In the Understanding the Problem, the clearest feeling comes from the relationship between the researcher and the participant. Those reminders about not hinting at answers and not finishing people’s sentences make me think of research as a slow, patient process. You don’t get meaningful results by asking a few quick questions. You have to wait for the other person to reveal their habits, frustrations, and preferences in their own way.

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Reading Research in Art and Design feels completely different. He keeps talking about “understanding through making,” and it immediately reminds me of those moments when things only make sense while I’m actually doing them. It isn’t about writing down ideas or building a theory first. It’s the act of making, testing, failing, and adjusting that slowly shapes the direction.

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While reading Lab, Field, and Showroom, my attention stayed on the act of “making.” Turning an idea into something that can exist in the real world. Words and theories matter, but what is emphasized here clearly lies elsewhere — in understanding something by building it.

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What stands out through the chapter is that design research is never a straight line. It feels more like moving back and forth between thinking and making. The debates about research through design, the problems in terminology, the unclear definitions — all of that sits in a strange contrast with the actual cases being described. In theory, people want to define things cleanly, but what truly generates understanding seems to come from prototypes, scenarios, mock-ups, installations, materials, and physical actions.

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Another point made me pause for a long time: the designer’s ability to operate in all those blurry spaces in between. The chapter talks about “between people and things,” about senses, habits, spatial awareness, movement, and all kinds of details that are hard to put into words. While reading this, I felt that so much of design training is actually about noticing these very small but very real signals. They are not as clear as theory, yet they often determine whether a design can be understood and used in the first place.