Research questions and design hypotheses

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Design practitioners are increasingly being asked to develop research questions related to their projects and to state design hypotheses associated with the concepts implemented in their designs. Architects, engineers and design professionals are asked to validate design concepts they propose with some form of evidence. Where can it be found?

In the arena of research-informed designs, we have moved beyond “research” as poring over manufacturers’ catalogs, referring to code books and gathering information about the client and their problems or goals. The idea is, of course, to continue doing such traditional searches for relevant and useful information but to differentiate it from turning to published, peer-reviewed research findings as a rigorous means of improving design decisions.

It needn’t be overly complicated. Best practice will serve well for most decisions that must be made. And some decisions will be made for intuitive or aesthetic reasons. Only a small few key design decisions where the stakes are particularly high and relatively little is known should be subjected to a major search. For these relatively few decisions, key design issues must be converted into research questions that are suitable for searching scholarly literature.

If a key design issue is to reduce drug mix errors in a cancer facility, for example, what sort of research questions come to mind? It is possible that some papers have been published on the topic of cancer drug mix errors, but the simple statement of the design issue rarely turns up enough depth of information to be helpful. One strategy to develop research questions is to break down the wording of the original design issue, such as: What is meant by drug mix errors? What kinds of errors are occurring? Where are drugs mixed? What environmental factors are associated with drug mix errors? Who mixes the drugs? How are the drugs delivered? A single statement of a key design issue can lead to a much larger number of researchable questions.

There are research findings that might be relevant and suited to influencing design in almost any area the client considers important. There should be a rich field to investigate, and some of the answers may come from the client’s database instead of peer-reviewed literature.

Creating research-informed design concepts is a matter of interpreting the implications of the findings that have resulted from the research question searches. The findings almost never address the specific design problem, so their application to the problem needs interpretation. The result is a research-informed design concept that can be used in the project.

Design hypotheses predict the expected outcomes. A design hypothesis may not be quite as rigorous as a scientific hypothesis, but it is a description of the expected result from implementing the concept. The predicted outcome can have many forms: improved task performance, user behavior, economic factors or time-related results, to name a few.

Once the outcomes have been predicted in a design hypothesis, there must be a commitment to measure the result to confirm whether the hypothesis was supported or not. A prediction of an outcome tells the practitioner what needs to be measured. It is important to use the appropriately accurate and relevant measure to confirm the result.

Carefully measuring the outcomes and sharing information with the field will lead to better design decisions in the future. 

Research used for this column

The following research articles and publications were used by the author when writing this column. They are recommended to readers seeking further information on the topic:

• R. Cama, Evidence-Based Healthcare Design, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons (2009).
• D.K. Hamilton, “Design and the Researchable Question,” HERD: Health Environments Research & Design Journal, vol. 5, no. 4 (2012): 139-141.
• D.K. Hamilton, “If A Then B, Design Intent and Measurement,” HERD: Health Environments Research & Design Journal, vol. 10, no. 3 (2017): 61-65.
• D.K. Hamilton, “There is Evidence to Support Design, But Rarely Proof.” HERD: Health Environments Research & Design Journal, vol. 11, no. 2 (2018): 189-191.
• D.D. Harris, A. Joseph, F. Becker, D.K. Hamilton, M.M. Shepley and C. Zimring, A Practitioner’s Guide to Evidence-Based Design Journal, Concord, Calif. (2008), The Center for Health Design.

About this column

The HERD Journal is a quarterly peer-reviewed publication created through a partnership between The Center for Health Design and Sage Publications. “Heard from HERD” uses studies published in the journal as a primer to explore different topics in evidence-based design and physical environment research. 

D. Kirk Hamilton, Ph.D., founding co-editor of HERD Journal and Professor Emeritus at Texas A&M University.