"Design Research for Social Scientists: Reading Instructions for This Issue by Hummels, Redström & Koskinen is an interesting introduction to the relationships between design research and social sciences. It's actually the introductory paper of a journal issue about that topic. A relevant excerpt:

"what determines what knowledge will be pursued within ‘design research’, is not necessarily what other research disciplines find to be scientific but what knowledge design researchers, design professionals, and perhaps especially design education find important, relevant, and even necessary for the advancement of their practices. (...) ambitions to completely fit within any particular existing framework is likely to be of secondary interest here although there are strong ambitions to build on more general ideas about science and research as to foster a solid knowledge discourse. Within the fairly new field of design science, design researchers are still exploring the boundaries of what science means from a design perspective; for example, some researchers consider their products/ prototypes as being a physical hypothesis and testing them as a hypothesis-generating method. (...) Design researchers do not aim at advancing knowledge in sociology or management science, but utilize well-established theories and practices from those disciplines to advance technological development."

Why do I blog this? coming from social sciences and working with designs led me to similar issues described here. The whole issue seems interesting to learn more about to find a common ground as well as processes that would be relevant for both communities.

Hummels, C., Redström, J. and Koskinen, I. (2007). "Design Research for Social Scientists: Reading Instructions for This Issue. In Hummels, C., Koskinen, I. and Redström, J. (Eds.) Knowledge, Technology & Policy, Special Issue on Design Research, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 11-17. Springer.