Making Theory Come Alive through Practice-based Design Research

The overall aim of this paper is to demonstrate how practice-based design research is able not only to challenge, but also push toward further development of some of the background assumptions of emotion theories as used within design research. In so doing, we wish to increase knowledge on a central epistemological question for design research, namely how practice-based design research can be a vehicle for the construction of new theory for design research.
To set the scene, we start out by providing a brief literature survey, where we discuss insufficiencies of some previous treatments of our subject matter. Secondly, and in order to remedy these insufficiencies, we introduce “dynamic research sketching” as a new explanatory tool for understanding how design research can be a source for generating new theory. Further, we apply dynamic research sketching to a research project thereby explaining how the design of a computer game has called for a rethinking of basic notions within emotion theories.