This chapter explains core concepts for developing attunement—the ability to discern people’s relevant needs, pain points, and preferences that comprise the problems to be solved with design solutions. When attuned to their surroundings and people’s needs, designers can more accurately frame problems and then select research methods whose findings can inform relevant products, services, and systems. As AI technologies become better at designing products, it is crucial that designers become “experience experts” to frame and solve detailed, emotionally charged problems in ways that AI cannot.
Description of Navigating the Landscapes of Design Research: Finding Your Way
This book provides emerging and established designers and design educators, along with their collaborators, with a means to understand how and why the landscape of design research has come to exist as it does, and how and why its various destinations and pathways are connected.
It is an accessible “guide” for those in and around design who have little to no experience with planning and conducting research to inform their decision-making. Specifically, this book makes the case that an integration of research and design is critical in a world shaped by an increasingly complex and pervasive amalgam of challenges: social, technological, environmental, economic, and political. The need to expand shared understandings of research has also become acute because this landscape is increasingly traversed by those who are seeking evidence-based outcomes to their needs rather than solutions shaped by aesthetic polish, subjective client demands, or simple cost-benefit formulas.
This book will be of interest to scholars and designers working in design studies and design research, as well as to design practitioners who are increasingly called upon to understand and act on data gleaned from evidence-based research. In addition to writings by Professors Gibson and Owens, this text includes chapters from fellow design researchers Helen Armstrong and Mathew Peterson, Leslie Atzmon and Diana Nicholas, Peter Hayward Jones, Cassini Nazir, and Dennis Cheatham.