Design Research Through Practice

5. Field

How to Follow Design Through Society

While Lab decontextualizes, another set of successful research practices takes the opposite approach and puts design in the real world. Our example of how design can be used in the real world comes from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where Marcelo and Andrea Júdice created a series of low-tech designs to improve public health in Vila Rosário, an impoverished village in metropolitan Rio de Janeiro. In their work, design is informed and created by going out of the studio and the workshop into the real world. Field studies can be done at every phase of the design process. Concepts and prototypes become things to be followed rather than tested. Researchers observe what happens to design ideas in the real world, ...