Abstract
AbstractSupporting designers is one of the main motivations for design research. However, there is an ongoing debate about the ability of design research to transfer its results, which are often provided in form of design methods, into practice. This article takes the position that the transfer of design methods alone is not an appropriate indicator for assessing the impact of design research by discussing alternative pathways for impacting design practice. Impact is created by different means – first of all through the students that are trained based on the research results including design methods and tools and by the systematic way of thinking they acquired that comes along with being involved with research in this area. Despite having a considerable impact on practice, this article takes the position that the transfer of methods can be improved by moving from cultivating method menageries to facilitating the evolution of method ecosystems. It explains what is understood by a method ecosystem and discusses implications for developing future design methods and for improving existing methods. This paper takes the position that efforts on improving and maturing existing design methods should be raised to satisfy the needs of designers and to truly support them.
Highlights
Industry does work undeniably in a systematic way (Daalhuizen 2014), but more evidence is required to show that they follow methods proposed by the academic engineering design research community (Tomiyama et al 2009)
Within the context of this framework, the fundamental limitation faced by academic engineering design researchers is with the ‘external validation’, that is, the reproducibility of the validation experiments results within the users’ environment, proving the utility when industrialists deploy the design methods
Design research is impacting design practice which goes beyond the pure uptake of individual methods
Summary
One of the stated purposes of design research is to provide support for industry for designing better products in a more effective and efficient way, for example, by studying designers, teams, organizations, or users as well as technologies, products or systems (Horvath 2004; Blessing & Chakrabarti 2009; Tomiyama et al 2009; Reich 2010; Andreasen 2011; Braha et al 2013; Cross 2018). Once companies have adopted a method, they often use it for a long time, but sometimes for purposes that it is not intended for (Gericke et al 2016) This position paper argues that one of the roots of the problem is that universities develop a plethora of methods in isolation, rather than offering industry methods and tools that they can adopt and adapt to their context and fit into their existing set of methods. The title of the paper alludes to the current state of method development through academic engineering design research. Design methodologies assume an idealized environment suitable to support design education, but do not (and cannot) describe the large variety of industrial contexts We distinguish between such ecosystems that can be found in practice, which often evolved over time
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
