Design Practice

Coordinator: Dr Nathan Crilly

Understanding and Representing Aspects of Design and Use

The Design Practice theme seeks to understand and represent activities of design and activities of use. This is with the intention of making products, spaces, systems and services easier to think about, and thereby make design research, practice and education more effective.

As is true for many complex activities, the full details of design and use cannot be adequately described without rendering these subjects impenetrable. Consequently, conceptual frameworks are required that represent those aspects of the situation that are most important. Such frameworks, and the accounts that support them, can assist all the relevant stakeholders (including designers, users, researchers and managers) in clearly communicating about design and use. This improves the design process itself, highlights areas of potentially fruitful research and facilitates the structuring of educational courses.

Our research approach is highly interdisciplinary, and this is manifest in two ways. Firstly, when seeking to establish the conceptual underpinnings of particular aspects of design and use, there is a broad base of existing knowledge to draw on and this knowledge is distributed across many different academic disciplines. It is therefore necessary to identify the most relevant ideas developed in other fields and bring these ideas into design research. Secondly, when conducting empirical enquiries into design and use, a broad range of research methodologies are potentially useful and these originate from many different disciplinary traditions. Consequently, the identification, adaptation and implementation of appropriate research methods is important to conducting the work. Where those adaptations are novel and potentially useful to others, they are offered back to the research communities that might benefit from them most.

The Design Practice theme is adopting the following dissemination strategy in journal articles, conference proceedings and books:

  • publication of frameworks that define conceptually useful perspectives on the subject
  • publication of literature reviews that collect, analyse and integrate relevant material from different disciplines, perspectives and periods
  • publication of empirical studies that represent aspects of design and use
  • publication of newly developed design research methods suited to investigating the area.

The Design Practice theme works closely with the IfM's Design Management research group, whose purpose is to improve the ways in which design can be managed and exploited at product, firm and national levels, and also the Crucible research network, whose purpose is to encourage collaboration between technologists and researchers in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

Completed Research