Making Trajectories / Design-Driven Research and the Emergence of Knowledge

Design-driven research rarely unfolds as a linear progression from predefined questions to stable outcomes. Instead, it develops through situated engagements in which experiments, materials, reflections, and conceptual framings continuously reshape one another. This poses a particular challenge within doctoral research, where projects are typically expected to demonstrate coherence, methodological clarity, and the potential for an original contribution to knowledge from the outset.

This text proposes the notion of trajectory as a prism for understanding how design-driven research develops through such conditions of openness and contingency. Due to the embodied and situated nature of design practice, and by extension design-driven research, inquiry often evolves through shifting trajectories that emerge through ongoing interaction with materials, contexts, and practices rather than through the execution of a predefined plan. In this sense, trajectory does not merely describe movement through a research process, but points to a mode of inquiry in which knowledge is progressively formed through engagement.

Understanding research in terms of trajectories requires an awareness of being in the research process, of how actions, decisions, and responses continuously redirect inquiry in relation to broader research concerns. At the same time, these trajectories must be actively mapped and documented to articulate how knowledge contributions are constructed. Trajectory thus becomes not only a way of describing research processes, but also a methodological lens for relating situated practice to the requirements of academic knowledge production.

‘Trajectory’ may be associated with the metaphor of the PhD journey, described by Pat Thomson as ‘a way of telling self and others the story of the PhD process and the various experiences, emotions, and challenges along the way. The notion of the journey sums up the sense of movement, personal growth and change’ (Thomson 2015). In this context, the PhD journey may be understood not as a steady progression along a predefined path, structured by a logically ordered research plan, but rather as a series of shifting trajectories. These unfold as experiments fail, research designs are revised, doubts emerge, and insights are gained.

Thomson underscores this by drawing on Christina Hughes and Malcolm Tight’s suggestion to frame the PhD journey as a pilgrim’s progress, characterised by ‘loneliness, confusion, loss of voice and avoidance of temptations in the process, as well as the final arrival at the heavenly destination’ (Hughes and Tight 2013, cited in Thomson 2015). By mobilising this quasi-spiritual imagery, Pat Thomson critically exposes how the metaphor of the journey risks shifting responsibility for success onto the individual, obscuring the broader institutional conditions under which doctoral research unfolds.

While this critique is highly relevant, the metaphor of the PhD journey need not be abandoned. Rather, it can be reconsidered in a way that shifts emphasis away from an internalised and individualised narrative toward a more situated and embodied understanding of learning. In this perspective, the journey does not primarily describe a personal, reflective process (although it still plays a part), but points to the necessity of engaging in and through practice to learn by being involved in situations where knowledge is actively made. The focus thus moves from narrating experiences to participating in them, foregrounding the role of material, sensory, and practical engagement in shaping the course of the research process.

From this perspective, drawing on Tim Ingold’s work on making, knowledge can be understood as emerging from within processes of engagement rather than being constructed after the fact (Ingold 2013). Ingold develops this position through a transdisciplinary perspective that brings together ‘the 4As’: anthropology, art, architecture, and archaeology. These fields are not aligned by shared objects of study, but by a common concern with making as a way of knowing. By placing them in dialogue, Ingold challenges established separations between thinking and doing, and between observing and producing, instead foregrounding practices in which understanding arises through active, material engagement.

From this perspective, trajectories unfold through situated engagement, where movement is guided less by overarching plans than by responsiveness to conditions encountered along the way. In Tim Ingold’s account, knowing develops through processes of making in which each action opens toward the next, forming paths that are continuously adjusted rather than prefigured. Trajectories in this sense are not directed toward fixed endpoints but shaped through interaction with materials and situations as insights emerge. A related dynamic can be observed in design practice, where the definition of a design problem and the development of a proposal evolve in parallel, each informing and transforming the other (Schön 1983; Dorst and Cross 2001). This reinforces the view of trajectories as emergent and responsive rather than predetermined. When this understanding of making is brought into the context of design-driven research, however, a fundamental tension arises.

If situated and relational forms of making are taken as a basis for research, trajectories unfold through processes that are inherently contingent and cannot be fully specified in advance. Yet entry into a PhD programme typically requires demonstrating the potential for an original contribution to knowledge through a prior mapping of existing research and the formulation of a clearly defined research question. The unpredictability implied in trajectories of making thus sits uneasily with academic expectations of positioning, coherence, and methodological rigour. The challenge is therefore not to resolve this tension, but to work with it so that knowledge emerging through such trajectories can be articulated and recognised within academic research.

In response to this tension, approaches within design research have sought to establish intermediary frameworks that can relate exploratory, practice-based processes to the requirements of academic knowledge production. Within constructive design research, Eva Brandt and Thomas Binder introduce the notion of the program as such an intermediary between research questions and design experiments. Drawing on the idea of the design brief as ‘the first statement of a design space within which to draft a design’, the program establishes a provisional framing that links broader research concerns to situated acts of experimenting and making. Rather than implying a hierarchical structure, the relation between program, question, and experiment is understood as dynamic and reciprocal, where each domain continuously informs and reshapes the others.

This model has been further expanded by Anne Louise Bang and colleagues through the introduction of motivation as an additional dimension (Bang, Krogh, Ludvigsen and Markussen 2012). In this sense, trajectories are not only shaped by the interplay between questions, programs, and experiments, but are also oriented by the values, beliefs, and dispositions brought into the process. These may be ethical, aesthetic, or rooted in design practices, and act as a driving force that influences the direction of inquiry without fully determining it.

A related approach can be found in Johan Verbeke’s notion of designerly grounded research (2017), which proposes that research questions and conceptual framings develop alongside the design process itself. Drawing on constructivist grounded theory, the approach treats experimentation and analysis as intertwined processes through which insights emerge progressively through engagement with the material produced. At the same time, Verbeke’s engagement with grounded theory is not only methodological. By relating design-driven research to established epistemologies from other research traditions, he also seeks to position it within a broader academic landscape, forming alliances that challenge the risk of treating design-driven research as an isolated or exceptional mode of inquiry. In this sense, designerly grounded research offers a way of aligning exploratory trajectories with the demands of academic knowledge production without reducing their situated and practice-based character.

Considered together, these approaches remain conceptual and somewhat abstract, grounded in different theoretical traditions, yet they share a common ambition: to establish provisional frameworks that are sufficiently open to initiate design experiments while structured enough to allow the gradual consolidation of research focus, questions, and outcomes. Rather than treating research questions, experiments, and conclusions as sequentially defined components, they propose dynamic relations in which these elements continuously inform and reshape one another through iterative movement between framing, making, and reflecting. In this sense, trajectories emerge through ongoing loops between exploratory practice and the progressive articulation of the research.

Such processes of gradually refining research focus are, of course, not unique to design-driven research. Most research develops through revisions, adjustments, and reformulations as inquiry unfolds. What distinguishes design-driven research is perhaps the more pronounced openness of the process, where the trajectory is less dependent on refining a predefined structure and more shaped through situated engagement with emerging material, spatial, and conceptual conditions. Importantly, these trajectories are not only processes to be navigated, but also to be made explicit. Their mapping, often through graphic means in design-driven research, becomes part of the research outcome itself by documenting how knowledge emerges through the unfolding trajectory of the PhD journey. In this sense, the contribution lies not only in the knowledge produced, but also in articulating the framework through which it is constructed.

A more practice-embedded version of such trajectories can be found in models developed within practice-led research environments such as RMIT University, where research unfolds through reflection on an already established body of professional work (Blythe and van Schaik 2013). In this context, trajectories connect past, present, and projected future practice, allowing motivations, values, and accumulated experiences to become active components of the research process itself. The mapping of trajectories thus becomes not only a means of documenting emerging knowledge, but also a way of critically unfolding how practice has been formed and how it might develop further.

Taken together, these perspectives suggest that trajectory offers a way of understanding design-driven research not as a linear progression, but as a situated and evolving process in which knowledge emerges through engagement. As both a conceptual and methodological lens, trajectory allows the researcher to navigate the tension between openness and academic structure by making the development of inquiry explicit. In this sense, design-driven research contributes not only through the knowledge it produces, but also through the articulation and documentation of the paths through which that knowledge is constructed.

From this perspective, research design itself becomes an evolving object of inquiry rather than a stable framework established in advance. Questions, methods, experiments, and conceptual framings are progressively formed and reformed through movement between making, reflecting, and positioning. The mapping of these trajectories is therefore not supplementary to the research process, but central to it, as a means of articulating how knowledge emerges through situated and exploratory forms of practice.