I’m interested in how creative design can be research. Or rather, how designing develops knowledge. Developing “Design as Research” feels like a dead end to me.
Asking how design can be research assumes that there is something called “research” that design processes can qualify for under certain circumstances. The term invites comparisons to scientific research, and the question how design is or can be similar. But design is not the same as research, scientific or otherwise. What’s interesting is how designing teaches us new things, what sorts of things we learn from it, and how this knowledge can develop from project to project.
With this in mind, “academic design” could be understood as designing with the goal of finding out new things, of developing generally applicable forms, principles, structures, or patterns. This goal transcends single projects. How can single design projects be constructive parts in a development program, organised around a certain question, goal, hunch, or other direction of exploration?
Thematic graduation studios in Architecture appear to be an interesting example of this. As are projects that are part of larger, ongoing development programs at Mechanical Engineering.
To me, it makes no sense to ask how these sorts of programs might be made more like “research”. Better questions to ask are what we hope to achieve with these ways of working, what is achieved, how the results should be judged, how they can be made more rigorous, how subsequent projects do or could build on earlier outcomes, etcetera.