The Complex Field of Research: for Design, through Design, and about Design
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The concept of design research is evolving through the literature, on-line discussions, and conferences. They revolve around defining what research is and where it belongs in design education and practice. This paper provides a framework for understanding the approaches to design research that builds upon existing overviews of the field provided by Bruce Archer, Richard Buchanan, Nigel Cross, Christopher Frayling, and Ken Friedman, among others. It begins with a brief history of design research to provide a foundation for understanding that research has been an integral part of the field of design since the early twentieth century. It then discusses the difference between clinical, applied, and basic research, providing an overview of the variety of approaches in each area. It is intended to serve as a guide to the discussion and provide a map of the literature. It is not intended as a detailed description or evaluation of the approaches or to serve as a vehicle for learning the methods, techniques, or theories of design research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.114 | 0.107 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.116 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.042 | 0.050 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".