(Un)Frayling design research in design education for the 21st Century

Abstract

This paper will focus on redefining design research education for the 21st Century. In this context, we will contextualize critical issues emerging from analyzing Christopher Frayling’s seminal paper Research in Art and Design by reviewing seminal theoretical work in the field of design by Archer (1968), Cross (1983), Jones (1970), and contemporary critiques such as Herriott (2019), and the authors (2019). By implementing an historical account into previous work, we will deconstruct Frayling’s structuring and why he articulated his framework leading to our critique of the fundamental problems arising from it. In the process, we build from previous work by the authors to reposition the ontological nature of design knowledge around notions of prospectivity, abductivity, and probabilism. This positioning emancipates design from the present, thus overcoming the scientific/tacit paradigms liberating design to operate in its true future-led prospective and transformational nature.