Design Science Research

Making something and studying something have been treated as opposites for a very long time.

If you worked in a university, you knew which side of this line you were on. Researchers discovered knowledge. Engineers and designers applied knowledge. The researcher wrote the paper, the engineer built the thing, and the implicit hierarchy was that the paper counted as a contribution to the field while the thing did not. This split has shaped entire careers, entire funding structures, entire departments, and it has caused a strange kind of waste, because the act of actually building something forces you to confront questions that observation alone will never ask. When you have to make something work in the real world, reality tells you which of your assumptions were wrong in ways that no literature review can.

There is a tradition called design science research that refuses to accept this split. It argues that the artefact itself, the system or the framework or the tool you have built, is a carrier of knowledge. It embodies your design decisions, your theory of what the problem actually is, and the conditions under which your solution does or does not work. Building well is a way of thinking out loud. You can only claim it as research if you can say what the design knows, which is harder than it sounds and is the part most builders skip. But when it is done properly, the line between making and knowing disappears, and you end up with something that would have been unthinkable in either tradition on its own. When was the last time you built something and realised only afterwards what you had actually been trying to figure out?

Last week we looked at the quiet plumbing connecting tools. This week we look at the long-standing split between making things and studying them, and at the tradition that refuses to accept it.