Looking for the true nature of academic research on design: a systematic review of 27 PhD theses
Samuel Danzon-Chambaud, Rose Dumesny · 2023
The launch of PhD programs in design constitutes yet another milestone that helped settle the field as an academic discipline of its own. As the line between scholarly research on design and design practice can sometimes be perceived as being thin, we believe these theses may hold some truth as to what is making them distinct from each other. To look—so to speak—for the key tenets of academic research on design, we retrieved almost 7,000 references off 27 dissertations, to see which authors were the most cited. We then reflected on the significations it bears. We found that, often, scholarly research on design relies on action research to make an intervention in the form of a prototype, of a framework, or both; that constructivist theories that give agency to material artefacts are actively put to use; and that it ranges from more positivist views to slightly postmodern perspectives.