In a design research, the goal is to offer the things(including information, data and knowledge) that the designers want or need to know. In our case, if there are some one want to design something(products, App, interior space or anything) about low-residency program community(create, improve, adjust or anything), we can offer something useful or inspiring for that designer through our research, and this is the goal of this research.
We can separate research into 2 periods, collecting data and analyzing data and we collect data by asking questions. So it is necessary to consider what kind of answers we may get, how would we analyze this kind of answers and what information we can get from this kind of answers.
Data is raw material, and we can get raw material from collecting, such as asking questions or making experiments; information is refined material, refined by analyzing, categorizing the raw material. We can’t get refined materials directly from collecting.
For example, if we want to know how to release people from computer and ask “how many hours do you spend on computer every day?” and we may get answers like 6 hours or 3 hours and these are raw materials; if we ask “why you spend too much time on computer?” the result maybe too complicated to category, because it involves complicated personal judgment by the interviewees. So the answer about “why people spend too much time on computer” should be get by analyzing the raw materials by researchers, instead of ask the interviewees directly. In other words, the interviewees can see for us, listen for us and remember for us, but they can’t analyze for us.
Design Denizens 