Research for Designers: A Guide to Methods and Practice

Whether as practice or as process, the purpose of design is to identify and articulate viable solutions. An epoch that has been proposed by the Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Klaus Schwab, as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (2016), this is a time in which the complexity and impact of today’s technologies on society and how we choose to leverage them are matters of existential import. Design is at the forefront of our times and has been steadily adopted across disciplines as a human-centric model for identifying opportunities and solving problems. Gjoko Muratovski’s second edition of Research for Designers: A Guide to Methods and Practice is evidence of design’s evolution from the practice of styling and focus on aesthetics to legitimizing solutions through research and evidence. As the Digital Futures Industry Professor and Director at Deakin University in Australia, who has also held several appointments in the US, UK, and Croatia, Muratovski has made extensive contributions to design research, with his work reaching international influence among Fortune 500 companies, NGOs, and institutions of higher learning. Research for Designers is not a manifesto professing the end of design as craft or dismissing the influence that style and aesthetic appeal have on user experience. It is a guide that introduces research methods tailored to designers as a resource for skill-building and engaging in interdisciplinary work involving gathering and analyzing data. This second edition expands the first edition’s nine chapters to eleven and reorganizes some of the content. Chapters one to three articulate the reasoning for this book and the value of introducing the basics of research practices to designers. The chapters are contextualized through a review of the historical development of design, current conditions and trends influencing how design is being defined, practiced, taught, researched, adapted in design programs, and how design is being channeled into other disciplines. Chapter three is a new chapter in this edition and briefly covers design practice, design research, and design thinking. To demonstrate how these approaches have been integrated into projects, these chapters provide interviews with designer practitioners, design leaders, and design thinkers on subjects including defense, advertising, and community-based projects. Chapter four introduces the terminology that will be used throughout the book (such as the differences between a María del Mar Navarro is Associate Professor of Visual Communication Design at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University and Ph.D. Fellow at the University of Arizona. marnavarro@asu.edu © 2022 María del Mar Navarro DOI: 10.1080/ 17547075.2022.2138144