Product design research

In recent years, there has been an increasingly lively debate about research methods in design practice. Design research is a relatively young discipline and does not possess a well-established knowledge base when compared to the sciences, humanities and other more recognized scholarly disciplines. Thus, a lot of design research has tended to draw on existing methods, techniques, and approaches from the physical and the social sciences. This connection with science has troubled many design researchers in recent years. While a scientific research is more analytic, therefore, recent developments in design research are more constructive, and seek to find new answers and knowledge in a constant drive to improvement.

There is another distinction with design research that needs to be clarified, and this lies between the academic and commercial worlds. A lot of design research conducted in commercial product design projects is highly confidential and is used to drive creative endeavors that are likely to result ultimately in new products coming on to the market. Most academic research in product design ends up in either conference or journal publications.