Experimental design research: genealogy, intervention, argument

Experimental design research must become more accessible in doctoral education, and obtain a clearer identity in the larger environment of academic research. How can we share knowledge produced in research projects with designerly experiments at their core even though the projects’ scope and the research approaches are very different? We suggest that an attentive reading understanding design research practice as iterations of programming and experimenting may be helpful. We invited research colleagues to join us in a meta-inquiry into fruitful reading strategies in a workshop examining three very different Ph.D. dissertations. In this paper we briefly lay out our notions of program and experiment and report on how the workshop participants map genealogy, compare interventions, and discuss how the outcomes of the various experiments become arguments in knowledge production.