Most of today’s business is conducted, in a way, to find new knowledge that could be acquired through the documentation of the research done during the design process. The crucial activity for any professional design process is documentation, consisting of different information at each stage. Hence, the authors assume that documentation is also an embedded function for research through design, and they present a framework for planning and evaluating documentation of the research through design (RtD) process. They also assume that proper documentation is often lacking in design, especially in RtD, which opens up a new set of questions that should be answered in order to document the right things with the right tools.

The research community is richer with an added design perspective, creating a holistic approach to documenting the research through design process. The authors discuss the scope of the practice of documenting research through design by presenting the literature and available tools in use. They shape their analysis of RtD cases by “conversation between two RtD groups on the relationships between words/text and objects in RtD,” where each group knows the importance of RtD process documentation. Hence, two actual RtD cases are concisely presented following the three general aspects of RtD process documentation: the medium of RtD documentation, documents as speech acts, and supporting research and design. Based on actual insight into these two cases, the authors discuss the general aspects of RtD process documentation for each project case, giving users helpful information on their findings. These findings are also a great contribution to the literature in the field.

The authors also state one fundamental observation: although they tried to answer questions about what and how to document RtD, they are keen that the RtD community should be more active in developing communicative platforms that also include technical appliances accommodated to the design process and research activities.