Dealing with diversity : Issues in design research and design research methods

Design research is a timely topic, given the current movements in art and design institutions throughout the world towards articulation, conceptualization, and (academic) research, where labels such as practice-based research abound. It is also a challenging topic with many open issues concerning conceptual foundations and methodological practices. As the articles in this special issue will show, design research is marked by significant diversity in the sense that it engages researchers from many different disciplines: Philosophy, systems theory, social science, information science, architecture, and design are among the academic disciplines represented here, with all the diversity in epistemological and methodological traditions that they entail.