Advanced design research workshop for design educators

Once again, this week I’m in Spain teaching a workshop on design research to art and design educators. This time I’m in the Generalitat Valenciana to teach at the Escuelas de Arte y Superior de Diseño in Orihuela and in Alcoi. The week-long workshop covers the key steps needed to plan, conduct and analyze research in the context of a doctoral or master investigation.

With a combination of in-person and remote teaching, the workshop covers the full research process, with special attention on how to conduct rigorous research and ensure trustworthiness, aspects that are often not fully addressed or unknown in design research. Through the analysis and discussion of case studies from academia and industry, attendees will see how concepts can be tailored to the context and project at hand, and the essential role that creativity plays in research.

To illustrate the broad spectrum of design research, I’m sharing case studies of projects that we have worked on at Sense Information Design, and others from my current MIT graduate students and former students at Princeton University. Some of these research projects focus on:

• developing digital interventions to increase patients with spinal cord injuries’ engagement with exercises
• understanding the role of participatory design in the food insecurity domain
• understanding college students’ sleeping habits and developing ways to improve them
• understanding how to increase the role of mindfulness among college students to improve wellbeing and develop leadership skills
• developing ways to encourage children living in urban areas to spend more time outdoors using less technology

All together these projects illustrate a range of research methodological strategies that could be used to investigate a wide variety of problems. They also show the role of creativity in developing data collection instruments and adapting methods to the needs and contexts of different populations, from children to people with spinal cord injuries.

The workshop runs between March 28th to April 1st.