Project research expectations
Research expectations can differ between projects. For the Digital Multimedia Design Capstone course, students can select from a variety of media types that correspond to their fields of interest. Research is integral to the design process that you will be using for the capstone project, and therefore, everyone will incorporate appropriate research methods into their production timelines. The importance of conducting research can be summed up by the following:
Research...
- Contextualizes your work within the broader landscape of work;
- Elevates your work to be based on current standards and the latest thinking in the discipline;
- Removes harmful bias as much as possible relying mainly on deductive reasoning strategies. Inductive reasoning is helpful for the telling of personal stories.
- Leads to a credible, unique, and a well designed project.
- Can be conducted via a "method" (methodology is the study of methods, outside the scope of this degree program)
- Drives your design decisions based on credible ideas, facts, and data — communicating the rationale of your design decisions;
- Transforms vague problems into understandable problems through exploration and investigation
- Provides a "systems" context and awareness (historical, professional, cultural, social, political, environmental, economic, etc.) to a problem space.
Universal requirements
Research can mean many things in the context of an digital art or design project. Here are some commonalities between capstone projects:
- Projects may include research into the tools, techniques, and methods that may be best suited to completing the project.
- Most projects are visual in nature, and will likely include visual research of some kind.
- When working with sensitive or discipline specific subjects outside of your expertise such as health, social issues, politics, the environment, etc., you will need to rely on credible experts or scholarly publications as your sources for data.
- Cited sources should be from scholarly publications. Google Scholar search engine is a good starting point.
Primary vs secondary research
Primary research is the research that you produce yourself. If you conduct a survey, that is considered primary research. If you reference someone else's survey, then that would be considered secondary research. Conducting research has many ethical and credibility implications, the type of primary research students conduct in this class would mainly be used to direct the design decisions of their own project and would not be publicized as being applicable elsewhere. Those who have go to graduate school and are trained to conduct primary research are the only ones qualified to publish findings to a wider audience, often in peer reviewed publications where the data, findings, and methods can be analyzed and tested by others.
Discipline specific
Choose the research that best suits your project's intended outcomes.
If you are creating products or services, you may do research into existing ones to better understand what has been done and how your project will stand out. You may conduct visual research for interface design, or use a variety of UX research methods to help you as the designer understand how users interact with a product or service without making too many assumptions (bias). This could take the form of a survey, a prototype test, conducting a poll, or other ux research methods that have been developed for this field. These projects will tend to include the most primary research of all project types.
If you are creating a video game, you may need to research certain relevant history, game theory, or various design research related to developing characters and props in your game. The research that you conduct depends of the scope of work and what aspect of the game's design you are emphasizing. This could be story, game play, environment or character design, etc. Each of or combinations of these areas could require research. See this project's research as an example for good game design research. For example, if you are making a project that takes place in 200 B.C. in a particular region of the world, you will need to conduct secondary research to find written or visual information of that period that helps inform the design of your sets, props, and characters. Simply copying other game designs would not constitute you as having completed research as those designs are interpretations rather than sources.
If you are creating a graphic design project, you may start by researching case studies of similar projects (Behance.net is a great place to start), look into the history or context of the subject matter you are designing for, and get a better understanding of client or business goals through a variety of research methods. If you are doing video or photography, perhaps you will do research into other artists, films, or work that you may try to emulate.
If you are designing mostly fiction, you will need to inspire your fictional design from something. All design for the most part can be referenced back to other design work or naturally occurring phenomenon. This is where reference sheets can come in as a visual research method, where you can assemble visuals that help guide the design process. Let's say you are designing a spaceship for a fictional universe, how would you create rules around that that universe might look like? Here is an example with the art director from the Ridley Scott film, Prometheus, discussing the inspiration for the production design.
Not sure where to start? The DMD Art and Design Course Resources offers a good starting point for many project types.