I had my first proper meeting with the PhD project team today. Over around 2 hours we discussed the background of the project and what it intended to achieve.
Design in Action is a national project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and there are partners in a number of universities around Scotland. I think one of the most attractive things about this PhD in particular is that it comes with this ready made research community. Each partner university (including Edinburgh University, RGU & Dundee Uni among others) hosts 2 PhD students – one covering the same broad research question as me, and the other covering Sarah’s area. I hope that we can organise meet-ups of this community throughout the 3 years and make sure that we’re sharing our work and benefiting from each other’s experience.
My broad research area is ‘promoting innovation in small business through design principles’ and I’m unsure right now what the focus is in there.
It feels like there are 3 key areas:
- Innovation – What is innovation? How to promote innovation, how to create innovation, how to manage innovation
- Business Development – how to improve a small business. What improvements are we aiming for? What metrics will be used to evaluate this improvement?
- Design Principles – What is a solid definition of design? What design principles are we looking to apply? How can design principles be implemented in a variety of situations?
All three of these areas needs to be tied together, and no doubt one will emerge as dominant in my research over the coming 3 years.
To start us off, Louie and Suzy gave us 3 tasks:
- Make a list of conferences and events related to this research area
- Start on a broad literature search, and find one paper which seems to have a great subject area (based on the title and abstract) but doesn’t quite deliver in the bulk of the article, either through bad writing or unclear research).
- Make a first stab at a clear research question
Time to start the search…
So, starting my literature review. Because of the mix of areas, I’m finding it quite hard to work out where to start. Will this be the art and design research sector? Will it be the ‘harvard business review’ hardcore business sector? And innovation… it’s a much more overarching concept which could be associated with either of the two previous areas, along with any other!
During the meeting, the concept that seems to have come up more than any other, though, is small business. The project centres around working with small businesses and improving their practise. They’re key to the sandpit events, so I feel that they would naturally be key to the research too. So, I think I’ll start there are look at how design and innovation have both been used in small business so far. The search will widen from there no doubt, but you have to start somewhere!
Img Credit: Paul_low Flickr
colinmcgray
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