Design Research

Design Research asks how designers produce knowledge, and how that knowledge earns support. The seminar treats research as a practice with its own craft: a specific question, a method chosen on purpose, evidence gathered from real sources, and an argument a reader can follow.

Two commitments run through it. The first is that making is a method. Collage, models, scores, mapping, typological catalogs and measured drawing each generate knowledge the written account cannot reach — drawing a thing forces you to respond to it and to ask the next question. The second is that theory is also a method, supplying the frameworks and vocabulary that let a project join a larger conversation. Alongside both, students learn where the material actually comes from: federal and local geographic data, historical map collections, public-domain image archives, patents and scholarly databases.

Running underneath both is a third commitment: research is never neutral. A framework decides what you will be able to see, a dataset records what someone decided was worth measuring, and an archive holds what an institution thought worth keeping. Students learn to say where they are asking from, and to read a source for what it leaves out.

The seminar closes on the proposal. Research that stays private changes nothing, so students practice writing it for a reader — plain language for knowledgeable non-experts, a clear gap, a realistic work plan, and an argument for why the work matters beyond the discipline.

Four of its eight parts work the ground underneath a method. Asking the question argues for the how question over the why: a why needs a cause isolated from its rivals, a what stops at description, a how names a process whose parts you can go and look at. Why theory matters treats a framework as equipment with a range and a blind spot. Paradigms and incommensurability reads Kuhn for what he actually claimed. Disciplines and trading zones asks what each field counts as evidence, then turns to working across those boundaries: boundary objects, a working pidgin, and the instruction to build the shared object before agreeing on epistemology.

The lectures come in two registers. What is Research is the general version, usable with students from any discipline; What is Research for Designers takes the same ground through drawing, models, mapping and typological catalogs.

The working list behind that slide in What is Research. Start national for coverage and go local for resolution. Download the codebook with the data and read it before you plot anything.

Public data. data.gov (federal catalog) · data.census.gov (census and ACS, down to block group) · bls.gov/data (labor, wages, prices) · wonder.cdc.gov (public health) · earthexplorer.usgs.gov and USGS map locator (imagery, elevation) · NOAA Digital Coast (climate, coastal, soils) · USDA Ag Census · World Bank, UN Data, Eurostat · most cities run a portal, e.g. NYC Open Data — finest resolution, least documentation.

Archives and records. National Archives · Library of Congress · Chronicling America for pre-1963 US newspapers, and your library likely licenses ProQuest for the rest · HathiTrust and the Internet Archive for full-text search at scale · David Rumsey and USGS historical topographic maps · county historical societies, company records and university special collections. Email the archivist; one reply beats a week of clicking.

Images. Public Works · The Met open access · Public Domain Review · LoC pictures · Shorpy. Check the licence each time — open access at one museum is not open access at the next.

Scholarship and other. Google Scholar · JSTOR · Project MUSE · Semantic Scholar · patents.google.com, which records how a technology was meant to work, drawn, at the moment it was new · standards, codes and regulations, often the only written record of what a practice was required to do · and people, who hold what was never written down.