Birger Sevaldson Design

Birger Sevaldson Discussions & Movements in Design Research

Birger Sevaldson

Discussions & Movements in Design Research
A systems approach to practice research in design
Abstract
The main approach of this paper is to look at design research from a systems-oriented perspective. This implies that design research is understood as a dynamic and emergent field of interrelated or contradicting thoughts, concepts and ideas. The first three sections of this paper draw cross-sections into the emerging richness in design research as it matures as a genuine mode of knowledge production. They address some of the positions, concepts, and discussions going on in the field, arguing that practice research in design is the most central.
The current
To move forward, I suggest that we need to do two seemingly contradicting things: 1) We need to see the whole in design research. Richard Buchanan (1992) stated early that there is no single definition that adequately covers design. Equally, design research approaches and methods are manifold and complex, a fact that frequently has been overlooked when conceptions of rigour and traditional scientific methods have been discussed and simplistic models have been suggested. A systems perspective on the field of design research provides a holistic and dynamic view that looks at design research as a complex field on the move where new ideas and positions are formed, where there are ideological contradictions and where new patterns of research practice emerge. The systems perspectives that form the backdrop of this analysis stems from the Systems Approach as described by
C.West Churchman as a legacy from World War II and Operations Research developing
2010©FORMakademisk

8

Vol.3 Nr.1 2010, 8-35

Birger Sevaldson Discussions & Movements in Design Research

systems thinking as a means of planning and action (Churchman, 1979). It is also inspired
Designers and Architects teaching at academic institutions refuse to have others defining their discipline. As a result, they tend to over-emphasise the differences between design research and other sciences at the cost of their similarities, and they tend to look at the sciences themselves as uniform. While this reaction is understandable, it is unjustified when it interprets ‘traditional science’ as something unified and something totally in contradiction to design research. In the so-called ‘traditional sciences’, we find a variety of approaches: one such approach is Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) that builds theory from the bottom-up so that the concept of the hypothesis becomes inappropriate.
Visualisation has become central in the hard sciences, in different fields such as astronomy, medicine, fluid dynamics, mathematics, quantum physics, but also in the soft sciences where e.g. complex social systems need to be understood (Miller & Page, 2007). The relation between visualisation and text is ostensive where the text reflects upon what