MYP Design Secondary Research Methods Notes

Secondary Research Is Everyone Else's Homework

1. Secondary research is information somebody else gathered, wrote up and published, which you then find, judge and use.
2. It is far quicker than collecting data yourself, and it reaches places you never could, such as how a hinge behaves after 50,000 cycles.
3. It arrives second hand, so somebody already decided what mattered before you saw it.
4. Criterion A wants both kinds, and in most MYP projects the split runs primary for the client and secondary for materials, processes and rules.
5. Point it at questions beginning "how is this normally done", "what is this made of" and "what is this allowed to do".

Where the Good Sources Actually Live

1. Textbooks and library books update slowly but get checked properly, which makes them safe ground for material properties and process descriptions.
2. Manufacturer data sheets give hard numbers for one specific product: thickness, working temperature, strength, price per sheet.
3. Standards set out what a product has to achieve before it can be sold as safe in a given market.
4. Existing product reviews on retail sites tell you what breaks after three months of real use, which no brochure will ever admit.
5. Images and technical drawings show construction details you would otherwise have to guess, such as how two panels are joined.
6. Trade and design websites carry useful case studies, though most of them were written to sell something.

Manufacturer Data Beats Opinion About Materials

1. A data sheet answers what a shop assistant cannot: the temperature acrylic softens at, how far a 3 mm sheet flexes, which adhesive actually bonds it.
2. Acrylic bends cleanly on a strip heater at roughly 160 degrees Celsius, which is also why a hot glue gun leaves a mark on it.
3. Plywood is sold in real steps of 3, 6, 9, 12 and 18 mm, so a drawing that calls for 5 mm means either special stock or a redraw.
4. Prices taken from a supplier's own site turn a costing table from a guess into a figure, and they come with a date attached.
5. Quote the number, the unit and the source together, so "6 mm birch plywood, 2440 by 1220 mm sheet" is usable where "plywood is cheap" is not.
6. Check the sheet describes the exact grade your workshop can actually get, since extruded and cast acrylic behave differently under a laser.

Standards Tell You What Safe Means

1. A standard is a published rule agreed by an industry body, describing what a product must achieve to count as safe or compatible.
2. ISO 216 is the reason every A4 sheet is 210 by 297 mm and A3 is exactly double it, which becomes a hard constraint the moment your product holds paper.
3. EN 71 is the European toy safety standard, and its small parts rules exist because of choking, so anything aimed at under threes inherits them.
4. Standards hand you specification points you could never have invented, plus a reason a moderator can go and check.
5. Nobody expects an MYP student to buy standards documents, so a summary from the issuing body, cited properly, is enough.

Judge a Source Before You Quote It

1. Ask who wrote it, because a materials supplier, a university department and an anonymous blog carry very different weight.
2. Ask when it was published, since prices, safety rules and anything about digital products go stale inside two or three years.
3. Ask why it exists, because a page ending in a buy button was written to sell rather than to inform.
4. Ask where it applies, since a safety rule written for the United States may not be the rule where you are building.
5. Check one fact against a second independent source, and if the two disagree, write that down instead of picking the convenient one.
6. Prefer pages that show their own sources, because a claim with no origin cannot be checked by anybody.
7. Drop anything you cannot attribute to a named person, an organisation or a date.

Images Count as Evidence If You Say Where They Came From

1. A labelled photograph of a competing product explains its construction faster than any paragraph you could write.
2. Exploded diagrams and patent drawings show how parts join, which is usually the hard part of your own design.
3. Annotate every image with what you want the reader to notice, since an unannotated picture is decoration taking up space.
4. Give each one a figure number and a source line directly underneath it.
5. Screenshots of a retail listing are good evidence of price and size, so capture the date in the same image.

Build the Bibliography as You Go

1. A bibliography is the list of every source you used, sitting at the end of the design folder.
2. Record author, title, publisher or website name, year of publication, and the date you accessed it for anything online.
3. Pick one referencing style and hold it across the whole folder, since consistency matters more than which style you chose.
4. Cite inside the body too, so a claim on page four points clearly at entry seven in the list.
5. The bibliography protects you as well, because it shows plainly which ideas are borrowed and which are yours.
6. Sources you found and rejected can go in with one line saying why, which reads as judgement rather than as wasted time.