Designing Designers
This ongoing research has sought to produce definitive guides to product design and research methods for product designers, aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate learners.
Overview
Project duration: Ongoing
Partners: Professor Paul Rodgers, University of Strathclyde and Laurence King
Impact
The two books have been placed on the essential reading lists of many design schools and universities around the world. The books have been translated into Spanish, Italian and Chinese, and the research team have recently been commissioned to produce a second edition of Research Methods for Product Design.
Challenge
Provide young and emerging product designers with a comprehensive, relevant, and visually rich insights into research methods and product design. The publications needed to include practical case studies and tutorials from leading design practitioners and researchers that would inform, inspire and help learners to understand the key tools, techniques and methods of product design, and enable them to conduct product design research and practice better.
Process
The authors worked with leading product designers, academics and companies to evaluate, curate and communicate the diverse range of design practices and research methods employed by product designers today.
Product designers need a comprehensive understanding of research methods as their day-to-day work routinely involves them observing people, asking questions, searching for information, making and testing ideas, and ultimately generating ‘solutions’ to ‘problems’.
Manifest in the design process is the act of research. Huge technological advances in information, computing and manufacturing processes also offer enormous opportunities to product designers such as the development of ‘intelligent’ products and services, but at the same time raise important research questions that need to be dealt with. Product designers are, in many ways, best placed to address these challenges because of the manner in which they apply their design thinking to problems.
The books needed to demonstrate in a clear, highly visual and structured fashion how established and emergent practices and research methods can support product designers and help them address the very real issues the world currently faces in the 21st century.
Output
Following the successful publication of the first edition, the book has been translated into Spanish.
The authors are now working on a second edition, aimed at bringing the original content up to date, and reflecting the rapidly evolving nature of design research.
Milton, A. and Rodgers, P. Research Methods for Product Design, Laurence King, UK 2013, ISBN 978- 1780673028
Spanish Edition, Blume 2013, ISBN 978-84-9801-712-0
Rodgers, P. and Milton, A. Product Design, Laurence King, UK 2011, ISBN 978-1856697514 Spanish Edition, Promopress 2011, ISBN 978-8492810222
Italian Edition, Logos 2011, ISBN 978-8857601595
Taiwanese Edition, Designin 2012, ISBN 978-9866026331
Chinese Edition, China Youth Press 2013, ISBN 978-7515316864