What Does It Mean: “Quality of Design Research”?

ISO 9000:2015 defines the term “quality” as the “degree to which a set of inherent characteristics of an object fulfils requirements”. The same standard also defines basic concepts for the subordinated terms like “inherent characteristics”, “object”, “requirements”, etc. This article asks what all this means for “engineering design research” as one of the major objects in focus of this publication: • How to decompose the object “design research” further? • What are its (inherent) characteristics? • What are the requirements? • Who poses requirements?