Research

Research is a key aspect of trying to solve any creative problem, and is usually the best starting point, as well as being helpful for aiding the development and improvement of your ideas. Carrying out research involves extensively investigating something. With creative problems, the main three pathways of research for artists and designers are your target audience, your project theme and existing work (e.g. existing festival posters if your brief is to design and make a festival poster).

I researched the building bugs on the boards
outside New Street Station (Birmingham UK)
for a project about Birmingham's architecture.
This is a form  of primary research.

There are two types of research, primary research and secondary research. Primary research is when you create a collection of information that doesn't currently exist as a collection. This involves collecting data first-hand. It can include experiments, questionnaires, surveys, interviews, tests etc. One advantage of primary research is that it doesn't rely on other peoples interpretations of data, making it more reliable. Also, the results respond to your research needs, rather than secondary research where you have to separate the useful information from the useless information. Depending on what you are researching, you may need information that is up to date, rather than information that is no longer relevant. Despite this, primary research can be very time consuming. If you are carrying out a questionnaire, you first need to write the questions, give them to people and wait for them to give them back, and then interpret the results. Primary research can also be very expensive, like a scientist carrying out an investigation.

Secondary research I carried out, looking at 

existing  magazines .

Secondary research is research that already exists, as it is primary research that somebody else has already carried out. Sources of secondary research include magazines, books, the internet and statistics. Unlike primary research, secondary research is much cheaper because all you need is access to an information source e.g. books and the internet in a library. It can be less time consuming because you don't have to collect the data and interpret it yourself. However, it will take a lot longer for you to divide the information you need from everything else. Also, you never know how reliable your sources are. This is one of the biggest problems with information on the internet. Anyone can make a website and lie about something they don't fully understand, or pass their bias opinion off as fact, so it is very important to check your findings with other sources or your own primary research. Also, you have to be very aware of plagiarism, meaning you need to reference all your sources of information due to copyright laws.

Extensive research is very important for any creative problem. Even though both primary and secondary research has its disadvantages, by using both, you are more likely to overcome these problems. Where one research type has a disadvantage, the other has an advantage to overcome this.