Abstract

At the heart of much academic design researchDesignresearch lies a Paradox: An appreciation of designing requires, systemically speaking, an inside perspective, while scientific Research requires robustness under scrutiny by outside criteria. This chapter develops a theory of enquiry from previously unrelated cybernetic modelsModel, showing how “comfortable marriages” of design and researchResearch may be achieved by concatenating and nesting multiple kinds of enquiryEnquiry within the same body of work. The purpose of this theory is to describe such concatenations and nestings and to inform postgraduate and PhD-level design researchDesignresearch and supervision, especially where they face scrutiny by scientific standards.