Design research and design practice: A framework for future investigations

Recent research has found that design could be thought of as a separate discipline with common elements identified regardless of the disciplinary context. However, the practice of design always occurs within a disciplinary context. While studies have been conducted that show the ways designers have experienced design across disciplines are common, it is often hard to see how these overarching results can be applied to the specific contexts that they came from. This paper presents a framework for moving between design practice in a disciplinary context on the one hand, and design research often across disciplines that treating design as an entity unto itself. This framework provides not only a way of understanding the framing of future research around design and design practice, but also suggests ways to move from one space to another.