Design Research Through Practice

4. Lab

Can You Really Study Design in the Laboratory?

Can you study design by bringing it into a laboratory in which it can be subjected to controlled experiments? If the goal is to learn about causality and even produce formulas for understanding design, this is viable, as long as researchers keep in mind methodological issues involved in generalizing from laboratory studies to the real world. In experimental methodology, concepts and prototypes become physical hypotheses that are used as stimuli in experiments. Our example of a successful constructive design research program with an experimental approach comes from Eindhoven, the Netherlands. This research program has created many frameworks for understanding and designing interactive products ...