Our Lens

Expanded and complex, Design presents critical challenges in its definition, delimitation, and mapping. This porousness of disciplinary boundaries, reflected in the ontology of Design, its professional practice, and scientific research for/into and through Design, endows it with a special brilliance—a seductive, yet problematic, intensity.

Herbert Simon's seminal definition of Design remains relevant: “To design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” Implicit in the understanding of this definition is the inference that, by its very projective nature, Design is always an investigative process, yielding outcomes such as things, systems, services, speculative ideations, or pragmatic solutions guided by the importance of design as a socially effective praxis.

Ursula Le Guin reminds us that “science fact and speculative fabulation need each other.” We must add that, in the case of Design, programme and poetics also need each other. Confined within the scientific area of Arts and Humanities by the FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology), research for/into and through Design breathes and moves comfortably within this confinement, even as it acknowledges Design as an autonomous scientific field and paradoxically recognizes its inter and transdisciplinary rhizomes.

At the foundation of Design research lie the pillars of ethics and politics, and the strive of design to be respectful. Its translation into KPIs or indicators of scientific production may not always be straightforward. Yet, being gentle and respectful researchers, empathetic and with  love for life (in the sense of biophilia) will always make us better researchers and better human beings. 

Scientific research demands scientific integrity, also inviting the embrace of humility and curiosity as guiding forces of research. It is important, each time, to comprehend the designs that Design designs. From there, research for/into and through Design can navigate different waters—the research environment is ever-fluid—approaching research canons and jargon to dismantle them, drawn by the light of the new or innovation, just as it can revisit the past, history, heritage.

The present is tense, yet within it resides a myriad of possibilities. Design research is a precious ethos to understand and unveil them. Perhaps this is still only the beginning, but being at the beginning of things is a good place to understand and respect them.