As a product design student, every time I design something, I will conduct a research before it. However, after this design research class, I found that my previous research rarely contribute to my design, and in fact many troubles I met in the design process was embedded in the former research process. Artists focus on themselves and designers focus on their objects, I knew this long time ago, but what is the practical value of it? What difference it made in the process of art and design? Now I found that one major difference exist in the research process.
Art is about self-expression, and it also need to do research, like material, technique and so on. First, an artist has a aim-an emotion, a thought or something like that and then they explore a medium to achieve it. In other words, first they get a goal, and then they find a way to achieve the goal. In most of my undergraduate class, my pattern was kind of like an artist instead of a designer-first I got an idea, and then the professor told me to conduct a research about it and in those cases, the research was more like to prove my idea was reasonable. So that means I knew my goal before I made the research, and the research didn’t change what I want during its process, so the research had very limited contribution or even a waste of time.
Now, I knew that a designer should not know want he want before conducting the research, or the goal is the result of the research. Research is the way, and the end of this way is the aim of that design, and the further you go the deeper the design will be. Every details of that design should come from the research, come with reasons. The result of the design forms in the process of research, from general to specific.
Now, if I redo my former research, I can think out many ways to improve it. Generally by asking questions like this: am I sure what I want to know, is there something wrong about my former idea, and what I can do with the information I will get.
Besides, there are some confusions about research, for example, how can I know if there is anything I missed or whether the point I found is the most important point. Another thing is how to find the right people I want to research, every design should focus on a group of people,and this group share some common characters, for example, I focus on elderly people, the elderly people from west coast have different lifestyle from mid-west, but the object I can interview always have limitations, so whether the characters I discovered from them can represent them all.
Design Denizens 