Rilla Khaled, 2025
Practicing MDM
Make it material
Ensure that your research workflow accounts for surfacing and materializing your design reasoning / reflecting / moves / problem solving / problem finding.
Context Research-through-Design (RtD) makes room for scholars to problem solve through making. At the same time, that problem solving can only be partly demonstrated in any resulting design/creation outputs. Most of the knowledge gained “along the journey” is legible only to the maker. Counteract this by intentionally forming material traces of your design reasoning as your project is underway, whether in the form of annotated sketches, well formed questions, design intentions, regularly maintained process journals, visualisation sketches, or prototypes associated with design research questions, and more. The operative rules of thumb here are externalise the idea in your head and connect your design reasoning to your design materials.
Make space/time for capture
Ensure that your research workflow affords regular archival capture of design reasoning / reflecting / problem solving / problem finding.
Context The practice side of design research can take us away from a headspace of critical reasoning, especially when it flows smoothly. A common response we hear with regard to adopting MDM is, “but it will interrupt my practice flow1!” Design practice in an academic context necessitates different commitments and forms of discipline from design practice in an industry/professional context. Revisit your entire workflow, checking that most of its major stages can be documented or captured, and/or that any gaps can be offset by regular, recurring documentation (and/or reflection) phases. This will facilitate responsibly contributing new knowledge to the body of design knowledge. Next comes the hard part: 🦾 being disciplined to your revised workflow 🦾
Make space/time for reflection:
Build intentional regular reflection “stops” into your research workflow where you write about and document what you have been doing, why it is significant, and how your design activity and reflection will inform your future trajectory.
Context Reflection is how practitioners learn from their own experience. Our work has shown that it assists designers in forming stronger understandings of their design problems, and enhances their ability to perform design problem solving. Having a regular, reflective account of personal design practice also greatly facilitates the task of communicating design research and learnings for external audiences. Most designers are not in the habit of incorporating regular reflection stops into their workflow, however. Schedule them if need be, but target doing them no less than once a week, because memory is fallible.
Chain of evidence:
Protect the integrity of your chain of design research evidence.
Context There are many moments in game design research where confidence in implied chains of evidence are under threat. If the integrity of the evidence is cast into doubt, any claims leaning on that evidence are likewise cast into doubt. Seek to form a chain of evidence in your research with as few breakages as possible linking together material traces relating to research question – concept/intention – sketching/prototyping – formal/material/functional experimentation – feedback – updated intention/realisation. If your working environment and resources allow for it, keep all of your interim prototypes, and make them publicly available in an online repository. This enables scholars to build on your work in the future.
Meaning comes from difference
Enhance the affordances for understanding the nature of any entity by putting it in context with another.
Context It is hard to perceive qualities of something familiar. To enable yourself and others to perceive that thing from a broader vantage point, put it in context with something that is different in a significant way, i.e. to notice qualities of a mobile app prototype give it to someone other than yourself to try out OR compare it to the prototype that preceded it OR compare it to a competing, similar app.
Intentions as arbitrator:
Prioritise the solution that is most in line with your design intentions when you are faced with more than one way to solve a design problem.
Context There are many ways to solve any design problem. If you have flexibility in how you distribute your resources (time, materials, tools, financial cost, effort cost), prioritise the solution that keeps you in line with your design intentions. Good design self-reinforces its rhetorics through internal consistency. Internal consistency emerges over the duration of the design process and across design iterations.
Writing for Peer-Reviewed Publications
Make your theory lift:
Explain the theoretical framework enough to motivate the methodology and provide context for your contributions.
Context RtD is often applied in interdisciplinary research settings, resulting in projects with specific epistemologies / theoretical frameworks, and as a result, bespoke methodologies. An impoverished presentation of the theoretical framework will confuse the reader by not giving them enough insight to engage critically with what you did and why. In fact, if you can drop your explanation of your theoretical framework without affecting the flow of your argument, are you using the theory for anything substantive? In which case, do you need to reconsider your theoretical framework?
Clarify context
Clearly articulate timeframes, environments, sources of funding, power structures, and academic contexts in which work was undertaken.
Context Without context, there is no design. Without specifying context, your audience will not have an understanding of how similar / dissimilar / relevant / irrelevant your design practice and research is. At best, your design research claims will be inaccurate. At worst, they will be fraudulent. In all cases, the integrity of your work has been compromised.
Clarify positionality:
Author a block that clarifies how your identity connects to and informs your RtD practice.
Context To maximise the chances that your readers will trust your work and findings, provide them with insights into who you are and reasons why you have sufficient expertise and lived experience to effectively tackle your research questions. Not all scholars come to RtD with the same amount of design experience. If you are experienced in the specific area of design practice, declare this in your writing (ideally including links to publicly accessible previous work you have completed). Your design experience and history evidence your design problem solving ability.
Feeling shy due to a lack of track record? Remember that track records build up over time only if you keep producing work and tracking it.
Method in 1080p:
Describe your RtD method in high enough resolution that a reader would have a decent chance of recreating it.
Context Descriptions of method in RtD are often minimal, mirroring the sparsity of language used to describe scientific experimental conditions. Picture your favourite movie in 640 x 480. It’s disappointing, right? Luckily, RtD is not science2. If design privileges doing, then method is the logic that binds the doing. A rich description of your method3 not only respects the work you invested in establishing that method, it helps your readers follow your lines of design reasoning and activity. A rich description also facilitates other scholars in building on your work.
Description ≠ reflection:
Explain your design process using description and reflection.
Context If description in design is a capturing of “what happened”, reflection in design is “what it meant, why it was meaningful, and what it triggered”. Description can exist without reflection; reflection cannot exist without description. Reflection is most likely where your design insights are to be found: after all, they are your attempt to articulate your design reasoning. Note that if you find yourself engaging in a design reasoning path that involves your previous experience or expertise, you are invoking reflection.
E before C:
Use evidence to power your claims (and not vice versa). Evidence may concern: context, process, materials, designerly reasoning, feedback from others, approaches to data interpretation, and paths between iterations.
Context Design research should be able to assert its own goodness / value in terms of its own standards. Creative work does not need statistics to express its qualities unless a statistical argument would be relevant to the epistemological orientation of the encompassing research agenda.
Note that temporal aspects of evidence make a difference: the narratives we produce at the end are not what we produced at the beginning, and the path/displacement between the narratives at the beginning and end will reveal a lot about designerly reasoning and problem solving.
About design evidence: quantity does not necessarily entail quality. If you write, “4 games were produced from framework Z”, I will think to myself, “but a good designer should be able to produce work based off of any framework”. Evidence is always more trustworthy if it has been contextualised. If in the same piece of writing, I learn that the 4 games were produced by inexperienced designers, but that framework Z was robust enough to scaffold their making, then “4 games were produced from framework Z” becomes significantly more compelling as evidence in favour of Z.
Clothe your claims in evidence4
Ensure claims you make in relation to the contributions your work is claiming are supported by chains of evidence and reasoning present in the same “bundle”.
Context RtD researchers often make claims in publications that are under-supported in terms of presented evidence (which may well be true - if only the evidence were there!) Contributions are what your publication presents and argues, on the strength of your supporting evidence. Do not make a claim that extends beyond what your contribution reasonably declares. Do ensure your claims are backed by evidence you have presented (and that can ideally be verified by readers).
Keep in mind practical considerations around paper length, with regards to how much you can argue / demonstrate / prove in any single publication. Check the length limits for the publication venue you have in mind, and scale the contribution you wish to make based on the page real estate you have available (i.e. don’t attempt to compress your PhD findings into a short paper with an upper limit of 4 pages. Conspicuous wastage of your hard work!) Establish a publication strategy such that paper A → paper B (cites A) → paper C (cites A & B).
Share your failures:
Share solutions that you tried that did not work, especially if those failures led you to explore more promising directions.
Context In most academic publications, scholars tend not to dwell on their failures5. In design research, this is problematic if omission of failure trajectories produces an incomplete rendering of how “successful” design activity took place. Yes, it’s embarrassing to fail, but it’s real – and in design epistemology, real transcends true.
Also, if we all did this, it would be less embarrassing. Just sayin’.
Be the change:
Put written works out there that you personally would be excited / interested / grateful to encounter.
Context We should all read more: agreed. But in our collective defense, when was the last time you read peer-reviewed design research literature that was not a chore to read and was rhetorically well-crafted (i.e. logically sound and elegant, made you care, enabled you to know and respect the author?) Due to the disciplinary standards inherited from everywhere other than design, many of us get trapped into believing that the formula for an authoritative academic written tone is DESCRIBE MY WORK IN THE DRIEST WAY POSSIBLE.
Enough6. Our work deserves more than that.
If you want there to be more academic work out there that moves you, you need to put that kind of written work out there yourself. Only write work you want to read. Only write in a way that balances “AUTHORITY” / I am my audience / other people would want to be my audience. The more we signal that this type of writing has value, the more welcome other scholars will feel in terms of following suit. Like attracts like.
Reading is UX:
Once you have a completed first draft, edit it with usability heuristics in mind.
Context Implicit in the written standards specific to each academic discipline are the values they hold dear. Papers in medical journals demonstrate a disciplinary commitment to scientific objectivity and experimental rigour, not only in terms of their methods and subject matter, but also in their written style – distanced, neutral, and mostly devoid of subjective detail. Contrast publications from journals on critical race theory: these reflect authorly commitments to standpoint epistemology and the disciplinary valuing of storytelling as a means of conveying experience – markedly different from what is commonly found in writings from medical science. Academic writing about design likewise ought to reflect a commitment to widely accepted values of design, especially ones concerning learnability, efficiency, and transparency. Jakob Nielsen’s usability heuristics may have been derived from analyses of commonly recurring issues in software, but arguably all are applicable to the context of effective communication. We suggest focusing on these guidelines at a minimum:
- Visibility of System Status: The design should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable amount of time.
- Match Between the System and the Real World. The design should speak the users' language. Use words, phrases, and concepts familiar to the user, rather than internal jargon. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.
- Consistency and Standards: Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform and industry conventions.
- Recognition Rather than Recall: Minimize the user's memory load by making elements, actions, and options visible
Footnotes
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Yes. As meals will interrupt your day flow. ↩
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If it were it would be RtS – Research through Science. RtS is the disciplinary home of the famously contentious conundrum, how long is a piece of string? ↩
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Neither adjectives nor adverbs are dangerous in design research, and your readers will absolutely suspect that you did it, so write in a hi-res, first person (singular or plural) active voice 🦾 ↩
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Evidence which is constituted from real material as opposed to the Emperor’s New Materials. ↩
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Perhaps for fear that it will undermine their competence. Hot tip: nobody cares. Be free! ↩
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My commitment from 2025 onwards: I shall not engage in writing destined for peer-reviewed publication that I would not want to read myself. Join me if you like. ↩