Research through industrial design: industrial design in the context of an Australian Cooperative Research Centre

The creative arts and industries, including design, are currently legitimating to higher education and funding bodies how project work, documentation of research process and critical reflection is the appropriate mix for scholarship in these fields. Central to industrial design is the role of making and products in the design research process although this emphasis may not be shared by the fields with which industrial design works. Cooperative Research Centers (CRCs) are contexts where science, design and industry collaborate offering unique opportunities to examine interdisciplinary similarity and difference and an environment for design research to prove to government and higher education the legitimacy and quality of its work. Drawing on evidence from two recent doctoral projects in CRC industry/university collaboration for Wood Innovation this paper analyses the design, science encounter and its consequences for knowledge production in the project text. The authors further argue that only a balance of prototype, process and reflection can help establish the academic and disciplinary status of design, itself a precondition for convincing the institutional skeptics of the current and future legitimacy and value of the creative fields.