CORE CONCEPTS

Design generates and applies knowledge, culminating in a contextually
appropriate, physical embodiment of those accumulated insights. Accessing,
augmenting, and preserving the knowledge underlying design is an important
core competency for designers and design firms and is a significant way to
competitively differentiate firms.
Designers need information that helps them lead cross-disciplinary teams
working to resolve wicked problems. Using their accumulated knowledge of
previous design solutions and design research tools, they can tap into important
pools of tacit and explicit knowledge. Designers have access to an array of
more qualitative or more quantitative research tools, ranging from surveys to
interviews to discussion groups to observations (among others) that they can
apply to most effectively leverage the information already available and obtain
the data that can best inform the design decisions to be made. The insights
designers can generate through the research process inform the design of
effective spaces—with the definition of effective also flowing from the design
and research process.
The support for design decisions that flows from the design research
process increases your comfort (as well as your client’s) in design recommendations
made. Insights generated, however, do not direct or define decisions—
instead, they simplify them.
The following chapters will identify the information generated by the
design process as research. The chapters will also demonstrate how to analyze, apply, and store information generated through the design process
in a way that follows the basic scope of services for most design firms dealing
with the built environment. They establish a pragmatic approach to design
research that conforms to the basic scope of design services.