The Supervision at the Early Stage of Conducting Design Research

Design researchers usually have a background in the design field, e.g. designers. “Designer” is a profession that seems to possess individuality as the most dominant nature. However, when a designer changes his/her role to be a design researcher or design research student, individuality cannot be utilised as efficiently as before because he/she lacks of experience as a researcher; as a result, he/she does not know what he/she should do in order to perform design research. The proper supervision of a like-minded supervisor is vital, especially in the beginning of conducting research (or even before that, when a designer is interested in pursuing his/her further studies in Doctoral degree). Moreover, supervision tends to be more valuable if the interest and background of a supervisor is similar to those of a doctoral design student under his/her supervision. To have two supervisors (for example, one supervisor may be a scholar who specialises in the same field as the doctoral student and has deep knowledge in the domain in which the doctoral student is investigating; and the other one can be an academic who has broad knowledge in philosophical thinking) may be a superior solution that is rather beneficial for the doctoral student in obtaining a broad perspective as well as profound insight. The lack of proper supervision will make the novice researcher becoming confused and/or disoriented, and may prevent him/her from being capable of using his/her full potential.

Suggested Citation: Nimkulrat, N. (2005) The Supervision at the Early Stage of Conducting Design Research. Idadedaimagem, 3, 70-73.