The Designer's Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Augustin, Sally.

The designer’s guide to doing research : applying knowledge to Inform Design / Sally Augustin, Cindy Coleman.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-470-60173-0 (cloth : alk. paper); 978-1-118-09961-2 (ebk.); 978-1-118-09962-9 (ebk.); 978-1-118-10378-4 (ebk.); 978-1-118-10379-1 (ebk.); 978-1-118-10380-7 (ebk.)

1. Architectural design—Research. I. Coleman, Cindy. II. Title. III. Title:

Applying knowledge in practice for design excellence.

NA2750.A94 2012

720.72—dc22

2011010961

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Foreword

The Necessity for Research

The hallmark of a vital profession is its body of knowledge. In law, it’s clearly defined as precedent, found in the great tomes and used, daily, by attorneys. In science, practitioners admit freely that they stand on the shoulders of giants. Those employed in the many subsets of the physical and behavioral sciences build their work on the findings of those who came before them, those who work next to them, and those who toil, simultaneously, in competing institutions. Although much of this body of knowledge is gleaned in the course of everyday practice, such opportunistic research is not enough to keep the professions at their cutting edge. It is the deep dives and the intense focus on confounding problems that lift each profession to its highest level of performance and increase the value of its contributions to the growth of human intelligence and betterment of the human condition.

In an age of climate change, global materials shortages, aging populations, technological sophistication, and a worldwide web of connections between people and ideas, the design professions—those best equipped to shape the built environment—are searching for ways to fine-tune their responses to these complex issues. The well-being of humanity and the Earth that supports all living things is at stake. This is a big assignment; it requires a collaborative approach to problem solving. This complex problem solving needs many different professionals, each at the top of his or her game, to bring their unique skills and extensive knowledge to the table.

Clearly, architects and interior designers, whose work comes in close contact with our bodily and emotional needs, are essential participants in this growing and evolving public dialogue. They stand to make significant contributions to human well-being everywhere, to every culture and every economic group, not simply to well-funded institutions, multinational corporations, and wealthy home owners. The prospect of this new clientele predicts a broadening of the designer’s work options, even as it calls for a new understanding of this uniquely varied population. At the same time, the profession’s fine-grained sensibilities, once defined by such skills as choosing colors, textures, and styles, as well as devising spatial adjacencies and lighting schemes—those things that continue to humanize our most intimate surroundings—need to be refined, expanded, and redefined.

Material toxicities, energy performances, and emotional connectivity are only a few challenges faced by architects and interior designers today. How should they dive into these topics while carrying on the duties of a midstream career? How can they understand problems that were, by and large, previously ignored by the professions? What tools are needed to bring today’s spatial designers up to the high level of performance expected of them? Research is a good place to start.

Research can become the solid cornerstone of the profession. The processes and approaches defined in this book are a strong beginning. But, like any worthwhile beginning, this moment, defined so skillfully by the authors, must grow and evolve if the profession and the world at large are to reap its full benefits.

Starting with the familiar, on-the-job research, a habit of relentless inquiry needs to be learned. Its clearly defined goal is to build a solid body of knowledge, a foundation on which future research will be based. This kind of information collection and analysis will be at its most powerful when the professions, as a whole, share their findings through publications and educational programs with ever-growing audiences. At the same time, practical knowledge accrued within firms must be shared freely, through available technologies and the many ways we are learning to use face time. Added to this effort, the professions must engage relevant specialists such as biologists and behavioral scientists in original research on human interaction with the interior environment and how our interiors connect to nature and the surrounding built environment. We intuitively know that it’s all connected, that it’s all part of a great system. The research will prove the hypothesis.

So, start here and start now. It’s the beginning of a wonderful, productive journey in laying a solid foundation for the twenty-first-century design practice. That foundation will make your work indispensable. Your embedded knowledge will make you a valued member of any team. And your contribution to the body of human knowledge will be noted, celebrated, and appreciated by those who are fortunate enough to occupy the spaces you’ll be designing.

—Susan S. SzenasyEditor in Chief, Metropolis magazine

Acknowledgments

Thank you to all the architects, designers, researchers, and experts who have contributed their time and knowledge to this book: Roshelle Born, Perkins + Will; Joseph Connell, Perkins + Will; Malcolm Cook, Loughborough University; Christian Derix, Aedas’ Computational Design Research Group; Bill van Erp, Gensler; Megan Fath, Conifer Research; Judith Heerwagen, PhD, U.S. General Services Administration; Todd Heiser, Gensler; Thomas Jacobs, Krueck & Sexton; Cary Johnson, Gensler; Keelan Kaiser, Judson University; Jan van den Kieboom, Workshop Architects; Peter van den Kieboom, Workshop Architects; Lynn Kubin, Gensler; David Ogoli, PhD, Judson University; Leah Ray, Gensler; Holly Roeske, Conifer Research; Jennifer Smith, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Carolyn Stuenkel, PhD, Conifer Research; Adisorn Supawatanakul, Conifer Research; Nicholas Watkins, PhD, HOK, and Claire Whitehill, HOK.

We extend our appreciation to: Conifer Research, Gensler, Keelan Kaiser, Krueck & Sexton Architects, Perkins + Will, and Workshop Architects for contributing their time and resources to the Stories of Practice.

We are grateful to Susan Szenasy, editor in chief of Metropolis magazine, for contributing the foreword to this book—we are honored.

We extend a special thanks to senior editor John Czarnecki at John Wiley & Sons, Inc., for his skillful guidance.

Finally, from Sally to Denny: Thank you for making all the effort worthwhile. And, from Cindy to Neil and Emanuela: Thank you for making all the effort fun.

Introduction

Before You Do Design Research

Research is a special sort of word. It is simultaneously a noun and a verb. As a noun, it represents a collection of insights and facts—a jumble of the longtime known and newly learned. This research is a tool to inform future decisions. As a verb, research represents the process of moving questions that are important enough to require answers toward those answers. At the early stage of a project, it can help to generate new ideas, and at later points in a project it can be used to assess them.

Design is also both a noun and a verb. When acting as a noun, it is a physical manifestation of a series of decisions about form and function. The verb forms of design and research are synonyms—both are a question-answering process. Designers for millennia have been doing research, but it is only in the last few years that people have begun to speak of design and research in the same phrase. Being a design researcher is among the hippest professions around—but the job title is redundant.

In this book, we will show you how to apply the processes and tools you have learned as a designer to answer project-related questions in ways that ensure competitive advantage and your own professional satisfaction.

Research versus Insight

Research alone is not all that important. It might get someone tenure at a university or spark conversation at a party, but research does not acquire real power until it is integrated with conscious and unconsciously recognized knowledge. Knowledge combines professional experience, abstract knowledge, common sense, and inspiration. Knowledge becomes intensely valuable when it can lead to an insight that inspires the resolution of an unanswered question. Insight is, according to Microsoft Word’s dictionary the ability to see clearly and intuitively into the nature of a complex person, situation or subject.

Developing a multifamily housing complex that enhances the lives of residents, while minimizing the literal and green footprint of their homes grows from a research base to an inspired insight. A school cafeteria that encourages camaraderie among its young users while minimizing bullying springs from the same process.

Insight is really useful to space designers. In this book, we show you, our fellow designers, how to move from questions to insights. It is important that you do research and develop your own knowledge because the people who can most effectively apply knowledge are those who generate it—no one else understands its nuances as well as they do. In this introduction, we talk a little bit about knowledge and insight, to ground our later chapters on research. After reading the introduction it’ll be clear why time used to do research is time well spent.

The Research/Design Relationship

We discuss research in the flow of the design process because research is an inherent part of each stage in that chain. Designers are always posing questions and answering them in the physical forms of the spaces they develop. They are continuously translating both project-specific and generalized expert information into a language understood by clients and others through projected physical forms. This book is not introducing designers to a new process but to new tools that can be used to make the current ones they use to answer design questions more effective and efficient.

And it’s about time that process was streamlined. Designers are being asked to develop more spaces more quickly. Our colleagues come to us exhausted, with questions such as these:

What precedents are there for the design of preschools where young people succeed cognitively and socially?

Who are the experts on sales-record-breaking retail design? How do I find out from them what I should know about designing gourmet, organic food stores?

What’s known about stores where people buy things they need or cherish?

How can I use a survey to collect the information I need to program the Massive Company headquarters?

How should a space be designed to maximize the productivity of a work team? (And the even thornier question: How should we define productivity, anyway?)

How much community space is just right in a new multifamily residential complex? What should it look like? Feel like?

What’re the secrets of writing a good survey? What about a survey to collect information from the people in the offices ringing a civic center who use its public space every day for lunch?

How can I be sure that the new hospital patient room we’re presenting will increase patient, visitor, and caregiver well-being? That the surfaces won’t harbor germs and the carpeting won’t trip up unsteady feet?

What do people actually do when they visit a farmers’ market or a county fair? What can I learn from that experience and apply when I’m developing a new store or shopping mall? While we’re at it, what could the design of indigenous villages teach me that should be applied to the design of that new multifamily residential complex (the one mentioned in my earlier question)?

Where should I suggest a new school be located? How should it be oriented on the site selected?

Which potential diners should I talk to about the design of a new restaurant? What should I discuss with them? What are their expectations about eating out, and how can those hopes/desires/requirements be reflected in design?

OK, I’ve learned a lot about people, materials, and social trends while doing this project—how do I save that knowledge so that my coworkers and I don’t have to go to the effort of learning it all again?

Reading this book will teach designers how to answer these questions.

Why This Book?

This book identifies ways to acknowledge the information generated by the design process, as well as how to analyze, apply, and store that data. The insights gathered from the process and products of design strengthen efforts to develop spaces that are informed by relevant knowledge, whether that knowledge is culled from previous projects and research efforts, or from project-specific investigations. This book is about research that enhances design.

When you’ve completed reading it, you’ll see that for as long as you’ve been designing you’ve been doing design research. Since designers are continuously generating information on one project that is used by both themselves and others on future projects and also using input beyond their own expertise, they research. Designers deal with complex issues that can be resolved only through the integration of material developed by people with different areas of expertise and through their own professional practice and place experiences. The ability to integrate this information is a hallmark of an effective designer. Both the design process and product are research activities in and of themselves that teach us about our world and ourselves.

In the pages that follow, we present the most effective ways to align research methodology with the design process and maximize the influence of the information garnered during design. The book supports the designer’s efforts to effectively access new, relevant information at specific milestones as design progresses.

This book lays out a process that a designer can adapt to his or her practice requirements. It outlines a practical approach that demonstrates, at each project phase, how to integrate a systematic research-based methodology into the basic scope of design service. After reviewing the information that follows, you will make design decisions with the confidence that comes from having greater insight about the context of those choices.

Key to the acquisition of new knowledge is learning how to appropriately analyze and apply the available information. This book includes firsthand accounts—stories of practice—that narrate effective methods, the lessons learned, and the outcomes of a research-based design application. Each story of practice focuses on a research strategy accomplished during a particular project phase. Beginning with project initiation, research is a means to market a project. Project investigation is when research is employed to build a statement of need. In the integration phase, research establishes a project’s philosophy of use and refines design thinking. Implementation is when research becomes a means to evaluate and document measures of success.

Figure I-1: The design process cycles through four main phases: initiation, investigation, integration, and implementation.

This book is written for all practices and people concerned with the built environment, from architects and interior designers, to facility managers, landscape architects, and urban planners. All of these groups will be referred to collectively as designers throughout this book. Students can also use the contents of the book to inform, and guide the development of, their design careers.

The authors have been doing design research for several decades; Cindy Coleman has been practicing in the field of interior design and Sally Augustin has been practicing in the field of applied environmental psychology. We have a good idea of what you need to know to move forward with a design project. We have organized this book so that the chapters focus on the phases that a design project moves through: project initiation, programming, conceptual design, design development, contract documentation, and project completion.

You can use this book in two key ways:

1. It can be read chronologically, either independent of a particular design project or as you work through a project.

2. It is a reference book. Each chapter stands alone and can be referenced as needed over the course of a project.

In the text that follows, we have not specified sources or references for research’s standard operating procedures for social science studies discussed to encourage you to do your own research. We do provide references, whenever possible, to unique methodological contributions by design and social science researchers.

Why Research?

Increasingly, a designer or design firm’s center of knowledge is a key resource and important source of competitive advantage. This core knowledge generally flows from two primary sources—first, from a designer’s previous experiences, education, and intuitive sensibilities. The other source is the new data and research that a designer uses to supplement this initial knowledge base—derived by conducting experiments (both actual and conceptual) generally and acquiring new information to inform a particular design response more specifically. Whatever its source, the value of this knowledge stems from effectively applying it and creating higher levels of understanding for the designer and his or her clients that provoke new ways of thinking and innovation.

Research for design is important. It is a fact: design has the power to affect human behavior, and research can identify the probable influences a space will have. Research (and practice) have shown, for example, that certain environments are better suited to socializing because they promote casual conversation. Sick patients respond more quickly to treatment in environments that reduce stress; lowering stress levels improves the functioning of the immune system. For certain tasks, a quiet and enclosed space heightens a person’s ability to concentrate. Classrooms that promote a student’s ability to move and release energy while taking in new information increase his or her capacity to learn, particularly for kinesthetic learners or those with ADHD. Broad research findings such as these inevitably need to be supplemented with the answers to project-specific questions to ensure design success.

The power to influence the behavior of the people who use a space or building or to optimize their performance in a place is fundamental to a design’s value. Design is valuable when its outcomes can create desired situations and potentially alter the performance of a space’s stakeholders. Design is fundamentally about change—change in behavior, attitudes, income, and so on. Good design encourages good changes.

Today, real estate investments must perform well financially. They require a significant outlay of an organization’s financial resources, and in return must make an active contribution to an organization’s cultural, social, professional, and financial success. Regardless of whether the real estate in question is residential, commercial, academic, medical, or civic, it is someone’s strategic asset—and its performance is crucial to this organization’s viability. Therefore, the design team’s primary obligation is to develop project-specific solutions that assure that clients’ strategic assets support their perceived and implied goals. Effective research makes a positive outcome much more likely.

Design as Research

Design is simultaneously a product and a process. Design as a product and design as a process rely on a sophisticated language to communicate—a language that negotiates between ideas that are presented as completed objects, places, and things; ideas systematized as experiences, emotions, and values; and ideas informed by social scientific data and theory.

The information needed for valuable design surrounds us, and is often a byproduct of the design process itself. Designers learn about new cultures within their home country and around the world. While waiting for a meeting to begin at a client office, designers notice that people walking by seem to show one sort of a behavior (culture) or another. With proven research tools, designers can not only quickly access and consider what they’ve learned through life and previous design work while making design decisions but also probe new areas.

Good Design Process

For many, the act of designing a place or a thing is in itself a form of research. Design as research acknowledges the similarity between the design process and a research methodology. From problem identification to the application of new information, a good design process, like an effective research methodology, is well informed and employs a range of techniques to derive a project-specific solution. Both require the integration of diverse information streams as expeditiously as possible. Design as research recognizes the important roles that emotion, intuition, and experience play in informing the design response. It establishes a methodology that a designer can use to proactively seek out additional sources of new information through the review of material learned earlier, investigation, experimentation, and establishing meaningful collaborations with specialists inside and outside of the design disciplines.

For practicing designers, ideas are more often presented in objects and places than they are in words and theories. Therefore, when the process of design is approached as a type of research, the process itself becomes an extremely useful analytical tool that informs the form of ideas, objects, and places.

Research, like design, is an evolved process. Both processes are nonlinear; they occur concurrently and simultaneously require multiple frameworks of analysis. For example, design researchers actively gather and interpret new information or begin a process of extracting and analyzing what is already known in the context of user needs, available resources, organizational values, and organizational goals. Although this is where the process often begins, it need not become the limit of design research.

The goal of design research is to enrich what is already known or understood and to actively seek out new information. This enhancement may require a series of well-crafted questionnaires to understand how the different stakeholders or users perceive their independent interests relative to place—something very familiar to the process of design.

To take the research role further, and to supplement the questionnaires, a design researcher might use observation to challenge and understand subjective concepts about space (how a stakeholder perceives he or she uses or should experience space) and objective reality (how a stakeholder actually uses or should experience a place). When a designer inserts data collection and analysis into the design process, it often shifts the working concept of the design firm from preconceived notions and stereotypes toward more clearly defined and explicit concepts—a more effective and knowledgeable base for design decision making.

Design research, as an experimental technique, is a proactive tool that demonstrates the effect of a design strategy while there is still time to refine or modify the design plan. Experiments and mock-ups provide opportunities to evaluate, reiterate, and modify design concepts using the information collected.

For example, during large workplace installations, when an organization is considering the benefits of furniture systems, design firms will frequently undertake an extensive mock-up and evaluation process to uncover which option yields the most efficient and effective response. However, the benefits of this type of experimental design research are often more extensive. A place-based experiment or mock-up can uncover many social, environmental, or physical conditions that may not have been considered without the benefit of the experiment or mock-up.

Research methodologies supported by the design process make it possible to incorporate the expertise of people with a wide range of backgrounds into the solutions suggested. Integrating this knowledge and then giving it a physical form is at the core of effective design. The research process not only provides a vocabulary and syntax for problem identification and solving but also roughly lays out the roles and the goals of different potential participants.

Established methodologies show each of these team players the part they will perform in the design process and can resolve many problem-solving turf battles. These methods provide the basic direction for a research program to which participants can apply the specific training they’ve received. As client teams have become more diverse, design solutions that reflect a variety of intellectual disciplines are increasingly important and highly valued. Insights from culture and technology experts, psychologists, and sociologists, among others, are also becoming increasingly important as the problem-solving contexts rapidly evolve. Materials experts and suppliers can also be valuable team members.

Different sorts of professionals have different approaches to defining and resolving complex problems. Psychologists, for example, look for answers at an individual or relatively small group level, while sociologists are concerned with much larger groups, and anthropologists regularly focus on cultural issues. Material scientists generally think more about how well a substance behaves mechanically than psychologists, who generally would focus on the emotional response to the color or texture of that material. All of these viewpoints and knowledge bases are important, and many are crucial for project success.

Design researchers aware of the important knowledge bases developed by practices, as well as individuals, store and retrieve this collectively derived information. It is a valuable component of what a designer knows. It gains its value when the designer has access to it, can reference it, and can demonstrate its effect. Some firms create databases of benchmarked information to organize what the individual employees generally know, as well as what the organization as a whole has learned; other design researchers maintain intranet sites that store specialized databases on project types, conditions, and goals. Some of the collective practice knowledge is stored outside firms, in published records.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking, like using design precedents, allows information to be compared across different projects. These comparisons can be stored and accessed within the firm or may be shared with clients and potentially published in professional journals. Benchmarking and comparing pertinent project parameters adds considerable knowledge to a firm.

Benchmarking is a process that continuously quantifies and measures aspects of a project ranging from energy consumption per unit to square foot ratios of staff to overall square footage. The goal of benchmarking is to establish a metric by which projects and processes can be analyzed and comparatively evaluated. When benchmark data are collected (to the extent possible) both before changes are made to the environment and afterward, they become particularly valuable. When several aspects of the physical environment are changed, it is impossible to isolate the influences of a single one on the benchmarked data, but before and after data still provide useful insights to designers.

Design researchers add to the knowledge bases within the firm and external to it by seeking out greater understanding and information. This greater insight may be achieved through the research methodologies described in this book, or from reading, attending conferences and lectures, or seeking out information (which might be more data driven or more anecdotal) from other practices.

Establishing systems to seek additional insight is an active process. It moves the knowledge source beyond what the typical act or process of designing delivers. It reaches beyond a designer’s internal source of knowledge to build greater understanding and perception through investigation, reading, learning and exploration—all components of a proactive research methodology that effectively informs design decision making.

Research-derived design knowledge includes the vast amount of information uncovered by answering project-specific questions—for example, when considering the materiality of a project, the acoustical attributes desired in a specific space, codes and compliance, thermal and energy conditions in a building or place, sustainability issues, site conditions, and so on. Individual sets of site-specific information are particularly valuable when integrated with other collections of similar material.

A system that analyzes, retains, and accesses this information for future projects is a key firm asset and plays a critical part in building a designer’s (or design firm’s) body of knowledge. Librarians have developed effective systems to retain and distribute information that can be used with physical and electronic files and artifacts, and those that are relevant are profiled in Chapter 7.

Application of the Information

Once you’ve obtained the information, how do you apply it? Effective analyses ensure that the critical information gained from the research process can be applied constructively and is appropriate for the situation at hand. Here, the data are tools and not simply part of the project history. Designers who conduct research know what sorts of answers they need and when they need them. It is therefore vitally important that designers control the research process as part of the design process. Control isn’t enough, though—when designers collect the information themselves, they need to answer outstanding design questions and analyze what’s collected. Through this process, they understand what’s been learned in a visceral way that immensely enriches design.

The way the collected data are evaluated and measured will also flow out of the research process. Looking for patterns in the frequencies of responses is a valuable way to assess information available from quantitative tools, for example. Looking for consistencies in the responses to qualitative discussion questions posed is also important. Reviewing observation videos for specific project-relevant behaviors transforms a meaningless stream of images to applicable information. Clear-cut statistical analyses can also provide information collected through surveys and simulations with a lucid and usable structure.

Each methodology aligned with the design process lends itself to particular and straightforward analyses, which will be profiled in the pages that follow. Collecting the information you need, and analyzing it with the appropriate tools, dramatically increases the likelihood that you can effectively apply that data.

Knowing

Writer, poet, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau quoted Confucius in this familiar saying: To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, is true knowledge.¹ Thoreau seemed to really understand the knowledge dilemma currently facing designers. What designers know, as Thoreau put it, is, in fact, their core competency. It’s what gives a designer his or her competitive advantage. Sometimes, this knowledge can be articulated and sometimes it can’t, but it is present and valuable, in either case. What a designer doesn’t know, however, does not need to stand in the way of success. It gives a designer an opportunity to expand his or her body of knowledge. The stock of things that are not known is always evolving—new information answers existing questions, providing the foundation on which new questions are posed. Data collected are analyzed and used to structure an evolving discussion.

Everyone comes to the proverbial design table knowing stuff. When designing interior office spaces, most designers know that placing a desk with the worker’s back to the doorway might be problematic for that worker because it is distracting not to know who might be approaching from the rear. Most designers understand that living spaces require separation between private and social activity and that a doctor’s office requires a reception area that accommodates both the healthy and the sick—without too much contamination of the former by the latter.

Mostly, this knowledge is gathered through life experiences. Education, travel, relationships, and personal/professional experiences all develop the designer’s ability to understand how life is lived. We learn about many cultural variations in the use of space through visits to other countries and through conversations with colleagues born into other cultures, for example.

Additionally, designers often draw from their intuitions. A designer might not have personally experienced a condition but still have the intuitive capabilities to predict certain outcomes because of their own professional and personal experiences. Designers generally realize, for example, that people must be able to relax somewhere in their home and that different shopping experiences encourage the purchase of different sorts of products—the big box store is for shoppers looking for bargains or routinely purchased items, whereas the boutique is more appropriate when shoppers want to acquire something unique or special and to have a pleasurable experience.

Learning through experience and intuition can be described as learning by observation—whether that observation is conscious or unconscious.

Philosophers, psychologists, and epistemologists (people who study knowing) spend a lot of time trying to answer questions such as who knows what and how they know what they know. They have learned that when we encounter some new information that we value, we integrate it