Design Research Methodology / Research Proposal
23/08/2021 - 13/09/2021 / Week 1 - Week 4
Ngu Kah Shin / 0347666
Design Research Methodology / B' in Creative Media / Taylor's Design School
Research Proposal
- The systematic and creative investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions.
- Increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of humans, culture and society, and the use of this stock of knowledge to devise new applications
- Research is the pursuit of knowledge
- Self-directed work in which students from all areas of study work individually or as part of a team to explore issues of interest
- Students and faculty mentors work together to design and implement a research, scholarly, or creative project and then communicate the results to others.
- Expands understanding and knowledge of your academic field.
- Defines your academic, career, and personal interests
- Establish valuable connections with faculty
- Gain academic experiences that help expand your resume, such as presenting at research conferences, publishing, and working with a research team
- Develop critical thinking, leadership, time management, and communication skills
- explore research techniques.
- Identify your field of interest. You might become curious about more than one topic through your courses, current events, or by reflecting on things that appeal to you. Reading up writings in some current design magazines might help too.
- After you have selected your field of interest/topic, delve into further research about it to establish an area (research problem) where you are interested to conduct research.
- Write a bit more extensively about the research problem in the form of a statement.
- Formulate a research question that is derived from the research problem.
- Identify research objective(s) that you would like to achieve from conducting this research,
- A concise description of an issue to be addressed or a condition to be improved upon.
- Identifies the gap between the current (problem) state and desired (goal) state of a process or product
- Paves the way for the reader to understand the research problem.
- Answerable inquiry into a specific concern or issue. It is the initial step in a research project
- The ‘initial step’ means after you have established the research problem in the form of a statement, the research question is the first active step in the research project.
- A research question is the ground of the foundation of your research. It is what everything in a research project is built on. Without a question, you can't have a research and discussion
- If your foundation is built on something shifty, like a house built on sand, then everything following that will be about correcting that initial issue instead of making an awesome research project.
- Basic process:
- 1. Specify your specific concern or issue
- 2. Decide what you want to know about the specific concern or issue
- 3. Turn what you want to know and the specific concern into a question
- 4. Ensure that the question is answerable
- 5. Check to make sure the question is not too broad or too narroW
- What we expect to achieve in a project.
- It May be linked with a hypothesis or used as a statement of purpose in a study that does not have a hypothesis
- Even if the nature of the research has not been clear to the layperson from the hypotheses, s/he should be able to understand the research from the objectives
- A statement of research objectives can serve to guide the activities of the research
- A tentative statement about the relationship between two or more variables. It is a specific, testable prediction about what you expect to happen in a study
- A hypothesis does not have to be correct. While the hypothesis predicts what the researchers expect to see, the goal of the research is to determine whether this guess is right or wrong.
- When conducting an experiment, researchers might explore a number of factors to determine which ones might contribute to the ultimate outcome.
- In many cases, researchers may find that the results of an experiment do not support the original hypothesis.
- When writing up these results, the researchers might suggest other options that should be explored in future studies.
- Frame in systematic creative terms
- Take the question in a few limited axes
- Write in systematic creative language
- Make use of no more than one verb for each
- Sort as primary and secondary
- Be clear about the type of question
- Descriptive questions (Measuring a quantity)
- Analytical/experimental questions (Testing a hypothesis)
- Use the verb “Estimate”
- E.g. Estimate the increase of business account in Instagram
- E.g. Estimate the increase of the unimaginative game being developed
- E.g. Estimate the increase of A.I. usage in the graphic world
- Use the verb “Determine”
- E.g. To determine whether Instagram is no longer serve the main purpose as creative expression and exploration
- E.g. To determine the popularity of the magical and unimaginative games rather than the reality e.g. Valorant and CSGO
- E.g. To determine whether A.I. can replace the creativity and conceptual thinking of the designer
For this assignment, we were required to read up some research articles and find topics that piqued our interests. After going through stacks and mountains of research articles, I finally stumbled upon the topic “Nudge Theory”. I realized I personally refer to psychological topics that can be observed in a daily setting. We were required to draft up a research topic, research problem, objectives, and questions, which will all point us to a clear direction where we will pursue our research. After reading so many articles, I realized how formal all the papers are written which was out of my comfort zone as I have never written such a formal piece of work. I also learned about all the rules towards writing a good research paper which include the citation, references, and writing format, which admittedly, I am still not good at.
Interestingly enough, the nudge theory is applied to us on a daily basis without us realizing it. From the hard to ignore sale posters or the tiny notification dots on our phones, we unconsciously change our behaviour due to the nudge theory. It is a concept that suggests positive reinforcement and indirectly influences the cognitive brain, the behavior, and thus the process of decision making. In a digital context, however, it is relatively new and has a lot of potential for future research.
We were told to read up on research articles to find a research topic during week 1 and I have landed myself on the digital nudging field. I was excited to start on this assignment because I was really interested and felt excited to start reading and learning. I later realize how tiresome and time-consuming this module can be. I had a difficult time finalizing my research proposal too due to the broad field as well as being inexperienced.
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