Initiating change by design : editorial

The papers presented in this special issue emerged from a postgraduate symposium held at Western Sydney University in April 2014 titled Initiating Change By Design. The idea for this event came about in an attempt to articulate the difference of design research, a question that has special significance in the context of a broad Humanities and Communication Arts school where creative practice research has many forms. Design research itself has many forms, but broadly we claim it is research that thinks through, engages with, or produces, social artifacts. Design is an applied rather than a fine art, and its artifacts are therefore distinctively social in that they are for people to use and share – they form the material infrastructure and visual environments of everyday life. Design research is also, and perhaps less obviously, research that is motivated by the possibility of initiating change in the situations being researched (Crouch & Pearce, 2012) – it can’t help but ask what is this research for? What can it help us to do?