial series of DRS conferences began in 2002 with the 'Common Ground' conference in London. Subsequent ones have been in Melbourne, Australia (2004), Lisbon, Portugal (2006), Sheffield, UK (2008), Montreal, Canada (2010). In 2005 DRS was one of the founding members of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR), which also holds biennial congresses.
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