Twenty-five years ago I was lucky to find a visionary designer willing to take a leap of faith in hiring me—a human scientist and researcher. That designer was the legendary Bill Moggridge, who shortly afterwards merged his company with two others to form the global design and innovation consultancy IDEO. My charge was to strengthen IDEO’s human-centred approach, and to integrate research with the practice of design. Back then there were few models for me to emulate. If I’d had access to a book like this one, certainly I would have felt more confident in my early endeavours. Design researchers will find this volume an invaluable guide as they navigate the options and challenges of their practice.

But constructive design research was in its infancy then, and my activities in that moment felt more like improvisation than evolving method. For me, that’s one of most exciting aspects of this book: it puts the everyday activities of designers, researchers, and design researchers in historical context and reveals their varied influences. Readers “overhear” a rich and discursive conversation among five erudite authors. Ilpo Koskinen, John Zimmerman, Thomas Binder, Johan Redstrom, and Stephan Wensveen weave together perspectives from culture, art and design, cognitive psychology, and education as they discuss the blending of design and research. It’s inspiring to see, through the selected work that they share, just how far that integration has come, to see the development of distinct traditions and intent—of lab, field, and showroom—and to imagine how far these will go within another generation.

Reflecting back on my early days as a new graduate of social science, I recall being frustrated that research and design were considered separate pursuits, developing in different academic spheres. Design was largely future-oriented; research focused on the past and the present. I found myself wondering, Wouldn’t it be better if we connected research and design? That’s precisely why I joined a design consultancy: I imagined myriad opportunities to link what I’d learned about people—about their behaviour, needs, desires, habits, and perceptions—with the design of places and things.

I did find opportunities, but linking design and research wasn’t as straightforward as I’d hoped. My training in academic research, which emphasised the rigorous analysis of observed conditions, undoubtedly provided me with a strong foundation. But that wasn’t enough to be interesting or applicable to the work of designers. I needed to find some common ground.

What I did share with designers was an interest in the future, and in developing new and better products and services for people. Back then IDEO worked intensively with both emerging companies in Silicon Valley and with established manufacturers, bringing new technology to life: new input devices for computers (such as the mouse); electric charging systems for cars (anticipating the drive towards alternative fuels); digital cameras (heralding ubiquity of shared personal imagery). We sought ways to explore future possibilities, and that meant creating prototypes—tangible things we could look at, touch, share, and experience ourselves and show others. Just as the authors herein assert, we were not dealing with research that tried to describe or explain things, as “constructive research imagines new things and builds them.” This was our common ground: a desire to examine and evaluate what we’d envisaged. This was crucial to learning what we needed to know to develop successful, world-changing designs.

Whether in the studio, the lab, or the field we used physical, mechanical, and interactive models—which usually represented new technology products that someday would actually get made—to help answer questions such as: How will this feel to use? Is it a good size, speed? How will it fit into daily life and support social behaviour?” By constructing prototypes, scenarios, role-playing, and body-storming we explored how to refine the design of those new things we were bringing into the world. Such design research applied whether we were developing a smart phone, reinventing a bank branch, conceiving a premium service for an airline, or creating new systems and processes for a fast-food company. It embodied the approach reflected in the current discourse about design thinking and “business in beta” which encourages companies to learn by doing—to commit resources to experimentation and prototyping as an on-going process rather than trying to pre-determine the details of a future offering through analysis.

Beyond refining the design of a future product or system, another important benefit of prototyping is in helping us explore the kinds of behaviour, attitudes and experiences that a new product, system, or technology might engender for people as individuals or communities. This is also constructive design research. It helps us answer questions like: What might it be like to design and grow artefacts from our own genetic material? How will new technology affect our experience of giving birth? Might a positive vision of the future encourage local action to minimize the effects of climate change? Here our constructions, though real, are somewhat more speculative; they are created to provide a vision for observers to explore new possibilities and how these affect their hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Such design research is close to the idea of the “showroom” explored in this book; using prototypes to provoke reaction and conversation with the ultimate goal of making a positive difference to the world we live in.

Thus, working alongside designers now for many years, I have learned that design research is about far more than creating things to be made and marketed. Design research plays an important role in illuminating and tackling many complex problems facing the world today. It encourages and enables social change and challenges assumptions and beliefs about how we live, work, and consume. It raises questions that prompt us to consider other possibilities.

As human beings we tend to shift between pondering our existence in the world—the people, places and things that comprise it—and taking action to alter it. Sometimes we’re inquisitive and seek to understand: How do people, places, and things interact? How do they shape our experiences, habits, lifestyles, and culture? Other times we’re innovative and want to effect change, to make new things and experiences. Human beings are both curious and creative. We are researchers and designers, in ways that are inextricably linked. At IDEO today, my colleagues and I “think to build” and “build to think” as entirely reciprocal activities.

“Design Research Through Practice” is a critical exploration of this reciprocity as it plays out in multifaceted ways in the real world. It demonstrates how different traditions of collaborative construction have bridged the gap between understanding and making, and between theoretical and actual solutions. This is not a how-to book (which could never feel right to design researchers anyway), but rather a thoughtful examination of exemplary practice—a how-they-did-it book—and an inspirational foundation for others to reflect and build upon.

May 18th 2011