Design research

Design research was originally constituted as primarily research into the process of design, developing from work in design methods, but the concept has been expanded to include research embedded within the process of design, including work concerned with the context of designing and research-based design practice. The concept retains a sense of generality, aimed at understanding and improving design processes and practices quite broadly, rather than developing domain-specific knowledge within any professional field of design.

Design Research emerged as a recognisable field of study in the 1960s, initially marked by a conference on Design methods at Imperial College London, in 1962. It led to the founding of the Design Research Society (DRS) in 1966. John Christopher Jones (one of the initiators of the 1962 conference) founded a postgraduate Design Research Laboratory at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, and L. Bruce Archer founded the postgraduate Department of Design Research at the Royal College of Art, London, becoming the first Professor of Design Research.

The Design Research Society has always stated its aim as: ‘to promote the study of and research into the process of designing in all its many fields’. Its purpose therefore is to act as a form of learned society, taking a scholarly and domain independent view of the process of designing.

Some of the origins of design methods and design research lay in the emergence after the 2nd World War of operational research methods and management decision-making techniques, the development of creativity techniques in the 1950s, and the beginnings of computer programs for problem solving in the 1960s. A statement by Bruce Archer encapsulated what was going on: ‘The most fundamental challenge to conventional ideas on design has been the growing advocacy of systematic methods of problem solving, borrowed from computer techniques and management theory, for the assessment of design problems and the development of design solutions.’ Herbert A. Simon established the foundations for ‘a science of design’, which would be ‘a body of intellectually tough, analytic, partly formalizable, partly empirical, teachable doctrine about the design process.’

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