<aside> 🚩 Research is “[t]he systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions.” (source, 27 March 2013)
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“Research” is both a noun and a verb. As a verb, it names any activity the goal of which is to establish facts and reach new conclusions. As a noun, it names the output of that activity, namely the documentation of facts and conclusions organized to facilitate its use by others.
Research is about generating or finding information, which is always done for a specific purpose. To make sure you're doing the right research, you need to understand very clearly what your purpose is.
We research things we don’t already know about, so the general purpose of any research is to overcome our ignorance. It’s usually phrased as a question. What range of temperatures must this oven work at? How much force will a user have to exert to turn this handle? How does one construct an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator?
Hence, the common term “research question”. A research question is specific, and defines the purpose of research required to answer it.
The answers to research questions are never simple. Indeed, whole research projects and theses are often based on single research questions.
The output of a research task will be needed at various points in the future (for subsequent tasks; for report writing possibly in a relatively distant future) so it's vital to document you research. This includes not only the questions that drove the research and the answers you developed, but also the justification for the research question’s significance, the methods by which the research was done and conclusions were drawn, and the sources where the information was found.
In designing, any task that leads to questions is a natural predecessor of a research activity. These tasks include, for instance, studying Design Briefs and determining Requirements.
The results of research tasks feed forward to subsequent tasks that cannot be executed until questions raised pre-research have been answered. In design, examples of these post-research activities include documenting product strategy and ideating embodiments.
To do research effectively and efficiently, you need to identify, as specifically as possible, the questions that the research will answer.
In design, Design Issues are a common way of specifying research questions implicitly. That is, for a design issue X, the corresponding research question is How do we resolve issue X?
A good research question will be specific to the project, and quite precise regarding what is unknown. For instance, a research question like How much weight can our users lift? is insufficiently precise, because the user’s posture and grip will significantly affect the lifting force a person can exert. It is also insufficiently specific because the general characteristics of those users (e.g., age) are not specified. To further clarify this research question, we might need to also answer questions like:
How old are our users?What levels of physical capability ought we expect of our users?Where is the grip located that the user must grasp, relative to the user's natural posture and location?Research questions must be grounded in justified rationales. For instance, research questions about climate are probably irrelevant to the design of a stapler, but very relevant to the design of gardening tools.
It makes sense to divide those questions among all the members of your design team, grouping related questions together for convenience. That way, you speed up the research process by parallelizing it. Also, you reduce the possibility of duplicating the specific research tasks and thus minimize wasted effort.
Not all your research questions will be new ones; some will be questions the answers to which are readily available. You can therefore either research existing answers, or develop your own answers.