Research at the CRD focuses on emerging design issues, it is often informed by questions from outside the field, including those emerging from the hard sciences, ecology, systems of democratic representation, augmented realities and bodies, and patrimonial knowledge.

The centre’s research programme is organised around four research axes. These focal points constitute the landscape of the laboratory, open to innovative milieus and patrimonial pathways. Here, doctoral students and researchers are able to develop their practice in the stimulating environment of France's leading school of industrial design and the Ecole Normale Supérieure - part of the Université Paris-Saclay, France’s No. 1 university in the 2020 Shanghai rankings.

 Axis - Device Design - Augmented Bodies, Digital Spaces, and the Production of Technical Imaginaries

• Aims to: work on defining new interactions between users and technical devices in terms of their physical aspect, their modalities and qualities, their expressive capacities, possibilities for decision making, and new forms of access to data.
• Question the way techniques participate in building imaginaries, how they frame ways of working, communicating and moving.
• Posit the role of the designer as a purveyor of scenarios for the future, between prospection, anticipation, and fiction.

 Axis - Design and Ecology -  Urban and Natural Environments, Systems of Production, and the Transformation of Sociotechnical Models

• Aims to: analyse and understand the thought systems, imaginaries, discourses, and practices at the origin of the contemporary ecological crisis.
• Constitute a resource for new modalities of use and ways of living in the face of environmental challenges.
• Participate in the redefinition of systems of production and their ecosystems, by requalifying the socio-technical imaginaries that they are associated with.

 Axis - Design and Politics -  Citizenship, Collectives, and Institutions

• Aims to: conceive of new local and participative forms of innovation, convening regularly with interested parties in various public projects.
• Imagine and test out new modes of public intervention, carried out on the level of the State, territorial entities, or public organisations.
• Study the impact of public action in and for itself, over the short, medium and long term.

 Axis - Transversal -  History and Methodology of Design 

• Aims to: deepen the historiographical foundation of the discipline of design, in particular its relationship to the history of ideas that have traversed it and structured it.
• Propose, test and share research methodologies emerging from the practice of design, combining both reflexive practices and critical studies.
• Participate in the study and definition of epistemological forms proper to research in design.