Investigation, Research & Specifications
Why Investigation Comes First
Your design and make project — the non-exam assessment — begins with an Investigate stage before you design or make anything. You must show you understand a real design problem, find out what an end user actually needs, and turn that understanding into a written specification the rest of your project can be judged against. Skipping straight to sketching ideas without this groundwork loses marks, because the reader cannot see where your design decisions came from.
Identifying User Needs & the Design Problem
A contextual challenge sets a broad theme — for example, products for outdoor activities. Your first job is to identify the needs of the end user: the specific person or group who will use your prototype. From this you outline a design problem, a clear statement of what is going wrong or missing, and identify a need for a product that could solve it. A vague problem such as ‘people get cold outside’ is too broad — a stronger design problem names the user, the situation and the specific difficulty they face.
A design problem must name the end user, the situation they are in, and the specific difficulty they face. Vague problems lead to vague specifications and unfocused designs.
Researching Existing Products
Before generating your own ideas, you must investigate existing products that already try to solve similar problems, including work by past and present designers. Analysing an existing product means looking at its form, function, the materials and components used, how it is made, its cost, and how well it meets the client and user requirements. This tells you what already works, what could be improved, and gives you evidence to justify your own specification points.
A student investigating a design problem about carrying school equipment analyses an existing backpack. They note its form (the shape and size of the main compartment), its function (padded straps to spread the load), the materials used (nylon fabric, foam padding) and its approximate retail cost. They also note a weakness — the zip is not waterproof — which becomes evidence for a new specification point in their own project.
Research Strategies
Research should not stop at products. The specification also needs evidence from four other research strategies: market research into what potential users want, often shown as percentages or a graph of survey responses; research into the context in which the prototype will be used, such as where and when it will be carried; research into other possible materials that could be used instead of the obvious choice; and research into any sustainability issues connected to the intended prototype, such as how it could be disposed of or recycled. Each strategy should produce evidence you can point to later, not just a general impression.
The four required research strategies are: market research, research into the context of use, research into alternative materials, and research into sustainability issues.
Writing the Design Brief
Once you understand the problem and have gathered evidence, you write a design brief: a short statement that responds to the contextual challenge and addresses the needs and wants you identified. A design brief is not the same as a specification — it sets out the general aim of the project in a sentence or two, giving the reader a clear idea of what you intend to design and for whom.
Writing a Product Specification
The design brief is then expanded into a full product specification: a list of statements the finished prototype must meet. Each specification point should cover:
- form — the shape, size and appearance of the product
- function — what the product must do
- user requirements — the needs of the end user identified in research
- performance requirements — how well the product must work
- materials and components — what it will be made from
- scale of production — how many will be made
- cost — the budget for materials and manufacture
- sustainability — the environmental impact of materials and disposal
Every point in the specification must be technical, measurable and justified — not just a general aim. ‘The product should be lightweight’ is not measurable. ‘The product must weigh no more than 200 g so it can be carried comfortably by a child’ is technical, measurable and justified, because it gives a number and explains why that number matters, using evidence from your research.
These three command words are not interchangeable. Describe asks you to give an account of the main features of something, without needing reasons. Explain asks for a reason or set of reasons — you must say why something works, not just what it is. Evaluate asks you to weigh up strengths and weaknesses and reach a substantiated judgement; simply describing a product’s features when asked to evaluate it will not access the higher marks.
Setting Evaluation Criteria
The final part of writing a specification is identifying the criteria that will later be used to judge whether your prototype is successful. These criteria come directly from your specification points — if a point states the product must weigh no more than 200 g, then ‘the finished prototype weighs 200 g or less’ becomes a testable criterion you can check against at the Evaluate stage of your project.
Iterative, Not Linear
Investigation, designing, making and evaluating are described in the specification as a sequence, but in practice your project should follow an iterative design process: you test, evaluate and refine your ideas continually, returning to earlier stages when new evidence comes to light. A student might, for example, return to their specification and add a new point after testing a material sample shows it will not perform as expected.