design-research

Important

Current monthly release: Atlas Alignment - April 2026
Due: April 8, 2026
Tracks: March 2026 work

design-research is the umbrella entry-point package in the cmudrc design research ecosystem.

It provides a thin, curated top-level import surface over the ecosystem's specialized component libraries.

Overview

This package focuses on discoverability and coherence rather than reimplementation:

• Submodule-first top-level API: problems, agents, experiments, analysis
• Curated re-exports of stable, user-facing APIs from component libraries
• Shared ecosystem framing and philosophy in one canonical package
• Lightweight wrapper design that preserves modular versioning boundaries

Quickstart

Requires Python 3.12+. Maintainer workflows target Python 3.12 (.python-version).

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
make dev
make test

Install from PyPI:

pip install design-research

Then start from the umbrella namespace:

import design_research as dr
from design_research import problems, agents, experiments, analysis

problem_ids = problems.list_problems()
problem = problems.get_problem(problem_ids[0])

print(type(problem).__name__)
print(agents.MultiStepAgent)
print(experiments.Study)
print(analysis.validate_unified_table)

Ecosystem Integration

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.

Philosophy

The full ecosystem philosophy is documented in docs/philosophy.rst and in the published docs site.

Docs

See the published documentation for quickstart, concepts, workflow framing, philosophy, and API reference.

Build docs locally with:

make docs

Public API

The supported top-level public surface is whatever is exported from design_research.__all__.

Top-level exports include:

• Wrapper submodules: problems, agents, experiments, analysis
• Package metadata: __version__

Contributing

Contribution workflow and quality gates are documented in CONTRIBUTING.md.