Conference Agenda

The development of the foundational body of knowledge is a primary concern of Design Research. This body of knowledge is essential to design education and practice, which shape the human-made environment. This article presents Design Knowledge Archaeology, an emerging approach for systematically rediscovering and developing this foundation by analyzing the evolution of knowledge structures within design discourse. This article outlines and evaluates three distinct methods: the Focused approach, the Discourse approach, and the AI-enabled Semantic Similarity approach. The Focused approach reconstructs the intellectual lineage of a single perspective or recovers marginalized accounts. The Discourse approach maps competing perspectives and discontinuities across a topic. The AI-enabled Semantic Similarity approach identifies thematic patterns in large datasets. This article contributes to Design Research by providing practical guidance and illustrating each method with concrete examples, equipping researchers with a Design Research methodology for developing a more robust, diverse foundational body of design knowledge.

This paper interrogates the persistent claim of design’s neutrality by tracing how notions of the political have surfaced, receded, and re-emerged across design discourses in Western contexts from the late 1960s to the present. Building on Arendt’s understanding of the political as the space of collective world-making through human plurality, and Mouffe’s agonistic perspective that foregrounds conflict and power, the paper proposes a genealogy revealing how design has always been entangled with ideological, economic, and socio-technical transformations. The analysis maps political trajectories across Radical Design, Participatory Design, Critical and Speculative Design, Social Design, Design for Social Innovation, Design Activism, Adversarial Design, Transition Design, Design for the Pluriverse, and Design Justice. Rather than treating these movements as isolated, the paper tracks their shared political imaginaries and tensions, arguing that the political is not a late addition to design discourse but a constitutive dimension of the discipline itself, whatever in research, practice or education.

In recent decades, Design Research Labs have proliferated across design educational institutions worldwide, emerging as dynamic spaces that challenge traditional pedagogical models. However, understanding this contemporary phenomenon requires contextualizing it within the historical origins of the laboratory metaphor in design—a concept repeatedly reimagined over nearly a century.

Building upon Hasenhütl's (2018, 2023) identification of two historical generations from the early to mid-20th century, this research extends the genealogy to encompass contemporary developments, with particular attention to socio-ecological themes. The analysis reveals four distinct generations of Design Research Labs that do not follow strictly linear chronological progression but represent "expanding parameters" shaped by evolving societal, technological, and scientific contexts generating multiple parallel developments.

This genealogical approach situates current practices within broader historical trajectories, enhancing comprehension of how design research laboratories have transformed as fundamental concepts in design education and practice, while illuminating their continuing potential to shape design's future.

Aside from design theories and design methods, the design research field has built numerous methods for observing design practices. Most of them can be classified into two categories: ethnographies, which consist of sharing the daily lives of designers, and experimental approaches, which reconstruct design situations in the controlled environment of a laboratory. This study retraces the history of these methods, that exist almost independently from one another creating silos within the design research field. Throughout their respective developments, both ethnographies and experimental approaches indicate the same blind spot: the study of material traces of processes that have already taken place. Yet both traditions repeatedly gesture toward the potential value of doing so. Following this thread, I examine existing (yet underdeveloped) attempts to reconstruct design processes through the analysis of sketches, models, drawings, and other artifacts; an approach described here as an archaeology of design processes.

The problem–solution co-evolution model proposed by Dorst and Cross (2001) remains highly influential for understanding design processes. This paper contributes a scoping review of DRS conference proceedings (2001–2025) revealing how the model has been adopted, developed, and critiqued. A thematic synthesis of a corpus of sixteen DRS papers shows how the model has been used to frame, connect, and extend foundational design theories by pointing to the crucial role of mutual adaptation of problem and solution. We find that problem and solution spaces are considered distinct and interdependent. Co-evolution is conceptualized and studied through several conceptual lenses, e.g., cognitive, social, and systemic, based on a pluralistic, yet interwoven collection of classic design theory. We discuss how problem–solution co-evolution research might be advanced through 1) design space representation and visualization, 2) co-evolution seen as a flexible boundary concept, and 3) psychological creativity research on problem construction.

Design methods have long occupied a central yet ambiguous role in design research. They are invoked as distillations of procedural knowledge and recipes for action but also function as placeholders for more complex performances. Yet the persistent assumption that methods are checklists—mechanical sequences of steps that can be validated or optimized—has obscured their performative and situated dimensions. This paper revisits the nature of methods through an architectural model that distinguishes between meta-methods, proto-methods, and method building blocks. Drawing from historical, theoretical, and empirical discussions, we argue that methods are best understood as assemblages of prescription and performance, whose coherence emerges through current and speculative future patterns of use.