Throughout 1998, I met each week with a group of folks who were then pursuing their doctoral degrees at the Institute of Design, IIT. This was when the PhD program at ID was still quite young, though there were enough PhD candidates by then that we decided it would be useful if we were to identify some overlapping areas of interest in our research, to define sub-groups focusing on those research topics, and to start working together in our research groups to define the terrain of doctoral research in design. Those folks included: Izabel Barros, Charles Bezerra, Praima Chayutsahakij, Kyung Ran Choi, Roberto Holguin, Jooyun Melanie Joh, Eunice Lee, Ding Bang Luh, Luis Pereira, Peter Storkerson, Sakol Teeravarunyou, and Carlos Teixeira. We were working in conjunction with the faculty coordinators of ID's PhD program, Professors Sharon Poggenpohl and Keiichi Sato. That image to the right is a model we were fooling around with to describe our various perspectives on design. Following is documentation of the research areas that we identified, some guiding questions that we felt held them together, and the beginnings of a common reading list for each research area. Since 1998, ID's official PhD research agenda has evolved to more closely match with the interests of the advising faculty. So these are no longer the official research areas for doctoral candidates. The current areas of doctoral research supported at the Institute of Design are probably described on the program's web site. Research Areas for ID's PhD Program Design has its own unique point of view. Like psychology, the social sciences, and business management, design looks at artifacts from the outside. It considers the implications of artifacts on their users, on enterprises and on the culture. At the same time -- like engineering and art -- design looks from the inside, at construction and properties of those artifacts. Design brings these concerns together to articulate the larger goals and translate them into structure and properties. Thus, while many related fields provide useful knowledge, they are fragments of the knowledge needed in Design. Design is badly in need of knowledge to ground and extend practice, and to communicate itself to others. This is not the knowledge of practice but knowledge behind the knowledge of practice which organizes, deepens and shapes practice. The goal of the PhD in design at ID is to build that knowledge base and definition of design by theoretical work and theory building research in the major design areas outlined below. Design Methodology Understanding Users & Contexts Design for Interaction & Collaboration Communication, Cognition & Learning Strategic Design Design Methodology Design Methodology is concerned with the analysis (and formal modeling) of the (mostly cognitive) activity of designing, with the identification and description of principles and processes of designing, and with the application of those principles to the development of new methods, techniques and tools to be used in designing and in design education. Kees Dorst says of Design Methodology, "Its general goals are to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of design activities and to develop design as a discipline by gathering, creating and critically discussing insights about design. Design Methodology includes the development of formal models of design activities, from which methods, techniques and computer tools can then be derived. In doing this, it tries to be domain independent." Some Research Issues and Problems What is the nature of design problems? How do designers identify a problem? What methods or techniques might help designers to improve their skills in problem identification? How do designers generate and evaluate solution ideas? What methods or techniques might help designers to improve their skills in solution synthesis, optimization, and evaluation? What are the essential skills involved in the activity of designing and how might those skills be imparted to, and developed in, students of design? What are the information requirements of creative design processes? Can formal models of design activity and design processes be generated that adequately capture the complex nature of design thinking? How could such models be used in the development of computer support tools for design? How can we best describe the creative and intuitive aspects of design thinking, and how will we reconcile those aspects with more formal descriptions of rational design problem solving? How can we characterize the role that the artifacts of design process (sketches, plans, prototypes, etc.) play in individual and group design activity? What role do designers' personal ethical positions (and normative positions) play in their task definition and problem solving processes? What research methods might be employed in the attempt to better understand and describe design activity? Related Knowledge Design Methods (Design Methodology) Design Thinking Design Problem Solving (Design Reasoning) Artificial Intelligence in Design Creativity Creative Problem Solving Creative Cognition Reflective Practice Sociology of Design Design Education Some Key Figures Omer Akin Christopher Alexander Nigel Cross Edward de Bono Kees Dorst John Gero John Chris Jones Bryan Lawson Peter Rowe Donald Schon Herbert Simon Understanding Users & Contexts More and more, designers are enlisted to design user experiences rather than isolated artifacts or tools. The emphasis on user-centered design methodologies, borrowed primarily from the social sciences, has highlighted the important role in the design process of consideration and deep understanding of the users of designed artifacts and of the contexts of their use. While the social sciences aim to understand and describe human behavior and social situations, design endeavors to affect purposeful change through manipulation of the built or made environment. The goal of understanding users and contexts includes development of practical theory explicating the relationships between these areas of research and professional practice. Some Research Issues and Problems What are the ethical issues associated with behavioral research in the service of design? How can we better understand and bridge the gap between behavioral research and the creative processes of design? How does a designer's "understanding" of a socio-technical system or situation differ from that of a social scientist's? How should behavioral research data be represented to best serve the needs of design? What role does prototyping play in the participatory processes of product definition and design? Related Knowledge Phenomenology Cultural Anthropology Ethnography / Ethnomethodology Social, Behavioral Research Methods Memetics Sociology of Technology Social Impact Assessment Environment-Behavior Research Human Factors Usability Engineering Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Some Key Figures Harold Garfinkel Clifford Geertz Barney Glaser Erving Goffman Edward Hall Bonnie Nardi Henry Sanoff Anselm Strauss Lucy Suchman William Whyte John Zeisel Design for Interaction & Collaboration The primary concern of this research domain is to understand and facilitate the creation of mechanisms of interaction -- mediating interactions between users and artifacts and/or between remotely situated collaborators. While a focus on interaction introduces new perspectives and new possibilities for design, interactive systems design requires new ranges of interdisciplinary knowledge and methods. In establishing theoretical foundations for the development of appropriate design principles, syntactic and semantic structures of a "language of interaction" are investigated. In addition, an understanding of spacio-temporal dimensions of interaction forms a critical basis for the design of dynamic user experiences. Innovative paradigms of, and metaphors for, interaction and collaboration inform the development of exploratory prototypes built by researchers operating in this area. Some Research Issues and Problems Which philosophical traditions best inform attempts to model interactive and collaborative activities in the service of design? At what level can we productively describe the elements and structure of a language of interaction? How can human-artifact interaction and human-human collaboration most productively be modeled and represented? How may we evaluate design interventions affecting interaction and/or collaboration? Which activities involving remote collaboration may be enhanced? How? From which domains might we harvest descriptive metaphors appropriate to the design of interactive and collaborative activities in virtual spaces? Related Knowledge Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Interface Design Human Factors Artificial Intelligence Cognitive Psychology Communications Theory Educational Theory Linguistics Some Key Figures Bill Buxton Alan Cooper Brenda Laurel Marvin Minsky Donald Norman Andrew Ortony Ben Shneiderman Terry Winograd Communication, Cognition & Learning If knowledge is created by people, then communication design concerns itself with nothing less than the creation, representation, and transmission of knowledge in the material world of time and space, and with the ways the resulting communications, in turn, transform people cognitively and behaviorally. Theory in communication design is unique in its combination of four requirements: first, to relate the highest levels of meaning to the most detailed material characteristics of a communication; second, to build operational and measurable representations of those characteristics; third, to build a complementary but recognizably human model of the persons who receive and act with and on communications; and finally in the requirement to be analytical but not reductive: focused not on its own analytic concepts, but on human experiences in their sensory fullness. While design can and must make use of other disciplines such as sociology, psychology, philosophy (epistemology in particular), rhetoric, and literary theories of narrative, it must synthesize and transform these to make them appropriate to its own problematics. In the present formative stages, the most important work is the development of points of view or general contexts into which research can be put to make it intelligible and meaningful. Some Research Issues and Problems How can we distinguish between those aspects of comprehension that are individual and idiosyncratic, and those which are species wide? In multimedia, what are the roles of different media types on stabilizing meaning? What are the strategic aspects of sequence and navigational choice on comprehension? Are there models of interpersonal behavior that can be developed and applied to communication, and if so, what? What material dimensions of a communicative artifact are relevant to comprehension, memory, and interpretation? Where communications are conduits for human-human interaction, what characteristics are relevant? What are the strategic characteristics of metaphor as a vehicle for intelligibility. Related Knowledge Sociology Epistemology Rhetoric Cognitive Psychology Perceptual Psychology Linguistics Semiotics or Sign Theory Narratology Educational Theory Some Key Figures Jerome Bruner Kenneth Burke Ernst Cassirer Marcus Tullius Cicero Umberto Eco Howard Gardner J. J. Gibson Stephen Kosslyn Humberto Maturana Charles Osgood Jean Piaget Charles S. Peirce Ferdinand de Saussure Victor Yngve Strategic Design (a.k.a. Policy, Management, Strategy or Design & Industrial/Economic Systems) Design takes on a strategic role within an organization or corporation when its influence is extended beyond traditional domains and when design thinking skills are employed at all levels of the organization from strategy and planning, general policy and management, to product planning and development. Researchers in this area adopt a perspective through which design is considered primarily as a strategic function within an organization, a corporation, or a nation. Some Research Issues and Problems How can we characterize the roles and functions that design plays within organizations and corporations? How can design's social and economic value be measured and assessed within a business context? How can design thinking be best applied in defining new approaches to business strategy development? to creative vision and strategy? to product strategy and planning? to project or creative management? to teamwork and collaborative design? to corporate identity and image? How should national and/or corporate policies be shaped to address such issues as: design for sustainable economic development? design copyrights and patents? environmental impact (e.g., design for disassembly, design for recycle)? Which organizational structures and methods of practice most effectively support the management of complex, information-intensive design problems? What are appropriate methods for analyzing strategic design planning processes and outcomes? Related Knowledge Business Management & Strategy Design Management Economic Theory National & International Commercial Policy Corporate Design Policy Branding & Corporate Identity Innovation Studies Product Lifecycle Analysis Organizational Management Knowledge Management Some Key Figures Robert Blaich Jay Doblin Peter Drucker Peter Gorb Gary Hamel Henry Mintzberg Ikujiro Nonaka Wally Olins Tom Peters Michael Porter James Brian Quinn Robert Reich Joseph Schumpeter Send questions or comments to: jaym@id.iit.edu Updated: November 10, 2003 Copyright © 1995-2003 Jay Melican