Reflections on the past week (Theme 5: Design research)

Design research has been in focus this week and I’m going to talk about what I’ve learned and what I think the essentials for design research are. The designing part in a research project often consists of constructing some sort of prototype or mockup of a final product; it can be a physical product, software of some sort or a new framework/method for how to do things, or a combination of all that. Design research is a significant step in the research process and is usually used when an idea is close to being finalized although design research can also be carried out from the start, through the whole process of development, for instance in the case when using Lo-Fi prototypes.

Mockups are used for studying or developing the physical aspects or the visual features in some way but typically don’t feature any or very little other functionality whereas prototypes also have some functionality as well. However both of these are used as tools in the design research phase to allow things to be developed that otherwise cannot be evaluated or tested.

In many cases the design research is needed so that people outside the project can get an understanding of the idea or the final outcome.

Design research can of course be done internally within a project for further development but in many cases a mockup or prototype is created to let external parties such as possible users, client or experts test and evaluate the prototype for usability etc.

A perfect example of design research is to be found in the link below, although it doesn’t necessarily is related to media technology, it demonstrates a complete research process, with strong emphasis on design  research; As Horacio Pagani, the founder of Pagani supercars says in the video below: “It is only with a one-to-one scale model you get the complete perception of the shapes”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RGmtvS5WBZM#!