design research is reaching adulthood Kees Dorst
During its long journey from being a craft to a sophisticated professional practice and now a firmly established academic discipline, design has had to find novel ways to deal with the ever increasing complexity of the problems it sets to address.
With each new challenge, design first borrowed and then incorporated more research findings, theories and methodologies from such fields as psychology, sociology, business, and physiology.
But yesteryear’ s approaches no longer suffice. Many organisations( commercial and public sector) find themselves powerless in the face of today’ s radically open, complex, dynamic and networked problems. In search of new problem-solving strategies, organisations and business schools have recently turned to the design professions(‘ Design Thinking’) for help— and they have achieved positive results by applying design practices to achieve innovation. However, although designers are better equipped than many other disciplines to deal with these complex problems, the designing disciplines too are hitting the limits of their current approach and paradigm. In earlier times, companies played an important role in the development of new approaches— at both an applied and fundamental level. Look back forty years, and you’ ll find that a large proportion of groundbreaking innovation research happened in the R & D departments of large multinationals. In contrast, these days, as short-term profitability( Return On Investment) has become the main measure of success and many R & D departments are downsized, it is up to universities, through publicly funded initiatives, to push these boundaries forward. With CRISP, the Dutch design research community has a unique opportunity to take the lead in expanding and redefining the design paradigm in face of the new complexities of the modern world. What I find interesting is that the CRISP program will also help to further develop the practices of design research itself. In the early days of design research( the 1960s), the general approach to the study of design was primarily formative— the field emerged from practitioners developing new ways of working to help them cope with the problems they faced. Design research then consisted of more or less informal observations leading to prescrip- tive recommendations of best practices in design. Although these efforts were far from fruitless, and the resulting recommendations were both plausible and useful, the lack of thorough descriptions and explanations made it difficult to critically reflect on each other’ s work and build a stable academic knowledge base. The last decades have seen a tremendous increase in research in this field, and I think it fair to say that we now have a pretty firm empirical foundation, as well as commonly established research practices. What this allows us to do is to move beyond mere observation and description. We know how design works, we know why design works, so we can now start to think about strategy: in what direction do we need to develop design? Which strategies and models will be effective for the complex challenges ahead?
Addressing these questions requires a major shift in the role of the university: it needs to move from being a semi-invisible objective observer to a position in which it is actively involved in the development of this professional field. By inviting other disciplines to become involved in critically questioning and developing the design paradigm, CRISP has created an environment that provokes and fosters the indispensable critical reflection needed for this development. Not a moment too soon— the issues we face in our society( globalisation, sustainability, etc.) will only become more complex and we need to address them through sophisticated design-based innovation.
With CRISP, academic partners take the lead in developing these design-based innovation practices of the future.
kees dorst— 1965 kees. dorst @ uts. edu. au
. Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology. Director, Designing Out Crime
Research Centre Sydney
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