Design innovation is a way of structuring design research processes and practices in pursuit of valuable outcomes. Drawing together ideas of complexity theory, creative action and communities of practice, we depict design research as creative action – an emergent, unpredictable, creative interaction amongst embodied participants and reified objects. From complexity theory we are interested in how modes of interaction and connection, combined with non-linear feedback processes, can give rise to innovation. In particular, we wish to explore how use of visual artefacts and the design of spatial and temporal dimensions of research might influence outcomes. We are attentive to the body as an expressive process rather than simply an instrument of the intellect and are cognisant that design research, like any other social practice, is linked to the processes of identity construction, which is inherently tentative, temporal and temporary in nature.