Reading

“Design research is a broad term with a long history. In the 1960s, design research referred to the study of design itself, its purpose and processes. This is still how the term is used in academia today. There are various institutes of design research around the world, mostly involved in large existential or small theoretical questions couched in highly specialized academic language. If you’re interested in transformative concepts of spatial intelligence or the poetics of the sustainable kitchen, this field is for you.

Design research both inspires imagination and informs intuition through a variety of methods with related intents: to expose patterns underlying the rich reality of people’s behaviors and experiences, to explore reactions to probes and prototypes, and to shed light on the unknown through iterative hypothesis and experiment.

Asking your own questions and knowing how to find the answers is a critical part of being a designer. If you rely on other people to set the agenda for inquiry, you might end up caught between fuzzy focus groups and an algorithm that scientifically chooses a drop shadow from among forty-one shades of blue. Discovering how and why people behave as they do and what opportunities that presents for your business or organization will open the way to more innovative and appropriate design solutions than asking how they feel or merely tweaking your current design based on analytics.

Research is not asking people what they like. Research is just another name for critical thinking.”

— Just Enough Research, Erika Hall