Although Mäkelä’s article is neither recent nor well-known, I include it within the bibliography because it closely aligns with my own notions of how the praxis component of the “Directions for Archival Interfaces in Virtual Reality” project should be positioned. Mäkelä, a ceramic artist and associate professor at Aalto University, provides a succinct and accessible overview to the field of practice-led (design) research, though the brevity of the article requires her to assume a degree of familiarity on the part of the reader with the experience of art or design practice. As a companion to the other two books, it introduces design research in a third disciplinary context – within fine arts – and attests to the pluralistic nature of the field. Given that the current stage of the project is aimed at developing a prototype, Laurel’s and Blessing and Chakrabarti’s texts offer more in the way of concrete steps for embarking on the process – but Mäkelä’s article critically articulates a conceptual stance for the project, one in which the act of making is a process of inquiry and the product created is not only evidence of that process but also an argument (159). Moreover, her brief summary of the theoretical origins of practice-led research hints at the further possibilities presented by incorporating ‘designerly ways of knowing’ into archival theory and practice, which is regrettably outside of the current scope of the project.

In describing the role of artefacts in practice-led research, Mäkelä makes a distinction between “the constructive, solution-focused thinking of the artist or the designer” from the analytic, problem-based thinking associated with verbal and numerical communication (159). While the act of making is understood as a consequence of thinking in conventional research, “invention comes before theory” in practice-led research (159). Mäkelä describes a ‘retrospective look,’ or the act of setting the artefact and the creative process that generated it within a theoretical framework for interpretation (161); in establishing the steps of the design research process for the current project, then, the ‘retrospective look’ may play a key role. At one point, Mäkelä proposes that the artefact is not only an answer to a research question and argumentation on the topic, as established by existing literature on practice-led research, but also “a method of collecting and preserving information and understanding” (158). She does not, unfortunately, elaborate upon her hypothesis but for the recordkeeping profession, it is a provocative idea worth investigating.

Another heavily cited text on the subject of design research is Laurel’s handbook of research methodologies to guide designers in their process. Unlike Blessing and Chakrabarti’s book, the series of essays edited by Laurel is firmly grounded in practice and celebrates heterogeneity within the design field rather than trying to rein it in. Even the presentation of the text itself – purposefully designed, and visually appealing as such – is an endorsement of Laurel’s approach. Design Research: Methods and Perspectives embodies the aesthetic spirit of design in contrast to a strict emphasis on usability that could be attributed to Blessing and Chakrabarti’s book. Of the two, Laurel’s text will likely play a far more significant role in defining the ‘how’ of the design process for the project.[1]

Design Research is divided into four parts: people, form, process and action. For the current stage of the project, the focus will be on the “process” section of the book to help define a design research methodology, although one chapter within “action” – “Social Impact by Design” – also maps out a promising approach. A few essays also specifically take up virtual reality, though it is worth bearing in mind that the book predates the affordable consumer technologies of our own moment by more than a decade. The remainder of the book – discussing qualitative methods (“people”), case studies (“action”) and the nature of artifact creation (“form) – could support later stages of the project.

[1] Not to say that Design Research is above criticism: while Blessing and Chakrabarti’s framework is replete with terms like “Actual Support Description” and “Measurable Success Criteria,” Design Research trades – at times – in its own smarmy bizspeak vocabulary of “fuzzy front end” and “innovation strategy.”

DRM: A Design Research Methodology identifies and attempts to fill a gap in design research by consolidating a set of diverse theories and praxes into a meta-framework that Blessing and Chakrabarti refer to as DRM (design research methodology). The acronym is fitting: the authors appear to propose locking down the inherently heterogeneous field of design research with the aim of making it “more rigorous, effective and efficient and its outcomes academically and practically more worthwhile” (11). Rather than arguing for an expansion and enrichment of academic research by championing the legitimacy of less conventional design methodologies, they instead suggest that design research ought to conform with its norms. Although they situate the concept of the design ‘product’ broadly, noting that it is often conceived as a “mass-produced artefact created by industry” (1), the assumptions underlying their framework are clearly circumscribed by a systems design perspective.

The methodological framework they outline, however, may be useful in drafting a template for the research paper that will accompany the VR prototype, or for articulating the findings of a design research project undertaken in archival studies more generally. It does, at least, offer a series of questions that should be addressed through the design research process, and a systematic way in which to approach them. But, in spite of being cited extensively in the scholarly literature, DRM: A Design Research Methodology is neither integral to the current project nor to a larger discussion of using a design research methodology within archival studies.