2006 Design Research Society . International Conference in Lisbon . IADE
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Research through DESIGN through research
- a problem statement and a conceptual sketch

Wolfgang Jonas
School of Arts and Designm University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany
jonasw@snafu.de





0) Problem statement:

Guiding ideas in design research: for users and / or for design itself?

Design´s ultimate purpose may be the "quality of life". Modernist design claimed to meet people´s needs by
means of 19th century scientific approaches, sometimes even using simplified and misinterpreted concepts of
purpose-oriented evolution, leading to ideological positions as the notorious "form follows function" (Michl
2001-02). This "belief in science" still applied to main parts of the Design Methods Movement of the 1960s.
And it still applies to major parts of the current "Design Research Movement" (DRM, my own term, W.J.),
which started in the 1980s.

The DRM addresses two related questions: (1) internally, regarding the disciplinary status: how can design become a
respected academic field?, and (2) externally, regarding design´s benefit for society: how can design contribute to human-
centred innovation? The adoption of scientific standards immediately contributes to design´s academic
respectability. Nonetheless, this strategy has a price, since it fails to substantially contribute to tackling practical
issues of social and economic innovation and human well-being. Two reasons are:

Firstly: the failure of de-contextualized scientific approaches to handle the systemic complexity of real world
situations. For a kind of programmatic statement see Weaver´s initial concept of organized complexity (1948), for
an account of the inherent problems in analysing / controlling / designing social systems see Luhmann (1984,
1997).

Secondly: the failure to deal with future developments of real-world systems. Design is involved in proposing the
new, which, by definition, is not predictable. Early Futures Studies were still aimed at prediction, today there are
projective and evolutionary approaches, which explore multiple futures and take the methods rather as learning

2006 Design Research Society . International Conference in Lisbon . IADE
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devices than as forecasting tools. These failures demand us to reconfigure and conjoint the above two
questions into one and ask:
How can design establish its own genuine research paradigm (independent from the sciences, the humanities
and the arts) that is appropriate for dealing with purposeful change in ill-defined (therefore called "complex")
real-world situations?

These issues are embedded in the ongoing debates about shifting modes of knowledge production in the
sciences and in society at large. Nowotny et. al. (2001) claim that science enters the "agora" and explicate
"Mode-2" knowledge production, which is contextualized and which must be "socially robust" rather than
"true". Science is increasingly involved in projects of socio-cultural and technological change, and this can be
interpreted as "science approaching designerly ways of knowledge production" (Jonas 2004). Knowing how
becomes equally important as knowing that (Polanyi 1966).

Concepts such as "research through design" (Frayling 1993), or "project grounded research" (Findeli 1997), or,
although semantics-focussed, "science for design" (Krippendorff 2005) offer promising starting points. But
little has been done since to operationalize these concepts.

1) Evolution as the basic idea

A Darwinian view of natural and cultural processes of development (or design) is deliberately adopted here, since
there is not the least evidence that the development of mankind and socio-cultural processes as a whole follow
a kind of plan or design. The concept of evolution seems to be promising for the sake of theoretical support
and methodological progress. Evolution theory relieves us from assuming an Intelligent Artificer at some mysterious
point of origin. Utter undesignedness, pure chaos was the starting point, no more conditions, no foundations
are required. (Dennett 1995: 69):

"A designed thing, then, is either a living thing or a part of a living thing, or the artifact of a living thing,
organized in any case in aid of this battle against disorder."

A good design theory, as a designed artefact, should be able to explain its own emergence. And so far,
Darwinian thinking, in close combination with operational epistemology (von Foerster 1981), provides the
only descriptive model, which satisfies this self-referential requirement. Any other explanation would be either
a vicious circle or an infinite regress.

This is not to deny that designers / planners / people are able to intentionally design and manufacture a new
teapot, a new aircraft, or a new constitution. But these designs are temporal interventions into evolutionary
processes. Design interventions are episodes in the process of evolution. Most of the results disappear, a few are
integrated into the further process. Failures as well as successes become part of the socio-cultural archive of
mankind.