Research Resources

These are documents (and links to documents) that I have found valuable. The links take you to more information and downloads.

I created this page on my previous website originally as a home for Henrik Gedenryd’s thesis when it seemed to be in danger of disappearing from the Lund University website.

How Designers Work – Making Sense of Authentic Cognitive Activity
Henrik Gedenryd’s PhD Thesis from Lund University.
One of the most valuable piece of work on designing that I have encountered, and a good source for other key texts.

Hospital beds by design: a socio-historical account of the ‘King’s Fund Bed’,1960-1975.
Ghislaine Lawrence’s PhD Thesis from London University, 2001
This thesis is of wide interest to designers and design historians as it provides a new insight into an early large-scale practical design research project, conducted by Bruce Archer’s team at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s, and also into the thinking of the early years of design research and the Design Methods movement

The Nature of Research
Bruce Archer’s 1995 review of concepts of research in Science, the Humanities and Art
From the short-lived but influential journal, codesign. Including the first serious discussion of the implications of “practice-led research in design and the introduction of Archer’s three-part model of research into practice, for practice and through practice

An Articulated Skeletal Analogy of the Human Upper Limb
Graham Whiteley’s PhD Thesis from Sheffield Hallam University, 2000
This was the first practice-led design PhD at Sheffield Hallam University. Graham Whiteley is an very talented 3-D designer who set out to create an entirely new set of principles for the construction of artificial arms for robotics or prostheses. This work led directly in to my own interest in tacit knowledge and the ideas which I have subsequently published on design inquiry.