Design Research

Design research investigates users' needs, behaviours, and motivations to inform the creation of effective and user-centred designs.

The 9 rules of design research

It's hard to distinguish between user research and design research.

But digging deep into the term's meaning, I have found its connection with economist and scientist Herbert A. Simon in post-world war. There was an intent to create a distinction between science and design.

The most fundamental challenge to conventional ideas on design has been the growing advocacy of systematic methods of problem-solving, borrowed from computer techniques and management theory, for the assessment of design problems and the development of design solutions.’

These ideas encouraged the development of design research as a discipline, with the foundation of the Design Research Society (DRS) in 1966 in London.

Wikipedia's definition of design research is a bit confusing, and it is open to new sources.

IDEO uses the terminology all the time. Jane Fulton Suri, in The Little Book of Design Research Ethics, gives us a tip that can help us understand this subtle distinction.

The goal of design research isn’t to collect data; it’s to synthesise information and provide insight and guidance that leads to action.

I would say that this definition would make many user researchers in product teams today cringe. Erika Hall's explains in A Design Research Framework what actions mean:

Asking and answering questions systematically to make more intentional and informed decisions about planning and creating new things and ways of doing things.

This is a rabbit hole.

This article is still in development, and it's a seed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_research
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Norman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_science
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_research
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ux-research/9781491951286/ch01.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Chris_Jones

Self-note: Explain designing systems and their relationship with design research.

The design system will vary then depending on our purposes [to design for a single unified purpose or for complex and unknowable ones]. It is a matter of the greatest importance to understand what great damage could be done by trying to solve the second type of problem as if it were a problem of the first type

From the conference writings