Research through Design

For a long time, design and research have been regarded as separate endeavors – the former residing in industrial practice and craft, the latter in academic experiments and reflection. In the past decades, as areas such as interaction design and other forms of design were growing their academic basis, became more widespread as subjects taught at universities, and grew a research culture, two things happened. First, doing research became a recognized part of designing products (and later services). Second, design activities, along with designed artifacts, would become established as the chief elements in the process of generating and communicating knowledge. Ever since Frayling’s influential speech (1993, 2015), these two have become referred to as research for design and research through design (RtD), respectively.

As of the latter years of the 2010s, explicit theory about RtD is still in its formative stage. Given this, the involved communities are still struggling to find the right words, models, and practices. In this chapter, outlined in Table 1.1, we try to sketch the field and its themes, show what’s been published, and draw parallels to other research approaches, both within interaction design and in broader areas of design and engineering.