design tools library

Research by design is an inductive mode of producing knowledge. On the one hand, it aligns with the tradition of broadly defined experimental research, akin to the natural sciences and engineering, where knowledge is generated by ‘putting things together and observing the outcomes’. On the other hand, it resonates with philosophy's use of thought experiments, posing questions such as 'What if?' and creating a speculative faculty that envisions the world through its potentialities, rather than simply its empirical reality. 

Design thinking is concerned with producing synthetic knowledge, which draws heterogeneous strands of analytic registers towards a productive value. Given the increasing emphasis on trans-disciplinarity in academia, design thinking offers an ontological ground to cut across a multiplicity of discourses, disciplines and definitions, fostering ‘tentacular’ thinking. There is a growing interest in design as a means of decolonising, emancipating, and radically re-imagining our world. As Bruno Latour famously put it: “I would argue that design is one of the terms that has replaced the word 'revolution'!" With its ability to provide solutions to ‘wicked’ problems, design thinking can help produce radical alternatives for the future, something sorely lacking at the moment. Design can serve as a mode of effective engagement and activism towards making all these alternatives happen.

The word ‘design’ has been widely appropriated by non-design disciplines, such as management and organisational studies, and there is a growing interest in design methods among ethnographers, sociologists and other social scientists. We can also add engineers to this list who, in a way, have never stopped ‘designing’. However, we contend that creative disciplines engaged in spatial and ecological thinking, through design tools, such as mapping, imagining and conceiving spatially and speculatively, are uniquely positioned to develop design not as a singular research method but as a research methodology.