Let's Get Divorced

Abstract

Over the last two decades, constructive design research (CDR) - more commonly called Research through Design within HCI - has become an accepted mode of scholarly inquiry within the design research community. It has been described as having three distinct genres: lab, field, and showroom. The lab and field genres typically take a pragmatic stance and typically propose a preferred future. Research done following the showroom approach - more commonly known as critical design (CD), speculative design, or design fictions - typically offers a polemic and a critique of the current state embodied in an artifact. Recently, we have observed a growing conflict within the design research community between pragmatic and critical design researchers [4]. To help reduce this conflict, we called for a divorce between CD and pragmatic CDR, advocating that each approach has its own merits and should be evaluated on its own account. Other design researchers have pushed back on this stance, seeking to create some middle ground to connect these two types of research. In this day-long workshop, we seek to look at exemplar CDR and CD case studies, to develop methods for describing, evaluating, replicating, and making use of knowledge outcomes from these two forms of design research.