ECCycles methodology: The division in architecture design research rectified.

Despite fairly unanimous agreement on the goals of design research, there had been concerns in the past years about what some theorists described as a division in research interest. This came along with the emergence of two different streams of design research: one that aims at increasing design understanding and one that focus on improving the design process, changing existing situation. Theorists suggest that changing the current design situation requires not only knowledge of what exists, but also of what would be desirable and how to change the existing situation into the desired. Although, most available theories express the dual goals of design research, see [4], they have not been able to show what changing existing situations actually needs. More recently, however, the division in design research is beginning to change and a new systematic thinking is now emerging. It suggests that changing the current design situation requires more than what is previously thought; it requires its own methodology in which design understanding and design improving are both essential components of systematic theory creation and validation process. This is the goal of this study; it aims to introduce the new systematic approach of design research that is based on the ECC methodology suggested by Bashier (2021). This paper shows how the evaluation-creation cycles (ECCycles) methodology is structured to address the dual goal of design research by systematically combining the processes of theory creation and validation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]