Design-Based Research: Research to Improve Design and Theory

As Learning and Instructional Design Technology professionals, we seek to improve teaching and learning in all situations and for all people. Part of accomplishing that mission is to develop understanding of the world through research, both research that explores an idea (e.g., qualitative research) and research that explains the relationships/variables in a phenomenon (e.g., quantitative research).

However, because we are also trained as designers, there is a third method that we use to understand the world, and that is through designing interventions to change the learning in a situation (see Gibbons & Bunderson, 2005). By creating new learning designs, we develop deeply intimate understanding of a phenomenon. This is knowledge only a creator knows and understands about their creation—knowledge that is “inaccessible via other means” (Moore et al., 2024, p. 2680). This knowledge helps a designer be more effective, but can also be communicated to others to develop both generalized theory about teaching and learning, as well as contextualized, local theory about how teaching and learning happens for specific individuals in a unique setting.

In this chapter, we explain the history of design as a form of research and knowledge creation, briefly touch on different ways to document and share design knowledge, and then focus more specifically on design-based research as a dominant strategy within the field.

Situating Design Research

In this chapter, we use the term design research to broadly mean all the different methods of using research methods/strategies in conjunction with design processes and activities. A scholarly focus on design research fosters the development of design theories, which in turn improve the quality of design and design practice (Margolin, 2010).

The Approach Trinity

However, not all design research has the same goals and purposes, and thus does not follow similar methods and processes. One way of defining different purposes of design research is by identifying the preposition in the relationship between research and design. Doing this, we identify three broad approaches to integrating design into research: research into design, research for design, and research through design (Buchanan, 2007; Cross, 1999; Jonas, 2007; Schneider, 2007). In presenting this trilogy, we rely most heavily on Jonas (2007) who described this originally, but more recently Jacobsen and McKenney (2023) have argued for a similar framework. We will interweave their thoughts with Jonas’.

Jonas (2007) identified research into design as the most prevalent—and straightforward—form of design research. This approach separates research from design practice; the researcher observes and studies design practice from without, commonly addressing the history, aesthetics, theory, or nature of design (Schneider, 2007). We argue that research into design is not typically considered part of design-based research, but it is a valuable approach to understanding design professionals, design processes, and design practice, and studies of this nature are frequently published.

Research for design applies to complex, sophisticated projects, where the purpose of research is to support research and development, such as in market and user research (Jonas, 2007), or in smaller cases where the research creates understanding about users/learners to aid the designers. Here, the role of research is to build and improve the design, not contribute to theory or practice. Jacobsen and McKenney included this in their framework as well, and argued this research studies the original problem that led to the design, the context for the design, and the stakeholders impacted.

According to Jonas’s (2007) description, research through design is where researchers work to shape their design (i.e., the research object) and establish connections to broader theory and practice. This approach begins with the identification of a research question and carries through the design process experimentally, improving design methods and finding novel ways of controlling the design process (Schneider, 2007). Jacobsen and McKenney divided this into two types of research: research on design, which focuses on the qualities of a design that helps to meet the learning goals, and research through design that focuses on the impacts that come from the design once implemented. We will call this approach research through design but recognize the distinctions that Jacobsen and McKenney had on the qualities of an intervention vs. the outcomes created.

Cross’s-ologies

Cross (1999) conceived of design research approaches based on the early drive toward a science of design and identified three bodies of scientific inquiry: epistemology, praxiology, and phenomenology. Design epistemology primarily concerns what Cross termed “designerly ways of knowing” or how designers think and communicate about design (Cross, 1999; Cross, 2007). Design praxiology deals with practices and processes in design or how to develop and improve artifacts and the processes used to create them. Design phenomenology examines the form, function, configuration, and value of artifacts, such as exploring what makes a cell phone attractive to a user or how changes in a software interface affect user’s activities within the application.

Buchanan’s Strategies of Productive Science

Like Cross, Buchanan (2007) viewed design research through the lens of design science and identified four research strategies that frame design inquiry: design science, dialectic inquiry, rhetorical inquiry, and productive science (Figure 1). Design science focuses on designing and decision-making, addressing human and consumer behavior. According to Buchanan (2007), dialectic inquiry examines the “social and cultural context of design; typically [drawing] attention to the limitations of the individual designer in seeking sustainable solutions to problems” (p. 57). Rhetorical inquiry focuses on the design experience as well as the designer’s process to create products that are usable, useful, and desirable. Productive science studies how the potential of a design is realized through the refinement of its parts, including materials, form, and function. Buchanan (2007) conceptualized a design research—what he termed design inquiry—that includes elements of all four strategies, looking at the designer, the design, the design context, and the refinement process as a holistic experience.

Figure 1. Buchanan’s productive science strategies, adapted from Buchanan (2007)

History of Design Research

These frameworks from Jonas, Cross, and Buchanan help us understand the different ways that design and research can support each other as a holistic design research methodology. Design research has existed in primitive form—as market research and process analysis—since before the turn of the 20th century, and, although it served to improve processes and marketing, it was not applied as scientific research. John Chris Jones, Bruce Archer, and Herbert Simon were among the first to shift the focus from research for design (e.g., research with the intent of gathering data to support product development) to research on design (e.g., research exploring the design process). Their efforts framed the initial development of design research and science.

John Chris Jones

An electrical/industrial engineer, Jones (1970) felt that the design process was ambiguous and often too abstruse to discuss effectively. One solution, he offered, was to define and discuss design in terms of methods. By identifying and discussing design methods, researchers would be able to create transparency in the design process, combating perceptions of design being more or less mysteriously inspired. This discussion of design methods, Jones proposed, would in turn raise the level of discourse and practice in design, something he encouraged as an early leader in the Design Research Society.

Bruce Archer

Archer, an early leader in industrial design, worked with Jones and likewise supported the adoption of research methods from other disciplines. Archer (1965) proposed that applying systematic methods would improve the assessment of design problems and foster the development of effective solutions. Archer recognized, however, that improved practice alone would not enable design to achieve disciplinary status. In order to become a discipline, design required a theoretical foundation to support its practice. Archer (1981) advocated that design research was the primary means by which theoretical knowledge could be developed. He suggested that the application of systematic inquiry, such as existed in engineering, would yield knowledge about not only product and practice, but also the theory that guided each.

Herbert Simon

It was multidisciplinary social scientist Simon, however, that issued the clarion call for transforming design into design science. In The Sciences of the Artificial, Simon (1969) reasoned that the rigorous inquiry and discussion surrounding naturally occurring processes and phenomena was just as necessary for man-made products and processes. He particularly called for “[bodies] of intellectually tough, analytic, partly formalizable, partly empirical, teachable doctrine about the design process” (p. 132). This call for more scholarly discussion and practice resonated with designers across disciplines in design and engineering (Buchanan, 2007; Cross, 1999; Cross, 2007; Friedman, 2003; Jonas, 2007; Willemien, 2009). Design research sprang directly from this early movement and has continued to gain momentum, in engineering, design, and technology.

Design Experiments

Years later, in the 1980s, Simon’s work inspired the first design-based research (DBR) efforts in education (Collins et al., 2004). Much of the DBR literature attributes its beginnings to the work of Ann Brown and Allan Collins (Cobb et al., 2003; Collins et al., 2004; Kelly, 2003; McCandliss, Kalchman, & Bryant, 2003; Oh & Reeves, 2010; Reeves, 2006; Shavelson et al., 2003; Tabak, 2004; van den Akker, 1999). Their work on design experiments focused on research and development in authentic contexts, and drew heavily on research approaches and development practices in the design sciences, including the work of these early design researchers such as Simon (Brown, 1992; Collins, 1992; Collins et al., 2004).

The Emergence of Design-Based Research

 As more researchers and designers acknowledged the work of Brown and Collins in the 1990s and early 2000s and how design experiments could be useful in research and design practice, their ideas took off in education. With the uptake of design experiments, how they were applied changed as they were used. Education researchers saw design experiments as “both ‘engineering’ particular forms of learning and systematically studying those forms of learning within the context defined by the means of supporting them” (Cobb et al., 2003, p. 9). The focus with design experiments was on real-world contexts, outside of laboratory experiments, and testing and revising  designs in those contexts. As an iterative process, design experiments transitioned into design-based research.

Formalizing DBR Processes and Definitions

While scholarly approaches to research into design and research for design are important, in the rest of this chapter we will focus on design-based research as an approach to doing research through design. But what is, exactly, design-based research? One of the most challenging characteristics of DBR is the quantity and use of terms that identify DBR in the research literature. According to van den Akker (1999), the use of DBR terminology and nomenclature varies by educational sub-discipline, with areas such as (a) curriculum, (b) learning and instruction, (c) media and technology, and (d) teacher education and didactics favoring specific terms that reflect the focus of their research (see Table 1).

Table 1.

We will now briefly describe a few of these models, briefly.

Design-based research. Barab (2014) defined DBR as an approach that “deals with complexity by iteratively changing the learning environment over time— collecting evidence of the effect of these variations and feeding it recursively into future designs” (p. 154). DBR addresses needs and issues, real problems in practice. But it also incorporates the process of design to address these problems, with a theoretical base and a research design to iteratively study the learning phenomena and refine the learning environment. All of these elements work together to develop products, contribute to theory, and inform or discover solutions to problems in practice (Bannan-Ritland, 2003; Barab & Squire, 2004; Sandoval & Bell, 2004).

Defining DBR and explaining the various models researchers had for it meant there were many articles written. A major initial description came from the Design-based Research Collective, a collection of researchers funded by the Spencer Foundation to study this “emerging paradigm.” Their work was published in 2003 in Educational Researcher (DBRC, 2003—later revisted by the journal a decade later by Anderson & Shattuck, 2012). In 2004, the Journal of the Learning Sciences published a special issue on DBR (https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hlns20/13/1?nav=tocList), followed by a special issue in 2005 in Educational Technology Magazine (https://www.jstor.org/stable/i40186159). Then in 2015 the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology published a special issue on educational design research (https://ajet.org.au/index.php/AJET/issue/view/114).

To help people understand the design-based research process as well as the various elements that are part of it, many visual models were created. The images are meant for novices to gain a better understanding of the nature of DBR. The various models attempt to represent the cyclical and messy nature of design-based research in a two-dimensional way (see images below). They are not all the same, some have more detail on the more granular level of the process and elements (see Easterday et al, 2014 and McKenney and Reeves, 2018); while Fraefel (2014) is more basic to the DBR process.

Education Design Research. In contrast to design-based research, McKenney and Reeves (2018) called their model education design research (EDR) and defined it as “a genre of research in which the iterative development of solutions to practical and complex educational problems also provides the context for empirical investigations, which yields theoretical understanding that can inform the work of others” (p. 7, see Figure X). While a well-known model, the name educational design research is still well known, and in 2017 the Educational Design Research: An International Journal for Design-Based Research in Education published its first issue.

Design-based Implementation Research. In 2014 a new variation emerged: design-based implementation research (DBIR). This variation emphasizes that DBIR is an approach to organizing research and development to problems and needs in practice. It is a collaborative and iterative approach grounded in systematic inquiry. The purpose of DBIR is to build the capacity of systems and engage in a continuous improvement process for the end goal of a transformation of teaching and learning (Fishman et al., 2013). DBIR is different from DBR in that it has a focus on developing capacity for sustaining change in systems. The DBIR process is explained in detail in published articles and on the Learn DBIR website (https://www.colorado.edu/research/learn-dbir/). DBIR pairs easily with Research-Practice Partnerships and some researchers argue that to do DBIR you must be in a research-practice partnership.

Key Characteristics of Design-Based Research

The proliferation of terminology among scholars and inconsistent use of these terms has created a sprawling body of literature, with these various splinter DBR groups hosting scholarly conversations regarding their particular brand of DBR. However, whatever design-based research is called, scholars agree that in order to do design-based research, you must do research that is:

Design driven. All literature identifies DBR as focusing on the evolution of a design (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012; Brown, 1992; Cobb et al., 2003; Collins, 1992; Design-Based Research Collective, 2003; Hoadley & Campos, 2022). While the design can range from an instructional artifact to an intervention, engagement in the design process is what yields the experience, data, and insight necessary for inquiry.

1. Situated and problem-focused. Recalling Brown’s (1992) call for more authentic research contexts, nearly all definitions of DBR situate the aforementioned design process in a real-world context and problem, such as a classroom (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012; Barab & Squire, 2004; Cobb et al., 2003).
2. Iterative. Literature also appears to agree that a DBR process does not consist of a linear design process, but rather multiple cycles of design, testing, and revision (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012; Barab & Squire, 2004; Brown, 1992; Design-Based Research Collective, 2003; Shavelson et al., 2003). These iterations must also represent systematic adjustment of the design, with each adjustment and subsequent testing serving as a miniature experiment (Barab & Squire, 2004; Collins, 1992).
3. Collaborative. While the literature may not always agree on the roles and responsibilities of those engaged in DBR, collaboration between researchers, designers, and educators appears to be key (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012; Barab & Squire, 2004; McCandliss et al., 2003). Each collaborator enters the project with a unique perspective and, as each engages in research, forms a role-specific view of phenomena. These perspectives can then be combined to create a more holistic view of the design process, its context, and the developing product.
4. Theory building. Design research focuses on more than creating an effective design; DBR should produce an intimate understanding of both design and theory (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012; Barab & Squire, 2004; Brown, 1992; Cobb et al., 2003; Design-Based Research Collective, 2003; Joseph, 2004; Shavelson et al., 2003). According to Barab & Squire (2004), “Design-based research requires more than simply showing a particular design works but demands that the researcher . . . generate evidence-based claims about learning that address contemporary theoretical issues and further the theoretical knowledge of the field” (p. 6). DBR needs to build and test theory, yielding findings that can be generalized to both local and broad theory (Hoadley, 2004).
5. Practical. While theoretical contributions are essential to DBR, the results of DBR studies “must do real work” (Cobb et al., 2003, p. 10) and inform instructional, research, and design practice (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012; Barab & Squire, 2004; Design-Based Research Collective, 2003; McCandliss et al., 2003).
6. Productive. Not only should design research produce theoretical and practical insights, but also the design itself must produce results, measuring its success in terms of how well the design meets its intended outcomes (Barab & Squire, 2004; Design-Based Research Collective, 2003; Joseph, 2004; McCandliss et al., 2003).

In short, Moore et al. (2024) summarized the main characteristics of DBR as including the following:

The DBR process generally includes an exploration and then focus on the challenge or problem to tackle. Then, using a theoretical framework (e.g., inquiry-based learning, cognitive learning, cultural historical activity theory) and applying design principles, something is created with the various collaborators on the project. That might be designing curricula, a program, professional learning, or resources. The practitioners then implement what was created, and that implementation is rigorously studied through rigorous research and data collection. Iterative refinements use the evidence collected through a cycle of design, implementation, analysis, and redesign.

Writing Up & Evaluating DBR Reports

Because it is so difficult to define and conceptualize DBR, it is similarly difficult to replicate authentically. As yet, there is not a commonly accepted structure for writing up DBR studies nor a list of criteria for evaluating the quality of DBR reports. Oftentimes authors publish DBR studies using the same format as regular research studies, making it difficult to recognize DBR research and learn how other DBR scholars mitigate the challenges from simultaneously managing a design project and research study.

Our recommendation is that DBR scholars publish the messy findings resulting from their work and pull back the curtain to show how they balanced competing concerns to arrive at their results. We believe it would help if DBR scholars adopted more common frameworks for publishing studies. As discussed in this chapter, the following are common characteristics of DBR:

• DBR is design-driven and intervention-focused
• DBR is situated within an actual teaching/learning context
• DBR is iterative
• DBR is collaborative between researchers, designers, and practitioners
• DBR builds theory but also needs to be practical and result in useful interventions

One recommendation is that DBR scholars adopt these as the characteristics of their work that they will make explicit in every published paper so that DBR articles can be recognized by readers and better aggregated together to show the value of DBR over time. One suggestion is that DBR scholars in their methodology sections could adopt these characteristics as subheadings. So in addition to discussing data collection and data analysis, they would also discuss:

• Design Research Type (research into, through, or of design),
• Description of the Design Process and Product,
• Design and Learning Context,
• Design Collaborations,
• Design Iterations, perhaps by listing each iteration and then the data collection and analysis for each.
• Also in the concluding sections, in addition to discussing research results, scholars would discuss
• Applications to Theory (perhaps dividing into Local Theory and Outcomes and Transferable Theory and Findings) and
• Applications for Practice.

In addition, DBR papers that are too big could be broken up, with different papers reporting on different iterations but using the same language and formatting to make it easier to connect the ideas throughout the papers. Not all papers would have both local and transferable theory (the latter being more evident in later iterations), so it would be sufficient to indicate in a paper that local theory and outcomes were developed and met with some ideas for transferable theory that would be developed in future iterations. The important thing would be to refer to all of these main characteristics in each paper so that scholars can recognize the work as DBR, situate it appropriately, and know what to look for in terms of quality during the review process.

In addition, it is important that journal reviewers and editors understand how to review DBR papers. Rather than using a typical evaluation rubric, we recommend that journals ask reviewers to consider the following when reviewing DBR papers (which parallels guidelines for mentors of papers in the journal Educational Design Research:

1. Is there sufficient exploration and analysis of the initial problem?
2. Is the description of the design and its context sufficient to understand the design?
3. Are the design iterations described and reflected on sufficiently to enable an understanding of what was new in each iteration and its potential effects?
4. Does the research meet rigorous methodological criteria for qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methodologies? (see Jacobsen & McKenney, 2023).
5. Is there sufficient explanation of both local and broad theory, and evidence from the research of the design to support each type of theory? Does the broad theory provide novel and useful guidance for research or practice?
6. Is there evidence provided of the practical benefit of the design, and its impact on practice by meeting its objectives in both implementation and dissemination?

Other Design Scholarship Approaches

 There are other scholarly approaches to design work or design knowledge that are different from design-based research and that focus more on research into design and research for design. This includes instructional design cases and formative evaluation of design. In recent years there has been some confusion about the differences among these three areas, along with case study research (Moore et al, 2024). This confusion became apparent when editors of different design journals were reviewing articles that clearly did not fit the scope of their journal or the methods used in the article were not clearly articulating the type of design work they were engaged in. For example, the Journal of Applied Instructional Design (JAID; https://jaid.edtechbooks.org/about_jaid) publishes instructional design cases, but this journal was frequently receiving design-based research or case studies articles. Other journals that publish design work include the International Journal of Designs for Learning (IJDL; https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/ijdl) and the Journal of Formative Design for Learning (JFDL; https://link.springer.com/journal/41686). Finally, Educational Technology Research and Development, in the Development Section of the journal, publishes robust research on the planning, implementation, evaluation, and management stages of instructional designs with a focus on developed technologies.

Conclusion

 Design-based research is, to some degree, natural for scholars in our discipline who are trained as both designers, theorists, evaluators, and researchers. When we seek to improve teaching and learning, we naturally design interventions to solve problems and create opportunities. And when we design things, we recognize the need for research and evaluation evidence to make our work successful. Also, as we consider the research and evidence, we often find connections to theory that can benefit other practitioners and researchers. Thus, often the work we do naturally could be called design-based research. However, in this chapter we have endeavored to argue for a more explicit approach to our design-based research. By understanding the history of DBR, its various approaches and models, and the key characteristics required to do it well, you can more explicitly consider how to attend to your work in a way that meets the criteria of quality design and research—and thus be more likely to make an impact in both a local setting and the general discipline.

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