Abstract
Beginning a new journal represents an opportunity to think carefully, not only about the journal scope, but also about journal structure, something that is sometimes less obvious when visiting a journal’s website. From the beginning of the 2 years that it has taken to develop Designing, the intention, of everyone who has been involved in its development, was for a wide range of perspectives about the activity of designing to be represented. The editorial team that we now have – senior editors, managing editor, and editor-in-chief – is large and ambitious, as is the editorial board, made up of 62 leading academics in the field. Partly this is due to the developmental objective of the journal: to provide as many opportunities as possible in editing, reviewing, authoring and for people to learn from one another through discussion, feedback, and guidance. Partly it is due to presenting a multi-vocal view of the discipline, recognising that designing is both a multi-faceted activity and also now a mature discipline of study.
The eight editor perspective papers that make up this inaugural issue of Designing illustrate this multi-vocal approach. We wanted in this first issue to put down some initial directions for readers to respond to, either directly, in subsequent commentary, or through submitting their own research. Members of the editorial team, working together or individually, have produced their editor perspectives on a range of issues that impact the scope of the journal, its relationship to other disciplines, and its operation. These papers are interlinked, sometimes coming at the same idea from different angles, and sometimes more obviously in opposition. Overall, they acknowledge the complexity of what designing entails, moving away from the idea of designing as simply a kind of rational problem-solving, to embrace different forms of understanding and epistemologies. Taken together they give an indication of the broad landscape that we hope to cover in the journal. What is also striking are the many relationships to adjacent fields of research – to science, social science, engineering, and technology – with perhaps the suggestion that many of these borders need to be made more porous.
The editor perspectives are subjective starting points. They are intended to inform, guide, provoke – perhaps at times infuriate – but above all to begin a more complex discourse about designing which, as I pointed out in my launch editorial (Lloyd, 2025), includes the designing involved in shaping the journal. The editorial structure we have is not complete, as Fernando Secomandi points out in his editor perspective. Such incompleteness means participation is necessary, so we invite critical commentary responding to these papers, and indeed additional perspectives, to take the discourse forwards. Above all we invite new and exciting research.
Designing has two stated aims: to publish high-quality research and to increase global diversity. In his editor perspective, Designing equity: Reflections on structural inequities in research publishing, Fernando Secomandi (2025) primarily addresses the second aim, but ties it to the first. Through reflecting deeply on his own experiences as a researcher, alternating between what he terms the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ of research in designing, a and drawing on recent published work, he examines the systemic biases of publishing in a journal. These include ‘pragmatic’ issues, such as the selection of editors, editorial board members, and reviewers. They also include more ‘theoretical’ issues, such as the unconscious privileging of certain types of knowledge. Pragmatism and theory overlap of course – we must remain vigilant and proactive in both cases. Reflecting on issues of quality in relation to work submitted from different geographical regions, Secomandi notes: “ ‘The same’ standards […] do not entail identical evaluative criteria but a principled and contextually responsive commitment to fairness that accounts for epistemic diversity and historical asymmetries in access to research infrastructures, networks, and linguistic capital.”
This is a great description of how we intend a Designing editor to act.
How is the design research field shaping up? In their perspective, Designing: A new era for design research, Phil Cash et al. (2025) take a broad look at the design research field and reflect on the maturity of the discipline. Their paper questions ‘taken-for-granted’ concepts and calls for more generalisable knowledge and theory development along with a clearer articulation and consistency of research methodologies. Maturity shouldn’t mean standing still, they argue, but using the strength that has been built in the discipline to embrace truly emergent research areas.
Rachael Luck’s (2025) editor perspective looks at the relationship between research into designing and research in the social sciences more generally. From practices to matter: Social science and new materialist reorientation of ways of knowing, being, and becoming-with in design research describes how social science disciplines – notably ethnography and anthropology – have, in recent years, shifted research into designing to focus on situated practices and material entanglements. Material entanglements, in particular, have become an increasingly popular area of study as relationships between humans and technology become increasingly codependent. New epistemologies related to such entanglements also bring ethical issues to the foreground as designing embraces more complex and ambiguous areas of practice.
Participative design has a long history in the design research field and, in their editor perspective, Design participation and codesign: New forms, application domains, and representational systems, Tomás Dorta and Hyysalo (2025) draw out recent developments, particularly in the area of larger-scale participative research. They sketch six research directions for different types of participative practices and associated research, echoing some of the concerns of Rachael Luck in her perspective. Again, there is a recognition of the nuance and complexity of designing as it is practiced in participative contexts – ‘realworld’ or experimental. Sometimes this is due to organisational, social, or political relationships, but equally methods, tools, and technology play a key role. They note the increasing use of generative AI in participative contexts as a recent trend that is set to grow. Additionally, codesigning has been a rapidly growing area of study – with an excellent journal, CoDesign, for its study. Dorta and Hyysalo situate codesigning in the wider participative and technological landscape that they hope Designing will inhabit.
Technology is the main focus for Heather Wiltse’s (2025) editor perspective, Designing for (alternative) platformed relations, where she takes both a philosophical and pragmatic approach to explore the implications of the fact that the majority of design products now have some kind of interactive and digital component to them. The digital sphere has been somewhat neglected in research on design processes, but design decisions, scalable in the digital space, can be hugely consequential for users (and ‘users’ is not a bad term to describe the intense attachment that people experience when interacting with today's platforms). The perspective notes that dominant capitalist logics of design, along with huge concentrations of power, have quickly established themselves in the many platforms - increasingly ‘AI-powered’ - that we interact with on a daily basis and that often seem to shape-shift before us. Focusing on ontology, Wiltse asks: how can we really understand the nature of these platforms and what they do? The corollary of this is the need for new methods and practices to engage designing at the appropriate level and to help think through alternative future pathways for our increasingly digital lives.
One well-established, multi-disciplinary area of research into the design process is that of design cognition which has developed in recent years to include design neurocognition. In her editor perspective, The future of design neurocognition, Laura Hay (2025) traces the current trends in this fast moving research area, with a view to short, mid, and long-term developments. Two things she highlights are first, the need for more systematic theory to underpin future studies, and second the need for studies of neurocognition to be applied in practice, through the use of tools or other methods. As with other perspectives, there is a recognition that we develop this subject by recognising the complexity and nuance of designing, and that advances in our understanding of design neurocognition should be tempered with ethical concerns, particularly in areas where humans and non-humans increasingly overlap. Symbiotic collaboration with AI may seem like science-fiction but, as Heather Wiltse argues above, we should be cautious of following solely technologically-driven pathways. The need to consider the wider picture of human wellbeing remains paramount.
How can research into designing engage with the new types of materials and entities that are now emerging? Owain Pedgeley’s (2025) editorial perspective provides some answers in the increasingly popular area of Research through Design, a research method that is unique to design research. In Considerations for planning, conducting, and disseminating research through design (RTD), Pedgeley tries to clarify the profusion of terminology – and subsequent confusion – that has built up around Research through Design over recent years. As an approach, it carries great potential to explore the complex experiential, epistemological, and ontological questions outlined in other editor perspectives, but as with all resonant phrases, we need to be careful not to apply it too broadly and so empty the phrase of meaning and rigour. We will embrace RTD work in the journal, seeking to uphold the standards and terms outlined in Pedgeley’s perspective, but also encourage further discourse about an area that is of increasing importance to the discipline.
Where can the knowledge we generate as researchers, and publish in Designing, find traction? Arguably it is in the classrooms and studios of design education institutions that most research in designing gets used. It is also where the idea of what designing is, and how to teach such a complex practice, gets negotiated. Starting from the design methods movement, Colin Gray (2025), in his editorial perspective, Designing in context: Bridging theory, practice, and education, reiterates the importance of looking at the full situational complexity of what occurs in design education, where theory and practice conduct a sometimes uneasy dance. As Gray points out, understanding the many different issues at stake and just who has ‘legitimacy’ in an educational environment offers a rich source of future work for Designing, and not only because more reductionist formal experiments and ‘findings’ about designing often derive from students working on design problems, a self-evidently problematic situation in Gray’s terms.
Through these editorial perspectives, Designing hopes to reinvigorate somewhat neglected subject areas and enhance others through research and analysis that recognises the complexity of the practice under inquiry. The editorial perspectives presented in this inaugural issue of Designing represent a multi-vocal approach to the subject of thinking about the activity of designing. Though the subjects they discuss are quite different, there are some common threads between them. Primarily, there is a recognition that designing is a complex, situated, and nuanced activity whichever way one looks at it. Previous work has sometimes over-simplified the design process to the detriment of the discipline. As Cash, Daalhiuzen, and Cross point out, other disciplines sometimes appear much more mature and coherent in their methods and discourses than our own. Secondly, there is a common future-focus to the perspectives, underscoring the activity of designing as being about doing; a way of moving forward towards an uncertain future whilst representing and negotiating that future. Finally, I want to emphasise the theoretical seriousness and fundamental thoughtfulness with which Designing editors are approaching their subject areas. Epistemology, ontology, and ethics are entangled, not only in contemporary practices of designing, but also in research into the practices of designing. Such theoretical dimensions have been present in design research for several decades; research into ‘designerly’ thinking, advanced by Nigel Cross (1980), had components of epistemology, phenomenology, and methodology. However, though designing is fundamentally a ‘realworld’ practice, theoretical orientations and concerns have come increasingly to the fore in recent years. Researchers interested in the activity of designing need to be properly equipped for the theoretical and practical challenges that lie ahead. Our aim with Designing is to provide that conceptual and practical agency.