Dear Kristina and everyone.

I did say I would try and keep my posts short in the future. Sorry,
this one got away from me.

I may be able to help a little in answering your questions, or at least
providing you with some thoughts on how we have tried to answer these
questions in our own little world.

My own field is communication research and within that particularly
communication design, or what is often referred to as information
design.

Those of us who come to identify with this field are a diverse lot from
many backgrounds. Information design is the field around which we
converge rather than a defined point of origin.

University courses in information design, per se, both at undergraduate
and post graduate level, are relatively recent, though there are many
courses that could legitimately claim to be teaching some aspects of
information design.

Research in information design also has a diverse set of origins and
much of its findings and methods are scattered across a wide
literature.

Probably the best place to look and get a quick sense of the field
would be to visit the excellent entry by Sue Walker and Mark Barret on
the design council site at:
http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/webdav/servlet/XRM?Page/
@id=6004&Session/@id=D_ORQ8Vs09inkdk8TxlqRk&Section/@id=1305

 From that you will get a sense of some of what we do. You will also see
that there is considerable overlap between information design and other
fields.

My own sense of the methods we use and the research we undertake is
that both achieved a kind of maturity by the mid to late 1980's. This
is not to say that we have been at a standstill since then, but I think
many of us working at the pointy end in the 1980's had a broadly agreed
set of design and research methods. As much of this is articulated in
papers and case histories, I won't go into detail here. But here is a
summary.

For as long as I can remember thinking about information design (going
back to the mid 60s), I can also remember thinking about design
methods. I was familiar with the Design Methods Group, the DRS, Bruce
Archer's then recently completed Phd thesis, the work at Ulm etc. There
was a strand of work in information design at the OU, with which I was
familiar, which drew heavily on operational research and typography.
Systems thinking, cybernetics, and information theory, were all being
actively discussed at the time, as was the emerging field of cognitive
science and human information processing. My point in mentioning all of
this is to suggest that in our own little corner of the world, it
seemed 'natural' to think about methods in the sense of a repeatable
pattern of activity to solve a particular class of problems. One way of
reading the information design literature, particularly through the
pages of *information design journal* is as a series of dialogues and
explorations of methods. Key papers by Pat Wright, Jinney Redish, Rob
Waller, Ken Garland and others, spanning a period of some 15 years,
explore this terrain.

Along with others, I have put in quite a bit of time over the last few
years trying to articulate those methods into a coherent body of
know-how. Probably my best attempt at an overall summary is in my paper
*Experiences in Codesigning*
http://www.communication.org.au/cria_publications/
publication_id_33_1312654719.html

The linage of  the little diagram I use in that paper to give a sense
of our design methods (with grateful acknowledgment to Mr Harry Beck
the originator of the London Underground map) is fairly obviously
derived from the design methods, cognitive science, cybernetics, and
operational research of the 1960s. But it's persistence and gradual
refinement over the last twenty years is due to the fact that we have
accumulated a considerable body of evidence from practice and research
to suggest that it works. Again much of the detail of that is in the
published research and I will not elaborate that here. I would however
caution that our own little field of information design is not
necessarily generalisable to other areas of design. And it may be
possible that our own work in Australia is not generalisable elsewhere
either.

This has been a long and round-about way to get to try and offer some
help in answering the questions you ask.
>  1) what specific design research methods there are in design, and
>  2) how are they different to design methods,
>  3) or whether they are only different in the mode of application.

To deal with your second question first. I think our little diagram of:
        scoping
        benchmarking
        designing
        testing
        refining
        implementing
        monitoring
is what I would call our design methods. At various points within each
of these stages we would use a variety of specific investigative and
analytic methods which would be recognisable as research methods. Some
come from other disciplines, some are home grown, that is they have
been developed by information designers to investigate information
design problems.

To give a couple of examples of the types of things I'm talking about
that many people on the list would know about, Liz Sanders work fits
into one of the phases in what we would call the 'scoping' stage of our
methods. A great deal of what human factors and HCI people call
usability testing, would fit into our 'benchmarking' and 'testing'
phase. As a designer, I'm uneasy about calling these research methods
because I think they are more properly called investigative methods.
They range from highly open ended exploratory methods right through to
highly specific formalised methods that are like routine pathology or
quality control tests. But, they are, from our point of view, part of
the tools of our trade, like a set of rulers are to a carpenter. A
carpenter would use a ruler to find out how long a piece of wood was,
but we would not call using a ruler in this way as *research*. Perhaps
some would. I prefer to talk about investigative methods.

But what is, from my point of view research, is coming up with a new
type of ruler. That, I believe is what Liz Sanders has done. I would
also regard as research being able to find out which rulers, as it
were, to use at which stage in our design methods. For example, much of
our own research has been directed at working out which investigative
methods are most useful to us and when to apply them. This also
involves us in rejecting certain investigative methods that do not
offer us useful data on which to make design decisions. Again, a lot of
the detail of this is in the published research. However, once these
research tools are embedded into practice, they become more of an
applied technology than a research method.

In a general way, I hope this answers your first question. If you want
a catalogue of particular investigative methods, you will find many of
them discussed in our Institute's published case histories and other
publications mentioned on the design council entry.

Your third question is, for me, quite intriguing. I can answer it
specifically with a particular example from our 'toolkit' of
investigative methods. One of the methods we use is what we call
diagnostic testing. Superficially, it looks like usability testing,
and, like usability testing it's origins are partly in applied
ergonomics, but we have grown to think about it, conduct it, and
analyse the data from it in very different ways to those that are
routinely taught in research methods courses. This post is already too
long, so I won't go into detail here. There are lots of discussions of
it in our publications which shed detailed light on it. However, when
you ask
> whether they are only different in the mode of application.
I would say no. They may have started life that way, but are now
something quite different. I suspect other designers have similar
experiences.

Moving slightly outside the questions you asked, but still on the
subject of the relationship between design methods and research.

One of the ways in which I have found our design methods useful is in
doing reviews of other people's research, trying to locate the value of
other peoples' work to our own interests by asking which part of our
methods does their research fit into. I recently tried to articulate
this and apply it in a literature review. You can see the result in one
of my publications on our web site.

(It's a large file size (1.59mb), so I will give you the main
publication page, rather than the direct URL
http://www.communication.org.au/html/papers_to_read.php
The paper is in the Health Information Design Section and is called
'usable medicines information')

The reason why I have found this useful is that it enables me, from a
designerly point of view, to generate  a set of critical criteria for
evaluating and valuing other researchers contribution to my field. This
is a recurrent problem, I know, for many design research students who
come to the task of undertaking a literature review but with no
critical criteria of their own. Perhaps this, or something like it
might be more generally useful to members of this list.

There are two other relationships between design methods and research
that I would like to briefly touch on. First, I think that design
methods themselves can obviously be the subject of research. Which
methods  or pattern of methods are best suited to particular types of
design and why etc. Second, there are a whole series of fascinating
questions to investigate about the nature of design methods and their
place in our world. This I take to be part of the subject of design
philosophy research.

I hope that helps a little, and my apologies for such a long post
again. I really will try to be brief in the future.


David