A Designer's Research Manual: Succeed in Design by Knowing Your Clients and What They Really Need (Design Field Guide)

AIGA’s Designing Framework divides project development into three categories: defineing the problem, innovating, and generating value.

Information Literacy, a life-long learning strategy, focuses on empowering individuals by instilling the ability to recognize when information is needed and to have the skills to find, evaluate, analyze, and effectively use that information.

Designers can use a broad range of tools for visualization, including computer renderings, models, comps, storyboards and mood boards to visually articulate their concepts.

Visualization is a rapid prototyping tool that designers use to make concepts easily understood.

Visual exploration is a method of primary research most commonly used by designers for solving problems of form and communication.

Psychographics is a quantitative tactic used to measure subjective beliefs, opinions, and interests. In other words, it is a quantitative tool for measuring qualitative information.

Marketing research, in contrast, is a form of sociology that focuses on the understanding of human behavior as it applies to a market-based economy.

Observational research is the systematic process of viewing and recording human behavior and cultural phenomena without questioning, communicating with, or interacting with the group being studied.

Visual anthropology differs from photo ethnography by placing the camera in the trained hands of the researcher rather than in the untrained hands of a subject.