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Hi Don, Thinking a little more on the history of design research and design research methods.... Of course, long before Engineering Design and Art and Design developed, was Design Theory in Mathematics and its research methods stretching back to Pythagoras and before. Mathematics of course was the earliest user of the term 'Design Theory' of any design field and still provides a tremendous basis for thinking about difficult design situations. The Arab scientists of the Middle Ages were especially strong on research to build design theory. As I've said before it would be helpful if that kind of advanced Maths was taught more in design schools.... :-) In art and design and engineering design it was the basis of Gestalt and, Function/Attribute methods, Morphological analysis and other design methods. For more info see for example http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~pjc/design/resources.html Cheers, Terry == Dr Terence Love FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI, MAISA Director Design Out Crime & CPTED Centre Perth, Western Australia [log in to unmask] www.designoutcrime.org +61 (0)4 3497 5848 == ORCID 0000-0002-2436-7566 -----Original Message----- From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Don Norman Sent: Wednesday, 1 February 2017 11:34 AM To: Terry Love <[log in to unmask]> Cc: Don Norman <[log in to unmask]>; PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: A question about the history of Design Research On Tue, Jan 31, 2017 at 6:21 PM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > I feel there is a more challenging question in the history of design > research about whether surveys of customers and users are better > regarded as market research rather than design research? That is they > are part of marketing research history rather than design research history. Terry This starts to move the discussion into another one, better titled something like "On the differences and similarities between marketing research and design research." I have long thought that these two fields are (or should be) more related than they are. Instead, they are often fraught with disciplinary fights and disputes about "who owns the another." And, for accidental historical reasons, a dispute over the efficacy of quantitative research (with large numbers of respondents, each studied rather shallowly) versus qualitative research (with sometimes very small numbers of respondents -- but studied in depth.) To my mind, the differences are minor. The qualitative/quantitative fight is starting to go away with the realization that both forms of data are valuable, but that each provides different information. In addition, the goals of the two groups differ: - Marketing tends to focus upon what people actually purchase - Design tends to focus upon what people actually need. But just doing market research can lead to products that do not satisfy, and just doing design research can lead to products that people do not buy. ==== I beleive that the earliest attempts to gauge the interest and needs of customers was probably closer to the marketing research side of things, but nonetheless, it helped inform early designers of true needs. Many of the early designers (and all the good ones that I know today) are excellent observers of the behavior of themselves and others. Even the guru designers who do not like design research actually do a lot of it, but they don't call it that. They watch, they oftentimes go and visit the sites, try the tasks they are designing for, and do a lot of field work. Is that design research? Yes, I would argue so. When did it start? I can only believe that it started when the first designing started. How else can one design unless there is some understanding of the people and activities? The reason that hand tools, crafts tools and sporting and athletic devices are often the best designed implements available is that the designers are often also strong practitioners of the activity. This is not formal design research. I think it might even be better, except that it clearly is biased toward an elite set of expert performers. SO, I consider research on people to all be a form of design research, although with different approaches and nuances and goals. My question many posts ago was when these activities became recognized with a codified set of standard tools (which today, measure in the hundreds for both market and design research) Don Don Norman Prof. and Director, DesignLab, UC San Diego [log in to unmask] designlab.ucsd.edu/ www.jnd.org <http://www.jnd.org/> ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------