Commentary:'Experiments all the way in programmatic design research'revisited

Reprinting and rereading good articles can serve many purposes. It can
bring attention to contributions that have gained new relevance for current
debates or it can provide a lead into lines of thought that may take academic
discourse in new directions. But rereading articles after a few years may also
provide opportunities to see and reflect upon how ongoing currents of work
are unfolding over time. In the case of Bang and Agger Eriksen’s article,
‘Experiments all the way in programmatic design research’, reprinted in this
issue of Artifact: Journal of Design Practice, and originally presented as a conference paper for the Nordes conference in 2013, my (re-)reading experience was
precisely one of seeing an ongoing strand of work – one in which I also see
myself as a participant – having passed important thresholds. Bang and Agger Eriksen expand and reiterate the tracing of practices of
design experimentation in what they, together with me and other colleagues
in the XLAB project, have termed programmatic design research. What originally made us eager to introduce the programme as an intermediary between
research question and experiment in design research was a shared sense of
both directedness and agility in design and design research inquiries, which
we felt was poorly accounted for in the broader discussion of design research
methodologies. With Bang and Agger Eriksen’s article looking back at several
years of research work beyond the XLAB, the engagement with the programme
and the dialectic between programme and experiment became reconnected to
the crafting of arguments and the making of texts that this earlier work had
somehow left in the shadows.
The XLAB project was initiated in 2006 as an open exploration of design
research in the making. The project had a strong methodological inclination,
but also an explicit ambition to embrace a full landscape of design research
efforts across a variety of approaches. The XLAB project could not in any way
be said to open the discussion on practice-based research. On the contrary the
project, that brought together doctoral students and design research faculty at
a number of experimental workshops, could draw on a bulk of work mainly
of doctoral dissertations that pursued the call by Frayling (1993) and others a
decade earlier to conduct research through design. The XLAB did not either
pioneer or even adhere to more foundational debates on what we would
perhaps today call the onto-epistemological particularity of design and design
research. In that direction the influential work of Buchanan (1992), Cross
(1982) and others had already provided arguments for design as a particular
‘mode of inquiry’. The gap that the XLAB intended to fill was different. We
wanted to be able to both expose and speak from within a design research
practice (Binder and Brandt 2017), that neither kept the design as a black box
nor reduced it to a manifestation of a particular way of thinking.
The article by Bang and Agger Eriksen lays out very well both what this
ambition led to in the XLAB and how the notion of the programmatic shaped
their individual research as an experimentation all the way. However, the most
important contribution when reading the article today is that it shows that we
have reached a point in design research where the making of research in its
entirety from doing design experiments to writing dissertations is one practice
of probing and experimenting. This is at the expense neither of theorizing nor
of acknowledging the coherence and substantiality of the design experiment.
On the contrary it is bringing these together in a practice of entangled noncategorical thinking and doing that may reconnect design research to discussions of design thinking as based on for example ‘the dogma of displacements’
pointed to by Buchanan (1992), but now from a practice perspective of doing
research, rather than of studying design.
Programmatic or constructive design research has gained a following and
the design research practices that this entails have passed a threshold where
writing, thinking and making no longer are separate realms of engagement
but amalgamates into a fluid practice of making and thinking experiments and
crafting materials across multiple situations. It is my hope that the rereading
of Bang and Agger Eriksen’s article also for others will make evident how we
have passed what STS scholars call an obligatory passage point, beyond which
we can full-heartedly engage with the making of theory (Redström 2017).