Notes on the Value of a Design PhD

This article focuses on my practice-based research which employs the artefact-exegesis model to write my novel, Kristal and Marg, exploring the impact of volunteering. It addresses approaches to methodology design for practice-based research, and the place for theory, practice and reflective evaluation within. It also focuses on creativity and flow and approaches to directing the creative process in practice-based research. Informed by my own experience in industry and community immersed in volunteering and altruism, my practice-based research looks at capturing the impact of volunteerism through narrative storytelling. This article focuses on what practice-based research allows for that traditional research methods do not, specifically when measuring and exploring the impact of volunteering. The way researchers have measured the impact of volunteerism in the past has varied and the impact of volunteering continues to prove difficult to measure. Attempting to measure the value of volunteering hours in economic terms can be useful, but does it tell the full story? Through practice-based creative research, I have written a novel which attempts to fill the research gaps by telling the real stories of the impact of volunteering.

This article focuses on my practice-based research which employs the artefact-exegesis model to write my novel, Kristal and Marg, exploring the impact of volunteering. It addresses approaches to methodology design for practice-based research, and the place for theory, practice and reflective evaluation within. It also focuses on creativity and flow and approaches to directing the creative process in practice-based research. Informed by my own experience in industry and community immersed in volunteering and altruism, my practice-based research looks at capturing the impact of volunteerism through narrative storytelling. This article focuses on what practice-based research allows for that traditional research methods do not, specifically when measuring and exploring the impact of volunteering. The way researchers have measured the impact of volunteerism in the past has varied and the impact of volunteering continues to prove difficult to measure. Attempting to measure the value of volunteering hours in economic terms can be useful, but does it tell the full story? Through practice-based creative research, I have written a novel which attempts to fill the research gaps by telling the real stories of the impact of volunteering.

In concluding this book, which was focused on the examination of the research process and practical clinical application of the novel science of translational effectiveness, this present chapter emphasizes the need and necessity for patient-centered, effectiveness-focused, and evidence-based health care globally in the coming decades. The chapter briefly reiterates some of the most fundamental concepts elaborated throughout the chapters of the book. It stresses that the purpose of a comparative effectiveness review is to add to our knowledge about how to enhance (multiple) outcomes of a health-care intervention, and the effective processes of teaching and learning, and in general terms health literacy through dissemination. Research synthesis in practice-based research may as well generate a comparative definitional review, which seeks to uncover a consensus definition for a construct in health-care intervention that is presently not widely accepted. A research synthesis protocol may also be used to generate a “best-case” or “scoping” review, which serves to explore the bibliome. Best-case scoping systematic reviews are often a preliminary part of a definitional and of a comparative effectiveness review and serves to refine search strategies, protocols, methodologies, and inferences. The chapter reiterates and discusses the structure and pursuits of practice-based research networks, with emphasis on realistically deliverable practice-based research outcomes and practice-based research designs, such as the cluster clinical trial. Taken together, the elements in this book and specifically the issues discussed in this chapter yield a program of clinical practice-centered, patient-centered, effectiveness-focused, and evidence-based global research agenda for the next decades that stresses the involvement and empowerment of the patients and all stakeholders through increased health literacy and participation in health-care decisions.

Practice-based Design Research provides a companion to masters and PhD programs in design research through practice. The contributors address a range of models and approaches to practice-based research, consider relationships between industry and academia, researchers and designers, discuss initiatives to support students and faculty during the research process, and explore how students’ experiences of undertaking practice-based research has impacted their future design and research practice. The text is illustrated throughout with case study examples by authors who have set up, taught or undertaken practice-based design research, in a range of national and institutional contexts.

This paper explores the value of design research to better inform design pedagogy in Higher Education. It describes a programme of initiatives aimed at giving staff involved in delivering undergraduate and postgraduate design courses the space, time and place to fully engage with practice-based design research and describes the results of that research. These initiatives aimed to address a perennial problem in design education in the UK. Although being actively involved in research is recognized at the highest levels as beneficial to better staff morale and resulting in better informed teaching, the daily pressures of working in Higher Education combine to restrict the very people who wish to engage with research from doing so. To retain the initial momentum Space/Time/Place provided, the staff established a Community of Practice (COP) ((Lave and Wenger)). The goal of a COP is to bring the peripheral members of the community into full participation within the community guided by more experienced peers who form the core group of the COP. The Space/Time/Place COP met to develop the initial discussions into bids to secure funding for further practice based research. The Community of Practice meetings were supplemented by the use of social media platforms. The strength of support the Space/Time/Place event and Community of Practice have engendered in the staff is undeniable. The outcomes of Space/Time/Place will be exhibited in a group exhibition and used by the authors to model and broker the impact of this approach to other lecturers across the department, faculty and University.

Emerging in the learning sciences field in the early 1990s, qualitative design-based research (DBR) is a relatively new methodological approach to social science and education research. As its name implies, DBR is focused on the design of educational innovations, and the testing of these innovations in the complex and interconnected venue of naturalistic settings. As such, DBR is an explicitly interventionist approach to conducting research, situating the researcher as a part of the complex ecology in which learning and educational innovation takes place. With this in mind, DBR is distinct from more traditional methodologies, including laboratory experiments, ethnographic research, and large-scale implementation. Rather, the goal of DBR is not to prove the merits of any particular intervention, or to reflect passively on a context in which learning occurs, but to examine the practical application of theories of learning themselves in specific, situated contexts. By designing purposeful, naturalistic, and sustainable educational ecologies, researchers can test, extend, or modify their theories and innovations based on their pragmatic viability. This process offers the prospect of generating theory-developing, contextualized knowledge claims that can complement the claims produced by other forms of research. Because of this interventionist, naturalistic stance, DBR has also been the subject of ongoing debate concerning the rigor of its methodology. In many ways, these debates obscure the varied ways DBR has been practiced, the varied types of questions being asked, and the theoretical breadth of researchers who practice DBR. With this in mind, DBR research may involve a diverse range of methods as researchers from a variety of intellectual traditions within the learning sciences and education research design pragmatic innovations based on their theories of learning, and document these complex ecologies using the methodologies and tools most applicable to their questions, focuses, and academic communities. DBR has gained increasing interest in recent years. While it remains a popular methodology for developmental and cognitive learning scientists seeking to explore theory in naturalistic settings, it has also grown in importance to cultural psychology and cultural studies researchers as a methodological approach that aligns in important ways with the participatory commitments of liberatory research. As such, internal tension within the DBR field has also emerged. Yet, though approaches vary, and have distinct genealogies and commitments, DBR might be seen as the broad methodological genre in which Change Laboratory, design-based implementation research (DBIR), social design-based experiments (SDBE), participatory design research (PDR), and research-practice partnerships might be categorized. These critically oriented iterations of DBR have important implications for educational research and educational innovation in historically marginalized settings and the Global South.

The expansion of the design field and the complication of design issues require new design knowledge, and design research in practice is the main way of new design knowledge production. This study conducts multi-level research on the knowledge production phenomenon in practice-based design research, establishes new design research modes from the perspective of knowledge production, and explores the corresponding design research project management strategy. The research purposes of this study are: discovering the mechanism for new knowledge production in practice-based design research; defining the classification of practice-based design research modes based on knowledge production characteristics; and offering design research strategy recommendations from a knowledge production perspective. Aiming at the above research issues, from the perspective of knowledge production, this research applied the new production of knowledge theory and the Legitimation Code Theory. Three theoretical models are proposed, which are knowledge production cross-border model, knowledge production heterogeneity model, and knowledge production process model. Then, the three theoretical models are applied to analyse six design research cases. The conclusion discovered the knowledge production mechanism in practice-based design research, that is, the purpose of research determines the cross-border mode of knowledge production; the quality of design research conclusions is related to the heterogeneity of knowledge production; the knowledge production process contains multiple iterations of semantic waves, and produces powerful knowledge and contextual knowledge. Based on this discovery, four practice-based design research modes are proposed.KeywordsDesign knowledgeKnowledge productionPractice-based design researchResearch strategy

The Netherlands has a world-leading position in potato breeding. This thesis analyses the factors that have influenced the development of the potato breeding industry in the Netherlands. The research focuses on the period from 1888, when the first crossings were carried out by small breeders, until the present. During that period of time a full potato breeding industry has developed. By means of literature research and interviews with various representatives from the potato breeding sector, the required data was collected to analyse the development of the Dutch potato breeding industry. After the introduction and establishment of the potato in Europe at the end of the sixteenth century, it became clear in the nineteenth century that the crop suffers from degeneration. This created a great need for improvement of quality in varieties and seed potatoes. Although The Netherlands is not the first to start with quality improvement, it is efficient in implementing it, especially due to the close collaboration between all parties involved in the potato chain. There is a simultaneous and mutually influencing development in the relationship between the government and the potato breeding industry. The involvement of and support by the government leads to an expansion of research, institutional infrastructure and legislation. The variety trials testing value for cultivation and use, lead to the introduction of the List of Variety in 1924. Advising, coaching and encouraging breeders is combined in a committee from 1938 onwards. The breeding research expands as a result of this support, but also due to the (free) provision of starting material to practice-based and scientific research. The institutional infrastructure of research and variety breeding, supported by the government, peaks in the 1970s. From then on as a result of policy changes, the government increasingly withdraws from practice-based research and the commercial breeding companies take over. From 1888 especially small breeders are active for the first 50 years. After the introduction of the Breeders' Decree in 1941 and its successor, the Seeds and Planting Act, in 1967 there is a strong development of breeding by companies. This is supported by the exclusive property rights (the monopoly) given to the breeder for his varieties to generate income through royalties. Continuously, even in the twenty-first century, new potato breeding companies arise. A unique collaboration between the commercial breeding companies and the small breeders functions to date, as a form of participatory breeding. A large number of factors determine the strategy of breeding. In one respect, it is 'crop driven', an important factor to maintain the level of production, leading to a continuous flow of new varieties. Breeding strategies are primarily influenced by the many diseases in the potato, but also by developments in cultivation, breeding techniques and markets. On the other hand it is 'export driven', which is a powerful engine in the development of the seed potato sector. The conclusion is that three elements have been the most important in the development of a strong potato breeding sector: the broad cooperation, the design of the institutional infrastructure and the remuneration of the breeding work through plant breeders' rights legislation. The result is an ever-renewing diverse variety package. Currently, the potato breeding industry, with some 15 companies and 150 small breeders, is fully developed and well-organized, with a leading position in the world. Due to the increasing investments in breeding technologies, the relationships in cooperating within an initially broad and open platform are changing to a more closed corporate culture. In addition to joining forces for efficiency and market expansion, it will also be a challenge to maintain the broad diversity in the breeding sector and to keep the smaller companies involved.

The current research of eTextiles tends to focus on integrating new functionalities into textile structures in a technology-driven manner. Meanwhile, we approach the development of eTextiles through utilizing interdisciplinary practice-based materials research for creating new types of textile-integrated actuators. Our study aims to shed light on how interdisciplinarity and especially the interphase between scientific thinking and practice-based research can create added value both through contrasts and mutual alignments. Based on interviews of researchers working in that intersection, we have identified some key factors concerning specifically the eTextile environment: differences in ways of thinking, intertwining concepts, common practices, and the need for a certain degree of individual autonomy. Overall, we advance the understanding of the inner workings of interdisciplinary projects and how to better facilitate them, as well as provide some concrete ideas of how this type of research should be supported.

Land-use change driven by the global oil palm boom has widespread environmental and socioeconomic consequences. Recent scientific research offers strategies to mitigate negative effects of oil palm cultivation. This Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy article presents a design-based research (DBR) approach to increase students’ knowledge and interest in interdisciplinary scientific research for sustainable oil palm cultivation. The land-use research addressed in this DBR is based on the international Collaborative Research Centre 990 “Ecological and Socioeconomic Functions of Tropical Lowland Rainforest Transformation Systems” (EFForTS). It focused on sustainable land-use change in Indonesia. Through a collaborative design process, researchers and educators from Indonesian and German universities designed two educational units on oil palm cultivation as a socioscientific issue for Indonesian higher education, specifically for science teacher education and forestry study programs. We systematically analyzed curricular needs, objects of recent scientific research, teaching and learning frameworks, and evaluation approaches to determine design principles. A pre-post-follow-up evaluation (N = 943) showed that the units, when integrated into curricular courses, increased and sustained students’ self-reported knowledge and interest, with improvements from pilot to implementation cycles. The formative and summative evaluations indicated positive ratings for instructional design quality, while also identifying areas for future improvement. Our DBR focused on Indonesian higher education, but the evaluation and reflection findings suggest that our approach can be adapted to a wide range of educational contexts and environmental socioscientific issues, also beyond Indonesia. Our DBR serves as a transferable approach for making scientific research topics, methods, and findings accessible and interesting to students, thereby contributing to the preparation of future change agents for sustainable land use at both local and global scales.

Design-Based Research presents a pragmatic approach to addressing both pedagogical problems and innovations within a rigorous framework that aims to build transferable practice. This panel discussion will explore four examples of implementing DBR in various higher education contexts and draw participants into a discussion of how they might apply DBR to address identified pedagogical problems or innovations in their own contexts. Why DBR? This panel discussion is a focal point for exploring how design-based research (DBR) in higher education in 2024, can address pedagogical problems brought about by the global pandemic and the explosion of generative artificial intelligence use in assessment and learning (For examples). In a period of continuous disruption in higher education, flexible and ethical research strategies that embrace unexpected influences in teaching and learning is paramount (Cochrane et al., 2023), leading to a new generation of educational researchers embracing DBR. Furthermore, practical examples demonstrating students as partners in curriculum design to inform ‘what works’ in practice are essential for researchers to gain confidence in adopting research-teaching-practice methods of inquiry (Bakker, 2018; Cochrane & Munn, 2020). Understanding how the processes and outputs of DBR can meet these needs is crucial to alleviating both business and educational tensions about timing, funding, resources, and workload planning (Cochrane, 2022; McKenney & Reeves, 2019; Reeves & Lin, 2020). At the core of DBR is the opportunity to explore pedagogical problems or innovation through four phases: problem analysis, develop solutions to the identified problem, explore and evaluate the impact of the design in iterative interventions in real learning situations, leading to the development of transferable design principles and theory building (McKenney & Reeves, 2019) Various research methods can be applied to progressively ask participant perspectives, including students, teachers and learning designers, on appropriate approaches or technologies to solve an identified problem (McKenney & Reeves, 2019). The intended outcome of this panel discussion is to collaborate with participants in implementing DBR in higher education in response to specific pedagogical problems identified by the participants. Beginning with a brief background to DBR followed by four examples to stimulate discussion on its application in broader contexts to address identified problems in curriculum design. Relevance to Higher Education The relevance of debating the role of design-based research in higher education in 2024 is to stimulate discussion for how this pragmatic research approach informs ‘what works’ in situated learning contexts to develop cutting edge design principles and theory that can be transferrable (Galvin & Cochrane, 2023). The methodological framework of DBR invites students, teachers, and learning designers to collaborate from the conception of a design artefact or educational approach to solve a learning problem through to iterative stages of delivery. Following a new normal in higher education where change is inevitable, and fast-paced, research design that does not shy away from the progressive and ‘messy’ elements of educational settings to improve real time learning is essential. Finding a balance between naturalistic and interventionist research methods to explore this complexity is a way forward that DBR can provide. It is acknowledged that greater understanding for the value of DBR and how to plan practical stages with multiple participants is needed for teachers, researchers, and leaders in higher education to confidently adopt this approach (Haagen-Schützenhöfer et al., 2024). Opening discussion with peers models the collaborative ethos of DBR and opens potential connections and networking avenues to establish and generate knowledge for DBR in higher education. The Panel Members The panel will be comprised of project leaders from four DBR projects: Clinical reasoning development, interdisciplinary engineering education, biomechanics, performance anxiety. These projects were introduced in a concise paper for the ASCILITE 2023 conference (Cochrane et al., 2023) and the authors are in the process of collaborating on a full journal article analysing these DBR projects (Cochrane et al., 2024) that should be published in time for the ASCILITE 2024 conference.

Since the first descriptions of design-based research (DBR), there have been continued calls to better define DBR and increase its rigor. Here we address four uncertainties about DBR: (a) the phases of the DBR process, (b) what distinguishes DBR from other forms of research, (c) what distinguishes DBR from design, and (d) the characteristics of DBR that make it effective for answering certain types of questions. We build on existing efforts by defining DBR as an iterative process of 6 phases: focus, understand, define, conceive, build, and test, in which other scientific processes are recursively nested. By better articulating the process of DBR, this definition helps us to better craft, improve, communicate, and teach design-based research.

Book Review: Practice-Based Research in Children’s Play 164 Practice-Based Research in Children’s Play Wendy Russell, Stuart Lester, and Hilary Smith, editors (2017) Bristol, UK/Chicago, IL: Policy Press, 272 pages $115.00 (hardcover); ISBN: 978-1-4473-3003-5 This book is a compilation of 12 research studies that examine children’s play, the places where they play and adults’ relationship to children’s play. The editors are researchers whose work focuses on children’s right to play, the value of play, policy related to play and the places where play can occur, and play’s relation to health and wellbeing. The contributing authors of the 12 studies come from a variety of backgrounds. Most, but not all, are not traditional (i.e., academic) researchers. They are play workers, managers of child-related organizations (i.e., zoo, museums, adventure playgrounds), and staff in local government organizations. All but two of the authors are from the UK; the remaining two are from the U.S. Given the book title and the background of the chapter authors, the book’s primary audience is those who work directly with children outside of formal educational institutions and those who are interested in policy related to children’s play. Some traditional academics may also find the work helpful if they are interested in nontraditional and alternative approaches to research related to children and children’s play. The editors are clear that the studies do not follow the traditional EuropeanAmerican empirical research tradition. In the introduction and the final chapter, the editors state that they believe this is not the only way to create new knowledge. The scientific method, anchored in theory, begins with a question to be answered in order to ultimately arrive at some cause and effect or truth. The research questions are driven by the interests of the researcher with little or no input from the “subjects” of the research. Whether quantitative or qualitative, the editors assert that research in this tradition relies on interpretation of the data from the perspective of the researcher’s worldview. This, they maintain, is in spite of the claim of objectivity. The intention of this book is to present research, all of which is qualitative and uses small sample sizes, that does not necessarily produce universal truths but rather concentrates on singular findings from a variety of play situations. The editors’ goals are to highlight practice-based research and to thereby encourage it. The book is divided into three sections: historical perspectives, spatial and creative perspectives, and playfulness and wellbeing. The three chapters in the first section explore adults’ memories and perspectives of play in their childhoods. The section includes a study that explored adults’ memories of their East London childhood during World War Two (Becky Willans) and a study of a UK playworker’s 40-year relationship with adventure playgrounds (Tom Williams). The studies used semistructured interviews, oral histories, auto ethnography, and performative and narrative methods. The information collected from the participants is analyzed through the lens of loose parts, affordances, risk and nostalgia. All of these studies were conducted in the UK. Book Review: Practice-Based Research in Children’s Play 165 The second section has six chapters that examine the current spaces and places where children play including a children’s museum and a zoo in the U.S. as well as an urban public square, an after-school program, and two adventure playgrounds in the UK. These studies make use of many non-traditional qualitative research methods. For example, the author (Hattie Coppard) of the urban public space study uses observation of children’s play, but the observers were a dancer, a writer and a painter. The argument here is that instead of a goal of objectivity on the part of the observer, individuals from different perspectives will see different things as observers. The information gleaned from each observer will provide a more holistic and perhaps nuanced understanding of children’s play and how they use this particular space. Another interesting aspect of this section is the exploration of the tension between adults’ intentions for children’s play and children’s own goals or needs. This tension is related...

Design-based research (DBR) is a programme where researchers co-operate with practitioners to work out new solutions. In DBR researchers interfere in daily life and participate in practitioners’ working processes. One open question is: What kind of knowledge can be generated in these projects? My starting point here is a DBR project in vocational education and training in Germany which is used for an investigation of the epistemological background of this kind of research enterprise. The characteristics of DBR are reflected on the basis of phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches. The basic assumptions of these concepts are introduced and applied to the DBR approach to show how DBR generally works and how, specially, features of DBR like participation in daily life, co-operation with practitioners, gathering knowledge in the field a. s. o. can be handled.
 The line of argumentation in this contribution is a radical switch between practical questions in daily work in DBR on one hand and theoretical re-assurance on the other hand. For researchers, DBR is an enterprise in a new world. The analytical paradigm does not prepare the voyagers for this journey. Therefore the non-analytic continental tradition of philosophy has to be re-discovered.

BackgroundComplementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use has steadily increased globally over the past two decades and is increasingly playing a role in the healthcare system in the United States. CAM practice-based effectiveness research requires an understanding of the settings in which CAM practitioners provide services. This paper describes and quantifies practice environment characteristics for a cross-sectional sample of doctors of chiropractic (DCs), licensed acupuncturists (LAcs), and licensed massage therapists (LMTs) in the United States.MethodsUsing a cross-sectional telephone survey of DCs (n = 32), LAcs (n = 70), and LMTs (n = 184) in the Tucson, AZ metropolitan area, we collected data about each location where practitioners work, as well as measures on practitioner and practice characteristics including: patient volume, number of locations where practitioners worked, CAM practitioner types working at each location, and business models of practice.ResultsThe majority of practitioners reported having one practice location (93.8% of DCs, 80% of LAcs and 59.8% of LMTs) where they treat patients. Patient volume/week was related to practitioner type; DCs saw 83.13 (SD = 49.29) patients/week, LAcs saw 22.29 (SD = 16.88) patients/week, and LMTs saw 14.21 (SD =10.25) patients per week. Practitioners completed surveys for N = 388 practice locations. Many CAM practices were found to be multidisciplinary and/or have more than one practitioner: 9/35 (25.7%) chiropractic practices, 24/87 (27.6%) acupuncture practices, and 141/266 (53.0%) massage practices. Practice business models across CAM practitioner types were heterogeneous, e.g. sole proprietor, employee, partner, and independent contractor.ConclusionsCAM practices vary across and within disciplines in ways that can significantly impact design and implementation of practice-based research. CAM research and intervention programs need to be mindful of the heterogeneity of CAM practices in order to create appropriate interventions, study designs, and implementation plans.