Balancing Product Design and Theoretical Insights

In this chapter the authors discuss the problem of balancing theory and artifact production in design research projects. Like other authors in this book, we believe that basic educational research benefits by being framed as a problem oriented research process, where design experiments and theoretical investigations go hand in hand. How this can be achieved and the challenges it creates is expressed in an ‘osmotic model’, showing the give and take of focusing simultaneously on product designs and theoretical insights. The authors offer some guiding principles by which researchers can navigate in such a methodological setting. The principles are based on experiences from three research and development projects at Learning Lab Denmark and illustrate the multitude of challenges to be faced, when balancing the processes of product development and the generation theoretical insights.