Research For, About and Through Design.
Within the lecture this week we were taught the distinctions between research for, about and through design. Simply put research for design is research for a project or undertaking, research about design is a story about design that has already happened and the researcher itself doesnt necessarily have to have any interest or experience in design, and research through design is something that can only be found out through conducting an ‘experiment’ using design.
Research for design is something as a design student I do often. Every project I undertake theres a certain level of research that goes before making an original draft of the project. It is probably the most common form and personally I use tools like pinterest daily to collect inspiration for future projects this is a form of research for design. In the coming projects for this course I plan to use research for design to research the topics which I am designing for. For example for another class I am creating an example of experiential design focused on a company called Current Health. For this project I need to do research for design and research on health inequalities in Scotland and how Current Health works as a business to help reduce this.
Research about design is finding stories about design, it doesn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with the actual process of design and designing. It doesn't necessarily need to be done by a designer, its just an interesting story about design. I will use this myself to just find out different topics or projects that interest me without having any particular aim or goal tot use what I find.
Research through design to me was the most interesting one. Its research which can only be conducted through actually conducting a design and finding out. The example we were shown was a man, rather than cutting down trees then making them into wood and then finally crafting the wood into chairs. He’s simply grown the trees into chairs. Going into that he didn't know if it would work, the only way to find out was to just try it and see if it would work. I thought it was an interesting idea and would help cut the emmissions and waste created in production. Not only that but the tree chairs themselves were very beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. I think we can use design to conduct feildwork research. We could design an intereactive piece of design in order to find out facts and opinions of participants, almost like Kirstie did in her lecture: she showed a Monopoly game which was used to conduct research. To me I think thats a useful way to get opinions of others as it intrigues them to participate.
