My readings have given me a good first look into design research and its methods. I have been taking a look at books like Donald Schon’s Reflective practitioner, Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered and Peter Downton’s Design Research and many other journals. From these readings I started to put together a draft of reflecting on my own teaching practice and specifically the breakdown of the design process and evaluation that I used in the classroom. Early on it was pretty much agreed upon that I needed to narrow down my topic. I am now focusing on undergraduate (honors) curricula because I see a great gap between the use of research in undergraduate and post graduate education. Also another factor to this research is the how the integration of design research in undergraduate (GD) education will play out in practice.
These have been the preliminary ideas leading up to my submission of candidature a couple of days ago.