What's design research?
Previous to this weeks discussion on design research my view of the topic was limited to the design and testing of prototypes. Now my scope has broadened to include the design of non-material ideas, such as frameworks and research methods. Instead of classifying research that includes prototype developing as design research, my view is now to classify research that relies on the development and testing of ideas as design research. This view was also supported by the lecture held by Haibo Li, where a lot of focus was put on the importance of good ideas, and how good ideas can be filtered from bad ones. Research that explore ideas, should therefore put effort into explaining and developing the concept phase, where the idea is born, just as much or even more than the testing and development phase.
This weeks seminar also brought up that the main difference between many design research papers where the methods used to come up with the idea. And the development and testing(if there was one) was more straightforward and followed logically upon what the idea claimed to achieve.
One thing that I want to argue is crucial to design research, and that was not brought up so much in the lecture or the seminar, is the importance of the conclusion and suggestions for further development in a design research paper. The artefact/idea that the research produces is not of much value to other researcher unless a critical discussion on how it can be improved is made. This is also what I believe differentiates design research from product development, where the goal of the research is to improve something not only by designing a new artefact that adresses what to be improved, but also to contribute to the knowledge of how something could be improved even further by others. This can be put in contrast to product development by a company where the goal is to improve something to get a market advantage and further improvements are motivated by just that(I guess that this is somewhat the classical argument for why capitalism is an effective system).
I'm not sure, but doesn't suggestions for further development require some kind of specific goal. In our seminar group we discussed design research where the design itself was the goal and no other specific goal was set. What I mean is that why can't you just share your design and let others develop it further? Or maybe that is not research?
SvaraRaderaI agree with you that the conclusions and suggestions for further development is a very important part of design research. The content of a paper about design research might differ from the content a "normal" research paper. By this I mean that the purpose of a "normal" paper probably is to inform the reader about a new discovery or so, while the purpose of design research is to inform the reader about a possible way of conducting a design process. Hence, I totally agree that the conclusions about what could be improved in further development is a vital part of a design research paper.
SvaraRadera