This book provides emerging and established designers and design educators, along with their collaborators, with a means to understand how and why the landscape of design research has come to exist as it does, and how and why its various destinations and pathways connect.

It is an accessible “guide” for those in and around design who have little to no experience with planning and conducting research to inform their decision-making. Specifically, the book makes the case that an integration of research and design is critical in a world shaped by an increasingly complex and pervasive amalgam of challenges: social, technological, environmental, economic, and political. The need to expand shared understandings of research has also become acute because this landscape is increasingly traversed by those who are seeking evidence-based outcomes to their needs rather than solutions shaped by aesthetic polish, subjective client demands, or simple cost-benefit formulas.

The book will be of interest to scholars and designers working in design studies and design research, as well as to design practitioners who are increasingly called upon to understand and act upon data gleaned from evidence-based research.