I was very honoured to be invited to give the first SOURCE lecture to the new master's students at the Design Academy Eindhoven and to speak on the question of design, research, and design research. As always, it was a bittersweet pleasure to revisit my beloved school and much maligned town!



The confluence between research and design is particularly dear to me, considering that I stake my livelihood within that very territory. To me, watching "real" designers at work is a wonder—the moment of transforming an inspiration, a creative act of observation, into an equally creative act of production, is like a magical performance. At the same time, I think that the design realm is in dire need of a healthy dose of skepticism, self-reflection, and critical analysis.


The Scientific Method

In an atmosphere of increasing challenges to the academic institution, especially the kind that elides any sense of quantitative analysis of its alumni, it's not surprising that there is pressure on places like the Design Academy to deliver academically rigorous results. A few years ago, when the students tended to come straight from bachelor's design schools with little classical university preparation, this was a misguided gesture, resulting in rather irrelevant written theses. At the same time, those students were probably focused on an independent, "straight-to-gallery" designer career path (that now seems almost quaint) that required very little of them in the way of eloquent writing skills (much less the verifiable research espoused by the scientific method).

Post-crisis, the situation looks very different for the new graduate. The Design Academy (along with other schools like the RCA) has distinguished itself by fostering the kind of student who makes "multidisciplinary" seem like an innovative and essential quality instead of a rather banal catchword. Those graduates are not destined for isolated work in a pristine atelier, but rather for teaching, workshops, creative financing, and contextually-based applications of material and social design skills. To me, research involves a feedback loop between analysing a context, inventing solutions, implementing them, and re-analysing their consequences.

I chose to present a definition of research that is neither strictly academic in the traditional sense, nor lost in the vague impressions of the worst kind of design writing. This definition is marked by three characteristics:

1 Research is systematic
2 All interpretation is data
3 All data is interpretation

At the same time, I also wanted to talk about a very different argument about design, research, creativity, and analysis—namely, that one has no business interfering with the other. I highlighted the following three quotes as a powerful provocation on the topic:


Willem de Kooning, 1963


Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation", 1966


Rudolf Arnheim, "Concerning an Adoration", 1970

These quotes suggest that the attempt to probe the creative process through analytical research produces little value. This may come as a surprise to those who know me as a writer, but I am partially inclined to agree with these artists and thinkers (consider the fact that the latter two were writers themselves!). There does seem something perverse about tampering with that act of artistic creation, that magical performance, I mentioned earlier. Perhaps because that aspect of design is the one I find most difficult as a designer, I am sensitive to the fact that practising design critique could be construed as a futile defence mechanism.

What strikes me about Arnheim's essay is how bad most critics are at engaging with the predominant medium of most designers, architects, and artists—with visual matter. In fact, both he and Sontag claim that the divide between form and content is nonexistent, that everything is form. When writers do talk about aesthetics, it is almost always either a facile discussion of trends or self-indulgent "artspeak". At the moment, the most powerful design research I seem to encounter is manifested not in the field of critical practice but as part of an arsenal of weapons in a cohesive act of design. I hope to develop this discussion over the course of the year in collaboration with SOURCE.