Action research in practice
Year: 2013
Editor: Udo Lindemann, Srinivasan V, Yong Se Kim, Sang Won Lee, John Clarkson, Gaetano Cascini
Author: Farel, Romain
Series: ICED
Institution: Ecole Centrale Paris, France
Page(s): 063-072
ISBN: 978-1-904670-45-2
ISSN: 2220-4334
Abstract
Action research might be one of the best strategies to undertake a PhD research on design. This method has been increasingly promoted recently within the design community in different fields such as human behavior, communication, new product development, etc. However, few researchers tempted to put themselves in the loop for exploring the design process. This paper provides a descriptive account of action research employed for studying the design process of user-centered new product development during a PhD research, and summarizes our main observations and return on experiment: 1) There are two distinct patterns for design and research in practice, 2) Transaction paths among action research steps are non negligible and need formalization, 3) Analysis should be added to the main steps, to take input from observation and to provide results for the reflection.
Keywords: Action research, modeling, design practice, innovation