Lysianne Léchot-Hirt

Professor Responsible, Institut de Recherche en Design, GenevaUniversity of Art and Design, Switzerland

CreaSearch – Methodologies and models for creation-based research projects in design

CreaSearch is a design research project focusing on the desirable and suitable conditions that are to be fulfilled in order to acknowledge and develop creation based research projects in design. It is not a creation based project itself, but a three step study about a central question: How does a creation project fit into a research project, able to fulfil the universal criterion of communicable results? In other words, what is the epistemological framework for what is called “recherche création” (research creation)? What kind of research model could convince the gifted designers to join research teams, without fearing to loose their creative skills in this academically framed activity?

Honourable authors have published enthusiastic or critical articles on the research creation topic in the visual arts or in the music and dance field, but few have systematically discussed such a research model for design. The main objective of CreaSearch is to propose a methodological frame for research creation projects in design, suitable with the up-to-date challenges of design research and with the legal and administrative peculiarities of the Swiss Universities of Applied Sciences.