The Future of Design Research: Consolidation, Collaboration and Inter-Disciplinary Learning?

Multiple academic disciplines have researched in design in recent decades, and in so doing have developed a vibrant body of work exploring design from multiple perspectives. This is both a strength and a weakness. Diversity has led to a richness of insights, but at the expense of a lack of coherence and perhaps the perception of a fragmented community. It is proposed in this paper that it is thus timely for the communities that research in design and related areas to collaborate with a view to developing a consolidated understanding of the design research area. It is proposed that this may be achieved firstly by design researchers exploring where there is commonality and differences in results and approaches and secondly for the design community to explore where the work of other scholarly communities informs or challenges design research and vice versa. Examples of starting points for this work are proposed, together with suggestions for mechanisms to develop the collaboration.