[cross-post, cross reply] :) In my experience in educational research, design research is generally the practice of designing a curriculum or another type of designed intervention and seeing how this new practice or artifact changes the environment and the practices that people engage in. In academic educational research, design research is sometimes frowned upon by both ethnographic oriented researchers and experimental oriented researchers because the ethnographic researchers see the intervention as disrupting the existing nature of the studied environment and experimental researchers have problems with the fact that the design is often iterated during the research process, leading to all sorts of confounds in the findings. Additionally, some design research is focused towards creating a particular product/curriculum/intervention, which is different than designing artifacts to answer more fundamental question about human psychology/sociology/development. This is a point of tension, in that the validity of findings for a particular product can be highly contextual and short lived compared to the answer to more fundamental questions that ideally have applicability across a number of contexts and time spans.
Outside of the academic research environment, I see design research to be quite an exciting practice of integrating understanding people and environments with understanding the role of new designs in people's lives. It does seem much more pragmatic in application, which is why in the educational research context, teachers are often quite excited by design research practices. The findings are relatively immediate and actionable, if still methodologically questionable. In my world of definitions, I'm not sure if one category really is bigger than the other with regards to comparing Design Research and User Research. Sort of like saying apples include oranges, but oranges don't include apples. Design research is generally conducted within some sort of applied context. User research may be too, but user research can also include need finding, shadowing, observation, usability testing, etc. That be my 2 cents. ;) ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
