Research-oriented design vs. design-oriented research.
Since the next deadline is coming up, and we have so much work to do for all the assignments, I decided to combine the reading for the next assignment with this one :). The first article we had to read is 'Design oriented-research versus Research-oriented Design' by Daniel Fallman.
Since it is a academic text, about somehow a practical subject (at least, I think it is pretty practical) it is sometimes hard to understand what Fallman is trying to say.
Basically, the way I understand it right now, research-oriented design is an approach to create new knowledge, where they mostly do research about an artifact. Design-oriented research is to create new artifacts. The thing that I miss though, is if the design-oriented research way is also doing research or not? I would assume that they have to do research about, for example, the users before they start to design something. Or maybe they use researches that are already conducted before starting to design.
Fallman claims that a distinction is needed because of 3 reasons: First, research-oriented design and design-oriented research are both different approaches, which means that both of them have different outcomes to be successful. The second reason is to cause a discussion about the two different approaches. And the third reason is because design-oriented research can be seen as academic research, while research-oriented design more can be seen as commercial design.
Personally, I think I am more the person for design-oriented research. I feel like this is the more practical approach where designers really make something. I personally am more the practical person. I absolutely agree that research is important for making good design, but this doesn't mean that I like to do that :).
Source: Fällman, D. (2004) Design oriented-research versus Research-oriented Design, Workshop Paper, CHI 2004 Workshop on Design and HCI, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2004, April 24-29, Vienna, Austria http://daniel.fallman.org/resources/papers/dfallman-CHI04_WS.pdf