Dragan Babic argues that designers often overvalue and overdo upfront "Design Research" with a capital R, especially for projects involving common design patterns and interactions. He suggests this excessive upfront research is unnecessary in most cases and designers should rely more on existing knowledge, documentation, and proven design patterns instead of always insisting on extensive discovery phases before any design work can begin.

Key points:

• Designers often insist on doing too much upfront "Design Research" before actual design work

• Most design projects deal with well-known design patterns that don't require extensive new research

• Upfront research should only be done when working on truly novel problems with no existing knowledge to leverage

• Designers should make better use of existing design patterns, documentation and knowledge transfer instead of reinventing the wheel

• The design community has become overly process-oriented and formulaic in their approaches