Design Thinking Research Symposia
The series of symposia was initiated by Nigel Cross with Norbert Roozenburg and Kees Dorst at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, in 1991, with what was initially expected to be a one-off international meeting on ‘Research in Design Thinking’. But the content and format of that meeting were felt by the participants to be so good as to warrant more of the same. So a second meeting was also held in Delft, in 1994, focused on the use of protocol analysis as a research tool for analysing design activity. For the first time in design research, a common data set (videotapes of both individual and team design activity) was provided to researchers around the world, for their own analyses.
A third meeting was held at the Istanbul Technical University, Turkey, in 1996, on the topic of descriptive models of design, and the fourth meeting was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, USA, in 1999, on the topic of design representation. It was there that the organisers introduced the term ‘Design Thinking Research Symposium’ as the generic title for the series. The fifth meeting was again in Delft, in 2001, on the topic of design in context.
The sixth symposium, at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, 2003, returned to somewhere near the focus of the original meeting in Delft in 1991, on the nature and the nurture of expert performance in design. This workshop meeting brought together a relatively small, international group of active researchers. Throughout this series of symposia, this workshop format has been found to be a successful way of synthesising the contributions of an international community, of reporting current work, and of identifying and promoting necessary further research.
A seventh meeting DTRS7 was held in London in September 2007. This was again a small, focused workshop meeting, and again providing researchers worldwide with a common data set for analysis - this time DVD recordings of meetings within engineering product design teams and meetings between architects and clients.
DTRS8 will be held in Sydney, Australia, in October 2010, with the theme of 'Interpreting Design Thinking'.
The series of meetings has produced a substantial set of publications (see below) in books and journals, with significant research results, and has helped to foster an international community of scholars and researchers focused on design cognition. Looking back to 1991, it is perhaps difficult to recall just how little ‘research in design thinking’ was going on then, compared with today.
Publications
The published output from the symposia series includes:
1. Cross, N., Dorst, K. and Roozenburg, N. (eds.) (1992) Research in Design Thinking, Delft University Press, Delft, The Netherlands.
2. Cross, N., Christiaans, H., and Dorst, K. (eds.) (1996) Analysing Design Activity, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK.
Dorst, K. (ed.) (1995) ‘Analysing Design Activity’, special issue of Design Studies, vol. 16, no. 2.
3. Akin, Ö. (ed.) (1997) ‘Descriptive Models of Design’, special issue of Design Studies, vol. 18, no. 4.
Akin, Ö. (ed.) (1998) ‘Models of Design’, special issue of Automation in Construction, vol. 7, no. 2/3.
4. Goldschmidt, G. and Porter, W. (eds.) (2004) Design Representation, Springer Verlag, London.
Goldschmidt, G. and Porter, W. (eds.) (2000) ‘Visual Design Representation’, special issue of Design Studies, vol. 21, no. 5.
5. Lloyd, P. and Christiaans, H. (eds.) (2001) Designing in Context, Delft University Press, Delft, The Netherlands.
Lloyd, P. (ed.) (2003) ‘Designing in Context ’, special issue of Design Studies, vol. 24, no. 3.
6. Cross, N. and Edmonds, E. (eds.) (2003) Expertise in Design, Creativity and Cognition Press, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.
Cross, N. (ed.) (2004) ‘Expertise in Design’, special issue of Design Studies, vol. 25, no. 5.
7. McDonnell, J. and Lloyd, P. (eds.) (2009) About: Designing - Analysing Design Meetings, Taylor & Francis, London, UK.
McDonnell, J. and Lloyd, P. (eds.) (2009) 'Analysing Design Conversations', special issue of CoDesign, vol. 5, no. 1.
Lloyd, P. and McDonnell, J. (eds.) (2009) 'Values in the Design Process', special issue of Design Studies, vol. 29, no. 2.
Links
DTRS7 Design Meetings Protocols
Page Last Updated: 13 January, 2010