Research as Design-Design as Research

Key insights

7 takeaways

01
RADDAR (Research as Design-Design as Research) is a methodology that emerged from a doctoral inquiry into designing a game to teach conceptual understanding of special relativity to undergraduate physics students.
02
The paper argues that design and research share a synthesizing character and a cyclical, reflective structure, and that design can be treated as action research once emancipatory collaboration and systematic reflection are addressed.
03
The author adopts Fourth Generation Evaluation, a constructivist, hermeneutic-dialectic methodology, and extends the notion of 'participant' to include design materials such as sketches, prototypes, code, and documents as collaborators alongside human respondents.
04
Design's problem-analysis-synthesis-evaluation process is mapped onto action research's plan-act-observe-reflect cycle to show the two are compatible.
05
Systematic reflection is handled through a case study report that documents the design context and is assessed against established goodness criteria.
06
The approach is illustrated by a single case in which a physics lecturer's reflections on representation, curriculum, and assessment led him to change the university's undergraduate physics curriculum, drawing on personal experience, ethnography, interviews, surveys, and observation of student play-testing.
07
The paper is a methodological contribution presented at DiGRA 2005, relying on a limited set of cited literature and one illustrative case rather than broad empirical evidence.

Summary

This paper introduces Research as Design-Design as Research (RADDAR), a methodology for investigating game design that emerged from a doctoral inquiry into designing a game to promote conceptual learning of special relativity among undergraduate physics students. The author argues that game design has no universal method and resists definition, so inquiry into it requires a flexible, multi-method approach capable of spanning artistic and scientific knowledge, including intuition, dreams, and tacit understanding. The central claim is that design and research share a synthesizing character and a cyclical, reflective structure, and that design can be understood as a form of action research once two long-standing challenges are addressed: emancipatory collaboration and systematic reflection.

The paper's core argument proceeds by drawing parallels between design practice, which relies on problem-analysis-synthesis-evaluation, and action research, which follows a plan-act-observe-reflect cycle. To make design fully compatible with action research, the author adopts Fourth Generation Evaluation, a constructivist methodology built around a hermeneutic dialectic of stakeholder views. The key innovation is to extend the notion of "participant" to include design materials such as sketches, prototypes, code, and documents, which become collaborators in the dialogue alongside human respondents. Systematic reflection is addressed through the case study report, which documents the design context and is assessed against established goodness criteria.

The methodology is illustrated through a case study in which the author collaborated with a physics lecturer, Jacob, a pseudonymous participant at a pseudonymous institution. The inquiry combined personal experience, ethnography, interviews, surveys, and observation of students playing prototypes, and the lecturer's reflections on representation, curriculum, and assessment ultimately led him to change the university's undergraduate physics curriculum. The paper is a methodological contribution presented at the DiGRA 2005 conference, grounded in a limited set of cited literature and a single illustrative case rather than broader empirical evidence.