Research through Designers: A pictorial reflection on engagements, encounters, and environments at a design research jamboree

Magazine article, 2024

We picture design researchers’ engagement with the task of capturing the value of Research through Design during a week-long event. The images are selected to document set and setting, hands-on activities, human and more-than-human encounters, and material engagements with the theories, methods, and practices of design research. The text is deliberately minimal, offering contextualization from the photographer and the organizer of the event, as well as commentary from attendees on material outcomes and bodily presences; context and environment, disciplinary esthetics; and social commentary from two non-attendees. We offer this record of process to inspire design researchers to further engage with practical, hands-on, personal, bodily reflective engagements of what it means to do design research. We also aim to advance further the form of primarily photographic pictorials in design research.