The Routledge Companion to Design Research by Paul A. Rodgers (University of Strathclyde, UK)

This new edition of The Routledge Companion to Design Research offers an updated, comprehensive examination of design research, celebrating a plurality of voices and range of conceptual, methodological, technological and theoretical approaches evident in contemporary design research.

This volume comprises thirty-eight original and high-quality design research chapters from contributors around the world, with offerings from the vast array of disciplines in and around modern design praxis, including areas such as industrial and product design, visual communication, interaction design, fashion design, service design, engineering and architecture. The Companion is divided into four distinct sections with chapters that examine the nature and process of design research, the purpose of design research and how one might embark on design research. They also explore how leading design researchers conduct their design research through formulating and asking questions in novel ways, and the creative methods and tools they use to collect and analyse data. The Companion also includes a number of case studies that illustrate how one might best communicate and disseminate design research through contributions that offer techniques for writing and publicising research.

The Routledge Companion to Design Research has a wide appeal to researchers and educators in design and design-related disciplines such as engineering, business, marketing, and computing, and will make an invaluable contribution to state-of-the-art design research at postgraduate, doctoral and post-doctoral levels and teaching across a wide range of different disciplines.

Paul A. Rodgers is Professor of Design in the Department of Design, Manufacturing and Engineering Management at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. He holds undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Design from Middlesex University and a PhD in Product Design from the University of Westminster, London. His research interests explore the discipline of design and how disruptive design interventions can enact positive change in health and social care and elsewhere. From 2017 to 2021, he held the post of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Priority Area Leadership Fellowship in Design in the UK.

Joyce Yee is Professor of Design and Social Innovation at Northumbria University, UK. She co-founded the Designing Entangled Social Innovation in Asia-Pacific network (www.desiap.org) in 2015 with Dr Yoko Akama, RMIT in Australia, as a peer learning network for designing social innovation practitioners. Her research focusses on culturally diverse and locally relevant practices that challenge the dominant industrialized and Western-centric models of design.