Design Research Through Practice: From the Lab, Field, and Showroom

Design Research Through Practice: From the Lab, Field, and Showroom focuses on one type of contemporary design research known as constructive design research. It looks at three approaches to constructive design research: Lab, Field, and Showroom. The book shows how theory, research practice, and the social environment create commonalities between these approaches. It illustrates how one can successfully integrate design and research based on work carried out in industrial design and interaction design. The book begins with an overview of the rise of constructive design research, as well as constructive research programs and methodologies. It then describes the logic of studying design in the laboratory, design ethnography and field work, and the origins of the Showroom and its foundation on art and design rather than on science or the social sciences. It also discusses the theoretical background of constructive design research, along with modeling and prototyping of design items. Finally, it considers recent work in Lab that focuses on action and the body instead of thinking and knowing. Many kinds of designers and people interested in design will find this book extremely helpful.

Ilpo Koskinen is a design researcher who has been full professor in leading design schools in Europe, Asia and Australia. His main interests have been in design methodology, mobile multimedia, design in cities, and in the cultural basis of design. His best-known books are Empathic Design (2003), Mobile Multimedia in Action (2007), Design Research through Practice: From the Lab, Field and Showroom (2011), Drifting by Intention (2020), and Design, Empathy, Interpretation: Towards Interpretive Design Research (2023). He has also written about social design and about its aesthetic, and more recently about the permeability of human beings and nature. He is currently revising and expanding the 2011 book and on a European initiative around reconciliation after the war in Ukraine. His work has impacted design, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and the social sciences.

He received his PhD in sociology, specifically conversation analysis and ethnomethodology. He has applied his knowledge variously, interactionism in Empathic Design but also in Design, Empathy, Interpretation, ethnomethodology in Mobile Multimedia in Action, and qualitative methodology in Design Research through Practice and Drifting by Intention.

Prof John Zimmerman, is the Tang Family Professor of AI and HCI at Carnegie Mellon University's HCI Institute. He researches human-AI interaction, human-robot/agent interaction, and new approaches to AI Innovation. He is best known for his work on Research through Design and for Speed Dating, a method for assessing acceptance of future technologies. He is a member of the ACM CHI Academy, and regularly give talks at conferences, to industry and the general public. Before becoming a professor at Carnegie Mellon, he worked on TV personalization for Philips Research.

Thomas Binder is a researcher and educator engaging open design collaborations and participatory design in the context of social innovation and sustainable transitions. His research includes contributions to methods and tools for experimental design research and open innovation processes with a particular emphasis on codesign and design anthropology. Through design research addressing everyday innovation within elderly care and citizen involvement in green transitions Thomas Binder has explored arenas evolving in the borderlands between commercial, public and civic involvement, and how collaborative design experiments in these arenas may nurture and amplify hybrid configurations of agency with a potential for a significant societal impact. He has been editing and authoring several books such as (Re-) searching the Digital Bauhaus’ (Springer 2008), Rehearsing the Future (Danish Design School Press, 2010), Design Research through Practice (Morgan Kaufman, 2011), Design Things (MIT press, 2011) and Design Anthropological Futures (Bloomsbury, 2016). He has been chairing the Participatory Design Conference in 2002, the Nordic Design Research Conference in 2005 and the Design Anthropological Futures Conference in 2015.

Johan Redström is a professor at the Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University, Sweden since 2012. Previously, he has been Studio Director of the Design Research Unit, Interactive Institute, adjunct professor at the School of Textiles, University of Borås, Associate Research Professor at the Center for Design Research at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, in Copenhagen, Denmark, and a lecturer and program manager of the Masters Program in Interaction Design at the IT University in Gothenburg. His background is in philosophy, music and interaction design. He received a PhD from Gothenburg University in 2001, and became Docent in Interaction Design in 2008. Redström's research aims at combining philosophical and artistic approaches with focus on experimental design, critical practice and the aesthetics of computational technology as material in design. Research programs include on designing for reflection rather than efficiency in use, on combining traditional design and new technologies, and subsequently on increasing energy awareness through critical and conceptual design.

Prof Stephan Wensveen is full professor of Constructive Design Research in Smart Products, Services and Systems. He is also Program Director for the Bachelor’s degree and graduate programs of Industrial Design. His interest is in using the power of research through design to foster collaboration between research, education and innovation. He helped introduce notions of ‘aesthetics of interaction’, ‘feedforward’ and ‘interaction frogger' and is co-responsible for canonical examples of Research through Design. Stephan Wensveen has a long-standing career at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). He started as Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial Design in 2002 and has held an Associate Professorship and, since 2017, a Full Professorship here. Between 2011 and 2013, he worked as Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark.