Research through Design, Documentation, Annotation, and Curation

(Long paper)

Keywords: Documentation, research through art, research through design, experience design, exhibition

The practice of research through art and design can pose challenges in terms of evaluating contributions, formalizing methodologies and generating extensible principles. Creating a middle layer of critique and interpretation between the generated artifacts of research through art and design and the foundation of general theory provides a viable space for exploration. We propose integrating artifact description, process documentation and participatory annotation as a useful approach in this intermediate critical area. We introduce a multimodal documentation framework for capturing, annotating and presenting the activities, processes and generated artifacts of research through art and design practice. We describe findings from our experience documenting a series of research through design workshops, and illustrate our annotation and presentation approach in the form of a curated exhibition.