Immodest Proposals: Research Through Design and Knowledge Jeffrey Bardzell Informatics and Computing Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47408 jbardzel@indiana.edu Shaowen Bardzell Informatics and Computing Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47408 selu@indiana.edu Lone Koefoed Hansen Aesthetics and Communication & PIT Research Centre Aarhus University, Denmark koefoed@cavi.au.dk ABSTRACT This paper offers theoretical support for research through design (RtD) by arguing that to legitimize and make use of research through design as research, HCI researchers need to explore and clarify how RtD objects contribute to knowledge. One way to pursue this goal is to leverage knowledge-producing tactics of the arts and humanities traditions of aesthetics, key among which is a community- wide and ongoing critical analysis of aesthetic objects. Along these lines, we argue that while the intentions of the object’s designer are important and annotations are a good mechanism to articulate them, the critical reception of ob- jects can be equally generative of RtD’s knowledge im- pacts. Such a scholarly critical reception is needed because of the potential inexhaustibility of design objects’ mean- ings, their inability to be paraphrased adequately. Offering a multilevel analysis of the (critical) design fiction Menstrua- tion Machine by Sputniko!, the paper explores how design objects co-produce knowledge, by working through com- plex design problem spaces in non-reductive ways, propos- ing new connections and distinctions, and embodying de- sign ideas and processes across time and minds. Author Keywords Research through design; HCI; criticism; epistemology ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. INTRODUCTION Research through design (RtD), the practice of using design thinking, processes, and products as an inquiry methodolo- gy, has garnered considerable attention in both HCI and design discourses [e.g., 3,4,6,9,11,12,15,20,22,28,29,32,37, 40,41,42]. As an emerging practice, there remains some contradiction and confusion about what it is and what it should be, which might [41] or might not be [22] a problem in itself. Whether or not a unifying theory is the answer, our position is that to support the theoretical development of RtD as a research practice, to support the community’s up- take of its knowledge contributions, and to support more HCI researchers and practitioners trying out this practice, at a minimum more research needs to be done to explore and to evaluate the epistemic potentials for RtD to contribute to knowledge in HCI. Design is both a noun and a verb as [18] writes; here, we focus on the noun—design as objects. We begin by observing that while RtD as a practice is in itself knowledge producing [1], so too can design objects produce knowledge. However, what this means is unclear in the research literature. Is the knowledge outcome of an RtD object a special form of communication, one that is superior in some sense to verbal discourse? Is it these objects’ job to reveal true propositions about the world? To reveal the po- tentials of design materials? To reify design arguments? To express emotional or subjectively felt experiences of the artificial world and its apparent trajectory? To critique as- sumptions imbued in everyday designs? To reveal alterna- tive ways of being to motivate us to pursue them? We investigate RtD in its relation to the production of knowledge; specifically, how design objects are knowledge producers both for those that encounter them and those that design them. In the arts and humanities, the ability of ob- jects to produce knowledge is well understood, and the aim of this paper is to characterize how we might understand the kind of knowledge that RtD objects produce, how they pro- duce it, and how we engage with it. We begin by character- izing the discourses on RtD in HCI vis-à-vis its knowledge objectives. We observe that there is demand for “good ana- lytical skills to carve out core and recognizable important new concepts” [37, p14], but less on what the analytical skills actually look like or do. To respond we turn to her- meneutical practice in aesthetics, which is based on the view that a central value of the arts is that art objects and phenomena co-produce meaning (as opposed to understand- ing aesthetics as primarily related to beauty, emotional ex- pression, or aesthetic pleasure). In principle, this goes back