Core77

Dan Soltzberg's got a bulls-eye post around Gain's Design Meets Research, where Debbie Millman and Mike Bainbridge provide a tight primer to, well, design and research. But something Dan wrote in his post really resonated with me:

I see research very much as a generative tool as well as an evaluative one, and have started to question whether the concept of a border between research and design is really accurate or productive. At the front end of the design process, research is a way of surfacing opportunities and generating ideas. At later stages, it's a way of refining and validating these ideas as they become concepts and prototypes. In this way, research is a design tool in the same way that drawing is a design tool, except that at the center of the mechanism is the customer/user.

Certainly it's the wise designer who moves back and forth seamlessly between information and iteration, and eliminating the border between the two--even in how we talk about design practice--might be a very good idea indeed.