Research Through Design: Twenty-First Century Makers and Materialities
Abigail C. Durrant, John Vines, Jayne Wallace, Joyce S. R. Yee · Design Issues · 2017
The Research Through Design (RTD) conference is a new, experimental dissemination platform to support design practitionerresearchers. Founded in 2013, RTD was established as a biennial conference series with RTD 2015, held in Cambridge, UK (March 25-27, 2015). 1 This special issue brings together a set of perspectives from those who attended the RTD 2015 conference, offering new experiential insight about what it means to practice, disseminate, and understand design-led inquiry within academic communities and beyond."Research through design" has been used for over 20 years within the design community as a distinct term to describe practice-based inquiry that generates transferrable knowledge.The term has gained traction in many diverse fields of design, from fashion, for example, to human-computer interaction (HCI).Arguably, research through design is not a formal methodological approach with a particular epistemological basis.Instead, it is a foundational concept for approaching inquiry through the practice of design; and as a concept it has been subjected to multiple articulations and interpretations both by individuals and by institutions.In 1993 Sir Christopher Frayling, in dialogue with Bruce Archer and others in the design research studio at the Royal College of Art, articulated a core conceptual tension fueling discussion on the subject: that "research practice" has historically been associated with the scientific method and with "words not deeds," which Frayling suggested might be antithetical to what design practitioners do. 2 Distinctions made between different design research approaches-for example, the "into, through, and for" practice model put forward by Frayling and the "about, for, and through" practice model put forward by Archer 3 -have since been contested and critiqued.Some commentators when making sense of research through design have drawn distinctions between the nature of design research practice in the different working cultures of academia and industry and in different working contexts.4 Others have investigated the different forms of knowledge that design and its artifacts can generate and transfer.5 As academic