Research Field Guide

Over the summer of 2016, I was asked by the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) to make a “really good book” to share with Industrial Design Masters students who were beginning their Thesis year. The intention was to have faculty go through the same process as students; to create researched content around a chosen idea and present it in a printed book.

I spent the summer thinking about the design process itself and the steps we take when tasked with a problem, and I did it through my then-4-year-old’s eyes. I let his questions and curiosities drive our experiments as we walked through the steps of a designer. This process allowed him to see and to touch solutions to big questions that were on his mind. Objects offer a concrete way to understand our curiosities and test our assumptions. We faced his fear of bugs and thunder and answered questions about trees and dreams. We set up a safety net to protect baby birds who were falling from an unstable nest. We also designed baseballs out of apples and other materials of his choosing and then tested them for durability and speed. My son is 12 now and he still asks if we can do experiments when he has a question he’s trying to answer.