1.FOREWORD

Aim：Link what I’d learned about people—about their behaviour, needs, desires, habits, and perceptions—with the design of places and things.

Work： sharing interest in the future

Solution（learn by doing）：creating prototyppes、scenarios, role-playing, and body-storming

"showroom"： using prototypes to provoke reaction and conversation with the ultimate goal of making a positive difference to the world we live in.

2.CONSTRUCTIVE DESIGN RESEARCH

ifloor：an interaction floor built into the main lobby of the city library in Aarhus.(visitors talk to other people---->visitors using mobile phone sent questions--->massage being projected to the floor) 

purpose of ifloor: bring social interaction and serendipity  back to the library, which have almost be lost with the improvement of tnformation technology.

Meaning: iFloor is a good example of research in which planning and doing, reason, and action are not separate, Usually, a research project like iFloor is seen as an example of “research through design.”

Scope of this book：

1.It excludes many other types, including research done in art and design history, aesthetics, and philosophy. 

2.We are dealing with research that imagines and builds new things and describes and explains these constructions.

3.how to integrate design and research, what is the best way to integrate these worlds

建设性设计研究包括心理学与设计，设计研究、设计管理、工程与计算机科学、设计中的自然科学、产品语义和符号学、基于实践的研究、设计历史，2美学和哲学。

what is design education: In Sharon Poggenpohl’s words, it aims at developing sensibilities of visual, material, cultural, and historical contexts.

Interaction design is time-oriented and relies on personas, scenarios, narratives, and software prototypes.

social foces behind research:50s--------educated upper middle classes   60s-----comsumer driven, ecological  crisis, democratized pop culture  70s-------design built on sources like pop art   80s-------from please everyone to pick their own consumer now-------design is currently maturing by embracing new computer-based technologies and research. Research helps designers to navigate the second modernity

3.THE COMING OF AGE OF CONSTRUCTIVE DESIGN RESEARCH

basing design on rationalistic thinking:

1. Herbert Simon, who proposed basing design on systems and operations analysis. design became an exercise in mathematics, and the task of design research was to describe the natural and human rationalities that govern it.

2. “design methods movement,” which bloomed for a few years in the 1960s, Writing at the end of the 1990s, Swedish designer Henrik Gedenryd noted how this movement built on operations research and systems theory, trying to lay the foundations for design on logic, rationality, abstraction, and rigorous principles.

problem: do design in the prescribed manner just doesn’t work. left a legacy of many useful means for improving design, but its problems went deep

phenomenon：the leading rationalists like J.C. Jones finally turned to encouraged designers to experiment with art

In the 1990s, Kees Dorst and Henrik Gedenryd followed Donald Schön’s pragmatist perspective, arguing for seeing designers as sense-making beings rather than problem solvers.  research can be done without complex rationalistic methodology on pragmatic grounds.

basic ethos of the occupation: Design is a creative activity whose aim is to establish the multifaceted qualities of objects, processes, services and their systems in whole life cycles. Therefore, design is the central factor of innovative humanization of technologies and the crucial factor of cultural and economic exchange.设计是一项创造性活动，其目的是在整个生命周期中建立对象，流程，服务及其系统的多方面质量。 因此，设计是技术创新人性化的核心因素，也是文化和经济交流的关键因素。

the most important ideas from this time built on usability and user-centered design

Usability fell on the fertile ground of ergonomics and spread quickly：Usability Engineering by Jacob Nielsen， Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things.

The problem with usability：it did little to inform design about the “context”

ethnography:American precursor Xerox PARC, Through PARC, ethnomethodology influenced a field called “computer-supported collaborative work” (CSCW). The aims of much of this work were summarized by Peggy Szymanski and Jack Whalen: 

1.understanding the fundamentally socio-cultural organization of human reasoning and action.

2. naturalistic observation of that action in everyday conditions.

sharing previously undocumented solutions ：much of any organization’s truly valuable knowledge, its essential intellectual capital, is found in the undocumented ideas, unauthorized inventions and insights, and practicable know-how of its members.

user-centered design created powerful tools for understanding people and creating designs that work. However, it was just as obvious that it was not able to respond to many interests coming from the more traditional design world. User-centered design methods may have helped to explore context for inspiration, but it left too many important sources of imagination in design unused.

Constructive design researchers have had good reasons to go back to contemporary art and design in search of more designspecific methods and ways of working：address the problem of creativity with methodic, conceptual, technological, and artistic means

3.1 Design Practice Provides Methods

mothod push beyond the user：experience prototypes, design games, and many types of traditional design tools such as collages, mood boards, storyboards, pastiche scenarios, scenarios, “personas,” and various types of role-plays，Froukje Sleeswijk Visser listed 44 user-centered methods in her doctoral thesis at Delft, and IDEO introduced a pack of cards having 52 methods . problem:with a limited connection to the intentions of the original work.

3.2Turn to Technology

“sandbox culture.” of MIT media lab: new possibilities in information tehchnology

3.3 Enter UX

Patrick Jordan at Philips, who claimed that design should build on pleasure rather than usability. Maypole followed his lead, usually building on concepts like need

This hedonic and emotional movement was a useful correction to cognitive psychology, It focused on measurable emotions at the expense of more finely tuned emotions like aesthetic feelings, which are crucial to design.Finally, pragmatist philosophy gave this concept credibility, depth, and openness

这个概念是如此成功，以至于领先的大学，公司和设计公司已经建立了研究用户体验的部门。甚至国际标准化组织（ISO）都在尝试为工业实践中的用户体验创建标准。

3.4 Design Tradition as Inspiration

RAC: artistic movement called “situationism.”  “critical design,”

many design researchers seek inspiration from art and design

3.5 Between Engineering, Science, Design, and Art

constructive design research：scenarios, personas, Make Tools, and the cultural probes. Constructive design researchers typically collaborate with sociologists, anthropologists, and computer scientists. In these research groups, design researchers are often junior partners who needed to follow the models of research from their more established colleagues

4.RESEARCH PROGRAMS

progress in research ultimately lies in research programs rather than individual studies.从过去的理论中获得延展，而不是仅仅进行个人的研究

4.1 Some Features of Constructive Research Programs

several successful research programs in constructive design research（which is programmatic）：(范围和脉络界定)

Interaction design in Eindhoven / critical design in London / Empathic design, co-design, and action research in Scandinavia 

J.J. Gibson’s ecological psychology---->design issues like pleasure and emotions------>research focus in the Netherlands shifted to Eindhoven ( increasingly interested in emotions and experience)--------->social ecology and the concept of self------->emerging interaction design borrowed theory from more established fields and researchers like the cognitive and ecological psychologist Don Norman--------> beyond cognitive psychology, interested in issues like identity and how people function in the world with their bodies.

接着文章提到culture probes作为一种艺术手段被忽略其艺术背景，kirstin boehner指出该方法被滥用为一种类似日记研究的数据收集技术，这是对传统HCL方法的破坏而不是补充。因此，When looking at empathic design in Helsinki,  the contextual inquiry quickly took philosophical and sociological tones.empathic design also built on pragmatist and ethnomethodological（实用主义和民族方法论） references.

文章提出一种研究的思路，即基于解释性的方式对艺术领域的方法进行重铸，进行关键案例的研究。research methods were borrowed from other researchers and practice,but were used creatively in interpretive terms.

4.2 Imagination as a Step to Preferred Situations

As the failure of the design methods movement suggests, design and design research will fail if they are reduced to a formula. Constructive design researchers do not try to analyze the material world as Simon suggested, nor do they see design as an exercise in rational problem solving. Rather, they imagine new realities and build them to see whether they work. The main criterion for successful work is whether it is imaginative in design terms. Theirs is a science of the imaginary

This work takes place in a cycle that begins with an objective of some kind, and continues to user studies. These studies lead to concept creation and building mock-ups and prototypes that are typically evaluated before the cycle begins again.

4.3 Making Imagination Tangible: Workshops and Studios in Research

builds things with its infrastructure (comfortable studio-like places that house discussions and create concepts and goes all the way to workshops with heavy machinery as well as computer and electronics labs) or or in the case of software, programs in some test environment. Just as in any sandbox, iteration goes on until something survives critique.

analysis and reasoning are important, but equally important is design experience, whether it is based on emotions, feelings, or intuition其中分析和推理很重要，但设计经验也同样重要，无论设计经验是基于情感，感觉还是直觉。

In MIT's hacker culture, doing has always been more important than reflection, but a program may be successful for a few years if it hits the rignt technological or political gold mine. However, when returns from this mine get leaner, this model faces difficulties. So it's important to produce new thinking at a slower pace.

4.4 How Constructive Design Research produces Meaning

That constructive design research is grounded in imagination, it turn to offer alternatives rather than try to alter reality, it directly provide alternatives to deeply ingrained habits of thinking.

Critical design, or design that asks carefully crafted questions and makes us think, is just as difficult and just as important as design that solves problems or finds answers. Its purpose is to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry, and the public.

Future and several other projects re-imagined better futures instead of trying to disrupt existing ones.