Research through and through design

Abstract

An intriguing aspect of the notion of research through design is how much we seem to gain from its proposition and how informative it appears to be, even as we do not state precisely what is meant by the terms research or design. But, what is it that this notion of through calls to the foreground? In what follows, I discuss three interpretations of what through might refer to by looking at it from different perspectives: through practice, through making and through judgement. Different perspectives bring different possibilities to the foreground, and therefore they also suggest slightly different future trajectories. But this also means that some issues fade into the background, something new perspectives can help us get a glimpse of. This is perhaps especially evident in the case of judgement, the least familiar of the three. Looking across the range of research trajectories that these three perspectives open up, there are reasons to think that we can make research through design become a more extensive, inclusive and a far more radical research proposition than its name reveals.