Dear all,
In my humble opinion, if there is no opportunity to take classes from
someone who knows what he/she is doing, best way to start is to read basic
social science research methods and then move to books written for
designers/by designers. Typically most design research methods are derived
from social science/humanities methods and sometimes they are watered down
versions of the originals. For example, both in qual. and quant. realms I
see designers (i am not talking about a non-academic setting) working with
much smaller Ns than what is typically suggested by social scientists.
Then, once the basics are down, each method is a world in itself and needs
to be learned by either taking practicum classes or under someone's
tutorship. I keep emphasizing classes since most methods have a lot of
tacit details that cannot be learned only through reading (even in
mathematical modeling and statistics, which may seem very codified at first
glance, are full of tiny implicit "rules" like this). Good old
apprenticeship (and phd is in a way like this) is still the best way to go,
again in my opinion.
Sincerely,
Ali
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