Action research, emancipation and design thinking

This article evaluates the notion and practice of action research, as defined by contributors to the recent special issue ‘Action Research and Emancipation’ in this journal. The author argues that, although action research implicitly has a design orientation, it largely draws on the humanities and sciences as its main role models. As a result, action researchers nowadays do not see themselves as design professionals. Idealized design methods serve to illustrate how design research can help realize the emancipatory intentions of action researchers.