Introduction

Ralf Michel

pp. 15-19

in: Ralf Michel (ed), Design research now, Basel, Birkhäuser, 2007

Abstract

For over forty years,designresearchhasbeenconsideredanessential element in the emerging academic discipline of design. In the last decade in particular, it has been conductedmore broadly than ever before.At the core ofmost, if not all, concepts of design research is the realisation that, in an age of increasingly complex conditions for practising and studying design, there are almost no systematic bases for the continued development of design as an academic discipline; systematic in the sense of scientific and thus independently arguable. Many people have come to realise that if design is to have a future as a socially, culturally or economically relevant discipline, it cannot dispensewith the academic tools of the discipline's cognitive force and agency.