ABSTRACT
The field of design research is a marketplace of methodological diversity. This chapter outlines two strategies to aid practising researchers in making sense of, and navigating, designers collective methodological plurality. In order to work through particular path out of the mire, they must set aside the researcher’s disciplinary or methodological allegiance, and instead identify his or her purpose in conducting the research. The purpose, to gauge peoples’ emotional responses to the design of products, is pursued by asking respondents to report on their feelings when shown a picture of a product. Specifically, designers must accept it is a reasonable task to ask students to identify and explain their own experiences of being stuck, to take those explanations as possible causes of ‘stuckness’ and to treat their descriptions of stuckness as accounts of the phenomenon of being stuck in a design process.
