design-research

The canonical umbrella package for the CMU Design Research Collective ecosystem.

What This Library Does

design-research provides a thin, stable entry point over the ecosystem’s component libraries. It keeps implementation in specialized packages while improving top-level discoverability for research workflows, tutorials, and papers.

Highlights

  • Unified top-level namespace

  • Thin wrapper design

  • Curated stable re-exports

  • Ecosystem-level framing

  • Compatibility-focused packaging

Typical Workflow

  1. Import design_research as the canonical ecosystem entry point.

  2. Discover domain-specific capabilities via problems, agents, experiments, and analysis.

  3. Compose studies across sibling libraries without rewriting underlying logic.

  4. Keep package-specific behavior in component repos while using one coherent umbrella namespace.

Integration With The Ecosystem

The Design Research Collective maintains a modular ecosystem of libraries for studying human and AI design behavior.

  • design-research-agents implements AI participants, workflows, and tool-using reasoning patterns.

  • design-research-problems provides benchmark design tasks, prompts, grammars, and evaluators.

  • design-research-analysis analyzes the traces, event tables, and outcomes generated during studies.

  • design-research-experiments sits above the stack as the study-design and orchestration layer, defining hypotheses, factors, conditions, replications, and artifact flows across agents, problems, and analysis.

Together these libraries support end-to-end design research pipelines, from study design through execution and interpretation.

Ecosystem diagram showing experiments above agents, problems, and analysis.

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