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 make a distinction between user research and design research.

But digging deep on the meaning of the term, I have found it's 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.

The wikipedia definition of design research is a bit confusing and 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 to understand this subtleties when it talks about .

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 to cringe.

This is a rabbit hole.

This article is still in development, 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

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