Within the big history of Design Research, I focus on early developments at the Royal College of Art, where Professor Bruce Archer was a pioneer of the idea and practice of Design Research from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Key developments were a focus on systems thinking, the use of computing, and the possibility – later rejected – of a ‘science of design’.

Systems thinking allowed researchers to consider how design interacts with social, technical and other factors. Computing had multiple roles: it was seen as a support for designing, but also potentially as a model of how designing works. Systems thinking and computing often came together in theories of cybernetics.