Selena

I am not entirely sure of your question.  However we have considerable experience of building tools to evaluate architectural designs to show the extent to which they use existing research.  This particularly applies to the design of healthcare buildings.  We built a database of about 2000 pieces of research that showed how good design if following certain principles can improve health outcomes in hospitals for example.  This is all well documented in the publicatiosn you will see on my page here.  In particular refernces to ASPECT and AEDET will show you this work.  It is important in not only allowing designers to build on research but also to have freedom of design since it does not specify design solutions but types of issues that need to be addressed to make the design work effectively.  If you want to discuss more then do come back to me.  This is a very big field now.  Good luck.

There are papers in the ACM Creativity and Cognition conference proceedings that tackle the types of evaluation that I think you are describing, as it has a focus on the connections between art, design and technology. See:

http://dl.acm.org/event.cfm?id=RE326

https://cc15.cityofglasgowcollege.ac.uk/

Hope that helps!

The 2Seas Interreg funded 'VIVID' project was often very practically focussed, and centred on design and creative processes. You can contact the project organisers at Breda City Council for more information on [email protected] and read more on http://www.vivideurope.net/.

in the new JM issue, there is a paper on the evaluation of new product design by Homburg et al. Maybe it helps. Otherwise, you might look into the following papers:

Russell (2003): Effort After Meaning and the Hedonic Value of Paintings.

Millis (2001): Making Meaning Brings Pleasure: The Influence of Titles on Aesthetic Experience

Not in any way. There are specific and important knowledge studied the area.

There are many interesting tools. There are a book of design methodology, with interesting articles, Vijay kumar authored, called "101 design methods a structured approach for driving innovation in your organization." Look "design methodology" texts.

Thank you all for your answers and recommendations. I appreciate the diversity of proposed sources, but I understand also that my question was perhaps not formulated precisely enough. 

By evaluation of design outcomes in research projects, I am not referring to design projects. Indeed, my focus is not on good design here, but on something that seems to be a contested topic. 

I understand Bryan R Lawson's critique of Fraser's "Design Research in Architecture" (as found in his review published in Design Studies in January this year) and his concern that its authors try to simply "generate design work that affords multiple interpretations". However, such criticism seems to dismiss the work done in the field of  research through design, a term used by Koskinen, Zimmerman, Forlizzi and more recently Krogh (all relying partially on Christopher Frayling's influential text "Research in art and Design", RCA, 1995). The fine but important difference is that the scope of research through design is not the process of designing - a field that has been comprehensively and exhaustively explored by authors such as Cross, Buchanan, Dorst or Lawson. It has - in my understanding - a more general scope of generating theory that is relevant outside of design practice (or design theory). It is not about studying outstanding designers or designs, but things outside of the immediate design practice - such as the experience of the environment, production of meaning, interaction of human and non-human actants... 

Research in the area of cognition and creativity could indeed bring more clarity to what is at stake when designing with a research question in mind, but the number of papers that discuss this is still very limited. I am looking forward to being convinced of the opposite. 

Hi Selena, 

To add more diversity into the discussion, maybe institutional funders perspective should also be considered on the evaluation of design outcomes in research projects... please check:

[1] T. Hellström (2010) 'Evaluation of artistic research'. Research Evaluation 19 (5): 306-316.

Best regards,

Diogo

http://rev.oxfordjournals.org/content/19/5/306.short

You could consider testing with users, in this article i explain about selecting users,  selecting standards and proposed informal user experience testing. "Measuring Public Value UX-Based on ISO/IEC 25010 Quality Attributes: Case Study on e-Government Website Commercialization and Market Research"