This article contributes to methodological studies of constructive design research by explicating its underlying epistemological foundations. At the heart of this article is the notion of drifting, defined as those actions that move design from its original objective or question to sometimes unanticipated results. The article explicates four traditions of knowledge production as derived from a corpus based on PhD theses. These traditions relate knowledge production to methods, research programs, design experience, and to a dialectic between researchers and user communities. As a result, they form epistemological traditions.

This paper explores aesthetics in what it calls new social design. It asks, “How can designers work with aesthetics when the main design object is social, and traditional object-bound aesthetic concepts lose their validity.” It describes three approaches to aesthetics: agonistic, which sees aesthetics as a way to lure people to interact with controversial content; convivial, which finds aesthetics in community interactions; and conceptual, which does away with aesthetics. All these have precedents in art.