Prototypes and prototyping in design research

In contrast, our focus will be on the roles of prototypes as vehicles for research about, for and through design. We focus on prototyping within research processes that necessarily involve design activities, which we will refer to as constructive design research, i.e. “research that imagines and builds new things and describes and explains these constructions” (Koskinen et al. 2011: 6). Our aim is to present a rough typology of the various ways that designed things appear in design research methods. We do this in order to identify and differentiate the range of possibilities open to design researchers for whom design practice is an essential component of their modes of investigation.