Thirteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

A fair portion of the last twelve years of my design research career has been defined through interdisciplinary partnerships. In this paper, I share my experiences working as a design researcher with a diversity of scholars, though with a particular focus on those in the digital humanities. Using examples from past projects, I reflect on three principles that form the foundation for my research agenda. First is the notion, proposed by Galey and Ruecker, that a designed artefact can hold some kind of argument about the design of similar artefacts. This idea is based on theoretical affinities between design and book history scholarship: both engage in interpretation and in making and both “can contribute to a theoretical framework for new questions facing humanists” (406). Second is the radical change approach to design—while certain design tasks are meant to propose incremental improvements over what has existed before; others are a deliberate attempt at major departures from the norm (Ruecker, Radzikowska, and Liepert, 2008). Radical design (and design research) has the intent to diversify the pre-existing gene pool of valid ideas. With each unique iteration, new questions arise regarding the design “problem”. And, third is the practical strategy of explicitly discussing principles and policies of research practice with people from different disciplines at the start of a research project. This strategy takes the form of a project charter that reflects interdisciplinary management strategies, developed through a process of trial and error on a variety of active research projects.