RESEARCH PROCESS

The purpose of research is to effectively and efficiently provide the information
needed to support the design process. The flow of the research process is
influenced not only by the research questions that you are answering but also
by the audience for your research, particularly their expectations and knowledge
base.
Design research plans evolve from a process of problem identification:
• What knowledge is essential for you and your colleagues to effectively
design a particular space or object?
• What information is required for your clients to feel comfortable with
design decisions made?
• What sort of information do you have that you can apply now?
• Can you be confident in the material that you have?
• What criteria will be used to judge the success of the project?
Identifying the questions to be answered requires careful thought and
clear priorities. Generally, knowing the reason that your client is thinking
about undertaking a design project and the criteria that will be used
to judge its success will give you a good place to start to determine the
research questions to be addressed. If success of the MRI suite is defined
as giving smaller doses of sedatives to patients, for example, you know that
relaxing patients is of utmost importance, and you can investigate environmental
modifications that will support just that. Similarly, if success will be
determined by a lower turnover rate among caregivers working in the MRI
suite, then reasons that staff members are leaving, as well as environmental
modifications that have the potential to increase staff retention, are important.
Projects often have several goals and research resources are often
limited, so a prioritized list of learning objectives is very useful. Priorities
should be established based on the anticipated ability for a design decision
to increase the value of a firm or organization. If the research and development
team at an organization has the most potential to increase its value (as
defined by the client firm itself), then design interventions to that group are
paramount.
Research can answer only a limited number of questions based on the
human, financial, and scheduling resources available. The questions may be answered with many sorts of research tools—from surveys to observation to
experience sampling to use of a simulated environment.
As you begin to identify research questions, it is important to keep in mind
that it is possible not to know everything about the situation in which a design
will be implemented and be successful at your job—indeed it is impossible to
know about all aspects of every context. You do need to know enough to move
forward and solve the outstanding issues that relate to the reason that your
firm was contacted—and it is also true that these are generally broader than
the client states in your early meetings. To clarify: when designing a workplace
it is good to know something about how employees are compensated in
a general sense, because that lets you know how much individual and group
work are really valued. However, it is not important to know the fine details of
the bonus structure for each type of employee. Be realistic and prioritize your
information-collection objectives so that they align with the importance of the
design questions that they can resolve.
Practical experience builds an important knowledge base—but recognize
the limits of drawing conclusions based on your own experience and applying
them to a particular project. How similar are the contexts in which you have
worked before to the one in which the information will be applied? Also, was
it possible to objectively measure how well a previous design solution worked,
to know if it should be replicated in a new situation? Realize that even if there
is a way to accurately gauge the success of a previous design solution, it is
extremely unlikely that the conditions for the new project will be identical to
the ones for which those measurements were made.
If you have ever had a journalism class or written for a school newspaper,
you are familiar with the five Ws (plus an H) that need to be answered as the
design process progresses:
• Who?
• What?
• Where?
• When?
• Why?
• How?
These are fundamental questions that must be resolved as part of creating
a design program for a space. For different projects, these major questions
will splinter into different subquestions. Sometimes one line of inquiry
will be more crucial to the design process than another. In any case, your
research question must be clearly and tightly defined—for example, it must
relate to preschools rather than all educational facilities if you are designing a preschool—and even then, you should focus on cultures and other similar factors
that are clearly related to the project at hand.
To illustrate: When designing an MRI facility, you might want to gather
all sorts of information about why patients are being tested or why caregivers
have chosen to work with this particular technology. The answers to these
questions have important implications for the physical and psychological
experiences to be created in a space. If people are often given MRIs because
of sports injuries, designers will need to make sure that the patients can move
easily to the machine, even with a sprained ankle. If the patients are being
treated for cancer, access is still key, but absence of potentially nauseating
sensory experiences also becomes very important. If caregivers believe that
working in an MRI suite is challenging and they relish challenges, the aesthetics
of the MRI control room should meet these expectations by communicating
a no-nonsense orientation. In addition, while designing that suite, you
need to consider patient mood and how the room might best create an appropriate
environment under a wide range of testing situations In short, how can
place design make the MRI process efficient, effective, and comfortable for
the patient?
With the MRI suite example, caregivers’ and patients’ needs require the
most investigation. Established medical practices and procedures specify the
safety standards and technical requirements of the suite, but not the experiential
and emotional aspects of visiting it as a patient or working there. Questions
related to the functionality of the MRI suite are more straightforward.
That might not be the case for other designs. For example, questions about
libraries activities must take into consideration that five years they might be
very different. Library use in 5 years was pertinent to the design of the Seattle
Public Library, discussed in the introduction to this book. Clearly, different
sorts of questions are important in varying contexts.
After you identify the fundamental questions to be addressed with the
research plan, a realistic review of the human, financial, and scheduling
resources that are available to answer those questions must be completed.
Carefully and thoughtfully consider the resource requirements of various
research tools, as described in the pages that follow.