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A theory landscape of design: mapping the theoretical discourse of the discipline

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2024

Katja Thoring  and
Roland M. Mueller
Katja Thoring*
Affiliation:
Technical University of Munich, Germany
Roland M. Mueller
Affiliation:
Berlin School of Economics and Law, Germany
*
[email protected]

Abstract

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This paper presents a mapping of theory use in the design discipline based on the corpus of the published ICED and DESIGN conference papers since 2010. We searched the resulting 4,451 papers for occurrences of theories and compared them with an existing ontology of named theories through natural language processing (NLP). The results yielded a variety of analyses, illustrating, for example, the most-used theories and which disciplines these theories stem from. This paper presents a rich overview of the theories relevant to the design discipline and a novel approach to bibliometric analyses.

Keywords

design theoryontologyliterature reviewnatural language processing (NLP)bibliometric analysis
Type
Design Theory and Research Methods
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society , Volume 4: DESIGN 2024 , May 2024 , pp. 145 - 154
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
The Author(s), 2024.

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