Design academics struggle in effectively reaching out to design practice, while design practitioners have difficulties in appropriating academic output. In their turn, design practitioners create new local knowledge that may not be recognised (as such) by design academics. This situation is seen as suboptimal and problematised as the research-practice gap. This paper addresses how knowledge exchange between design research and practice can be understood and improved. We therefore introduce and investigate a social co-design case study which bridged the gap between research and practice and which shows how knowledge development within academia, professional design practice, and non-professional design practice are interwoven. We analyse the case through an alternative template analysis incorporating four perspectives on ‘the gap’: abstraction, communication, alignment of knowledge needs, supporting local knowledge production. We compare and interrelate these four perspectives. This refines our theoretical understanding of the research-practice gap and provides implications and actionable insights about practitioner-centred knowledge production for design academics who want to contribute to design practice.
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Since 2000, all Dutch Universities of Professional Education are confronted with three major renewals. The first was the European agreement to implement the Bachelor-Master system in Higher Education. The second was the strong tendence to renew eduction towards Competence Based Education. The third renewal came from the decision of the ministery of Education to contract lectures (lectoren) and research networks (kenniskringen) to improve research competences among students. Basic idea behind the latest renewal was that if students from Universities of Professional Education bring in more knowledge in companies, during and after their study, this will stimulate the innovative power of Dutch small and medium enterprices (SME’s). Educational developers have been very bussy with these renewals. Under the cloak of national assurance guidelines and external panels of inspection many educational developers automatically tended to use the instrumental paradigm for many design contexts. In accordance with the research of Gustafson (1993) and Richey (1993) we raised questions about the relevance of the instrumental paradigm for educational design contexts, because often the means-end thinking of the instrumental approach have seemed to be out of place. This research project by Lappia, De Boer & Van Rennes took place in 2006 at INHOLLAND university of professional education in the western part of The Netherlands with four pilots at School of Technology, Social Work, Education and Economics. The researchers started from the assumption that improving competence-based internships could not been based on an instrumental paradigma, because of the lack of absolute standards and the need to support deliberation among stakeholders. The Design Science Approach of Van Aken (2004) and Andriessen (2004) was been used to reveal field-tested and grounded technological rules as design specifications for improvement tools. Beside that the research project used the communicative paradigm (Visscher-Voerman & Gustafson, 2004) to reach consensus among the practitioners, who accompanion students during their internships in organisations in order to achieve a growth of competences in the choosen working field. Participants in the research project were employees of the School of Education, The School of Technology and the School of Economics, the department of Education, Quality, Research and development (OKR). Conditions for participating in the project were that the Schools recognized the problems with implementing Competence Based Internship and the School had to set the employees whe participated in the project free for half a day during the project. The Schools as stakeholders in the project were primary interested in solution of their practical problem (practical stream). The department of Education, Quality, Research and development was interested in solution of the pratical problem for dissemination reasons, but would also learn new strategies for implementation (knowledge stream). Therefore was choosen to follow the Design Science Research Approach.
