Navigating the Landscapes of Design Research: Finding Your Way (Design Research for Change)

This book provides emerging and established designers and design educators, along with their collaborators, with a means to understand how and why the landscape of design research has come to exist as it does, and how and why its various destinations and pathways are connected.

It is an accessible “guide” for those in and around design who have little to no experience with planning and conducting research to inform their decision-making. Specifically, this book makes the case that an integration of research and design is critical in a world shaped by an increasingly complex and pervasive amalgam of challenges: social, technological, environmental, economic, and political. The need to expand shared understandings of research has also become acute because this landscape is increasingly traversed by those who are seeking evidence-based outcomes to their needs rather than solutions shaped by aesthetic polish, subjective client demands, or simple cost-benefit formulas.

This book will be of interest to scholars and designers working in design studies and design research, as well as to design practitioners who are increasingly called upon to understand and act on data gleaned from evidence-based research.

Michael R. Gibson is a Professor of Communication Design at The University of North Texas, U.S.A, who has led graduate programs in design research and interaction design. Gibson’s investigations have yielded positive outcomes in the facilitation of healthcare on behalf of children and older adults, and regarding the development and implementation of design processes in the K–12 education space.

Keith M. Owens’ experiences as a design researcher and Professor of Communication Design at The University of North Texas, U.S.A, have afforded him opportunities to blend his extensive, experiential knowledge of professional design with his scholarship in ways that have allowed him to address a wide variety of issues in and around socially focused design practice.