A Theory of (and for) Enquiry

At the heart of much academic design research 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 (and for) enquiry from previously unrelated cybernetic models, showing how “comfortable marriages” of design and research may be achieved by concatenating and nesting multiple kinds of enquiry 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 research and supervision, especially where they face scrutiny by scientific standards.