Research for Designers

A Guide to Methods and Practice

Gjoko Muratovski’s Research for Designers provides a structured approach to introducing design students and new researchers to design research. Designers embarking on research have often found it to be challenging to find books that are able to provide them with the necessary advice and guidance for success. This book helps to overcome this challenge by taking the reader through the research process from defining the research problem through to the literature review on to data collection and analysis. With such practical and useful chapters this book should prove to be essential reading in design schools across the world.

With Research for Designers, Gjoko Muratovski has put together a highly valuable resource for designers who want to better understand how to do design research. Designers, but also those who teach designers, will find these resources extraordinary useful.

A brilliantly written and wonderfully comprehensive book on the wide array of research methods available that can, ultimately, help us design a better world. As companies, organizations and even governments turn to designers to solve a wide range of problems, a more evidence-based approach to design will certainly be in design’s future. This book is an invaluable contribution to that effort. Appropriate for students and professional designers alike, Gjoko Muratovski’s Research for Designers should be required reading for anyone creating anything!

In Research for Designers, Gjoko Muratovski provides a comprehensive and insightful guidance to designers on how to find answers to well-articulated design related questions, in a methodical and systematic way. Given that the design field have suffered a lack of well-grounded literature on research methods and research methodology this book is a welcome contribution and fills a gap for everyone that aims to approach the field in a methodologically proper way.

This book is an excellent contribution to the knowing of ‘how’ to do design research – a knowledge critical not only for researchers but for everyone operating in the design field. With Research for Designers, Gjoko Muratovski makes a long-awaited contribution to the professionalization of the design field.

In Research for Designers, Gjoko Muratovski provides a comprehensive and insightful guidance to designers on how to find answers to well-articulated design related questions, in a methodical and systematic way. Given that the design field have suffered a lack of well-grounded literature on research methods and research methodology this book is a welcome contribution and fills a gap for everyone that aims to approach the field in a methodologically proper way.

This book is an excellent contribution to the knowing of ‘how’ to do design research – a knowledge critical not only for researchers but for everyone operating in the design field. With Research for Designers, Gjoko Muratovski makes a long-awaited contribution to the professionalization of the design field.

The need for conducting rigorous knowledge-based inquiry is a central theme of this very timely and relevant book by Gjoko Muratovski. Research for Designers is an extremely valuable ‘how to’ book that arms designers with practical knowledge on how to conduct and communicate research in order to create even greater value from the work that they currently do.

Research for Designers is a highly valuable book for anyone who engages with the design process, regardless of whether they are designers, engineers or business developers. This book introduces research with a strong practical focus, and it lays down the foundations for developing an entire R&D process, even for large-scale, long-term projects – which makes it incredibly useful to both design and business leaders.

Designers aiming to change the world are always in pursuit of new approaches that can help them realize their potential, even if they are already strongly motivated creative people. This search is a driving force that leads them to become deeper thinkers, and this is also what drives them to learn new things. So far, they had to do with basic research in order to understand complex problems, namely looking within the field of design itself, while this book shows them how to find knowledge that lies outside the field. Wonderfully written, each well-structured chapter of the book encourages designers to develop their own knowledge from the ground up.

Muratovski’s clear, methodical coverage of the major approaches to research provides the succinct introduction and on-going practical resource that every undergraduate, graduate, or practicing designer might need to begin contributing, themselves, to the next stage of the field’s development. Armed with the lessons contained in this practical guide, they will not only make further contributions to the marketing bonanza and paradigm shift in corporate leadership already underway, they will help move design from problem finding to problem predicting and also, it seems, teach us much about what it means to be human in a world of ever accelerating technological change.

Research for Designers works well to illuminate for Master’s and Doctoral level students how and why important shifts in design are taking place around the world from ‘product creation’ to ‘process creation’ and from ‘a field of practice’ to a ‘field of thinking and research’. In course development and lecturing on design at universities such as Stanford, St. Petersburg Polytechnic, Borås, Aalto and Tongji, I have until now been searching for good new books of this kind. One down.