Design research
At UCHD we’re not just designing better healthcare. We’re doing design research as well. What do we mean by ‘design research’? We think of this term in three ways:
- Research as part of design: this means thinking about and understanding the people or the situation that a design project is concerned with.
- Research about design: this means looking at the actual process of design – what designers do, how they work and why, and how the process might be improved.
- Designing as research: this is when new insights and discoveries are uncovered because we have engaged in a design process. This type of research uses designing itself as the research method and it often leads to innovations that would have been difficult to get any other way.
We’re interested in design research because it can give us a better understanding of the work that we and others do to improve the way the NHS operates.
