A 10-day course to plan and execute field studies for maritime design processes

Human-centred design processes often include field studies to achieve effective design solutions that support user needs. Despite this, field studies are rarely used in maritime design because they are time consuming and because it is hard to ensure that the field study outcome will have an impact on the design process. One way of overcoming these challenges is to better train designers in how to carry out efficient field studies aligned to the needs of ongoing design processes. We present a 10-day course to plan and execute field studies. The students’ feedback indicates that the students are able to identify key challenges in their field study practice and propose solutions to address them. We conclude with propositions for how to improve the course and suggest to open it to a wide audience of designers and engineers with little or no experience with field studies.