Differences between 'research in design context' and 'design inclusive research' in the domain of industrial design engineering

This paper investigates past promotion research projects at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, with the goal to identify the applied research methodologies. The overwhelming majority of research approaches can be sorted in three methodological frameworks, which have been named 'research in design context', 'design inclusive research' and 'practice driven design research'. This paper contrasts research in design context and design inclusive research from an epistemological and a methodological point of view. The state-of-the-art is briefly surveyed and the main issues of design research are presented. Then, representative promotion research projects are summarised in order to show that, though not referred to as such, the discussed framing methodologies have instinctively been applied in industrial design engineering research. Finally, the epistemological features and the process flows of these methodological frameworks are discussed and the differences are pointed out.