Remarks on the Acceptance of the Design-Ed, Cumulus, and DRS Lifetime Achievement Award for Design Research presented at the LearnXDesign conference in Chicago 2015

Abstract

I am deeply honored to be standing before you tonight to
accept this Lifetime Achievement Award for Design
Research from Design-Ed, Cumulus, and the Design
Research Society. I know that Design-Ed is a relatively new
organization with a strong commitment to improving
design education, while Cumulus and the Design Research
Society have fostered research for many years and have
consequently had a strong effect on deepening design
culture. I am a longtime member of the Design Research
Society and have only recently begun to participate in
Cumulus meetings, while this is my first Design-Ed event. I
would like to thank the committee that nominated me for
the award and hope that my remarks this evening will not
disappoint them.
My participation in the culture of design – and here I use
Guy Julier’s term – has been rich and satisfying. I came to
the study of design before it was a widely accepted and
understood activity and I have been involved in its growth
over the past thirty-five years. I have watched the field of
design research expand from one that involved only a
small number of people to a professional practice that
engages scholars worldwide. On the one hand, I applaud
this proliferation of academic interest in design but on the
other I have some concern about its development. Despite
much valuable research that has been done, I believe that
we researchers still lack a clear and widespread consensus
about how these research activities can relate to each
other and how they can influence design practice and the
world at large. These are not questions easily answered
and I raise them in order to suggest their importance as we
move forward.