The projects’ outputs: the nature and their connection with outcomes and impacts

The chapter presents and illustrates the so-called outputs of the European-funded research projects, defined as results generated within the project’s life span in the form of scientific publications, products, software, services and so on, and aimed at meeting the outcomes and the research impact. More in detail, it explores the design research outputs, identifies, through clustering, their nature, and discusses them through the investigation of thirty-two (32) funded research projects carried out at the Department of Design of Politecnico di Milano in the period between 2014 and 2019. This analysis was performed to answer three main research questions: (i) which are the main typologies of outputs generated by the projects within the Department of Design? (ii) what kind of outputs are directly attributable to the outcomes and impacts, and finally (iii) how the nature of the outputs is somehow related to the nature of design research and to the department expertise? According to APRE – Agency for the Promotion of European Research, there are six categories to group the outputs of the European research projects: (1) publications; (2) prototypes, artifacts, research datasets, and software; (3) patents, innovations, product & services; (4) methods & processes; (5) new companies; (6) exhibitions, performance. The research projects investigated in this chapter are highly diversified. Among the 32, we have one (1) national project, nineteen (19) European projects, and thirteen (13) regional ones. Such multifaced nature of research didn’t allow us to use the codified clusters categorized by APRE, so through a qualitative analysis of the projects, and we used an interpretative clustering able to better represent the granularity of the outputs produced by the Department in the different types of projects. As a result, we obtained six categories namely: analytical output, scientific output, tangible output, instrumental output, educational output, and performative output. The text will define these categories, map the different outputs generated by the projects within the clusters by also presenting them in terms of numbers, and discuss the nature of the outputs connected to the nature of the design research. The primary investigation revealed that the 32 projects mainly generated outputs belonging to co-design and co-creative sessions, educational workshops, and, in general, analytical outputs. The presence of more analytical, performative and educational outputs rather than scientific ones might be twofold: the implementation essence of the European research projects on the one hand and the recurrent skills of the Department of Design on the other.