Research Through Design & Research Through Education

The very definition of a university is a place where research and education are intertwined. When there is no research, a university will look like a place for vocational training, and when there are no students to teach, the university is no more than a research institution. This convention of research and education is firstly explained as a practice where research (as in the generation of new knowledge) informs education. So that education develops constantly and is ensured of the latest insights in the discipline. In a more sophisticated integration of research and education, the two pillars of university practice mutually support each other. In this paper we want to shed light on this mutual support alongside nine years of experience with design research in education, going beyond the mere practices of using students as simple test subjects filling in questionnaires, and proposing different levels of design research results instead.