Discovery and Evaluation of Design Methods in Practice: an Empirical Study

Web platforms and literature on design methods allow users to search for existing methods based on the method’s name and stage of use. Little support is provided to assess whether a method is appropriate for the task at hand and the context where the method will be applied. In this explorative study, patterns in searching, selecting, assessing and exchanging experiences with peers in professional practice were analyzed across a range of disciplines. This work reports on our findings from interviews conducted with practicing engineers and designers. Several similarities in the way practitioners find, select and assess new methods were found and interesting differences were identified for the practices in exchanging experiences with peers. In this work, we present the findings of our interview study along with directions for future work to better understand design processes in professional practice.