This chapter offers an all-compassing definition of design research, suggesting that it it best placed now to engender speculative thinking and experimentation through an engagement with the normative, collective practices of everyday life in the contemporary city. In the context of urban design, it argues that globalisation is crucial to 21st-century research, albeit when best conceived as a rhizomatic Deleuzian concept as opposed to the usual binary oppositions of the local and the global.