This paper deals with the complexity of doing research in design practice. More and more projects and papers appear dealing with this topic and the time has come to draw up the balance sheet. This paper starts with explaining the status of design research until now, in which we indicate the challenges to overcome to become a mature research field. We discuss nine issues which are - according to our experience - important to overcome. Within each issue we indicate the problem that we encounter (or have seen being encountered) while executing design research in practice. For each problem we propose a solution that fit both to the quality standards and methodology of scientific research and to the quality standards required in daily design practice.
Academic design research often fails to contribute to design practice. This dissertation explores how design research collaborations can provide knowledge that design professionals will use in practice. The research shows that design professionals are not addressed as an important audience between the many audiences of collaborative research projects. The research provides insight in the learning process by design professionals in design research collaborations and it identifies opportunities for even more learning. It shows that design professionals can learn about more than designing, but also about application domains or project organization.
The following guidelines address issues related specifically to sign language tests and testing of children since most of the existing guidelines focus on tests for adult learners. Links are provided to existing guidelines for test development, such as from the International Testing Commission (ITC), or the European Association of Language Testing and Assessment (EALTA), which include more general, construct-independent issues on (language) tests to provide additional/in-depth information. The guidelines stated here serve as a point of reference to develop, evaluate, and use tests, both for children or adult learners of a sign language. To investigate specific topics more in-depth, we recommend using existing guidelines (see Additional resources and guidelines for (language) test development) or refer to publications on sign language test development and adaptation (see Selected references
