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Jun 25, 2026

Method Design Studio

The Method Design Studio helps you design a rigorous, reusable methodology for a research project. Rather than trying to encode every methodology natively, it offers a set of discipline templates. Each template carries structured guidance prompts for the parts of a sound method, and you turn one into a per-project Method Protocol that you write once and reuse everywhere.

Open it from any project at Research > Projects > [your project] > Method Studio (URL: /research/projects/{id}/method). Browse the full template gallery at Research > Method Studio > Templates (/research/method/templates).

Discipline templates

The Studio ships with templates covering the common research traditions:

  • Design Science Research
  • Archival / Documentary Method
  • Ethnography
  • Case Study
  • Qualitative (general)
  • Quantitative (general)
  • Mixed Methods
  • Discourse Analysis
  • Historical Method
  • Legal / Policy Analysis
  • Computational / Digital Humanities

Each template lays out the same set of guidance areas, worded for that discipline:

  • Research design
  • Sampling / selection
  • Data sources
  • Instruments
  • Coding / analysis framework
  • Variables / constructs
  • Validity
  • Reliability
  • Ethics
  • Consent
  • Bias control
  • Reproducibility
  • Data management

The guidance is jurisdiction-neutral. Ethics, consent, and data-management prompts speak to general principles - informed consent, lawful basis, retention, anonymisation - and never assume a particular country's regime. Name your jurisdiction in your own answers; your site can layer a market module (such as a GDPR or POPIA module) on top.

Starting a Method Protocol

  1. Open a project and go to Method Studio.
  2. Click New Method Protocol (or Browse templates to compare them).
  3. Choose the discipline template closest to your approach, give the protocol a title (optional - it defaults to the template name), and click Create.
  4. The protocol opens in the editor pre-filled with every guidance area for that template.

Editing the protocol

The editor presents one card per guidance area, each showing the guidance prompt and a free-text box for your answer. Fill in as many or as few as you need. Set the status as the protocol matures:

  • Draft - work in progress.
  • In Review - ready for a supervisor or collaborator to look at.
  • Final - locked in for the project.

Click Save to persist your answers. Statuses come from the Dropdown Manager (taxonomy method_protocol_status), so an administrator can adjust the labels.

Viewing and printing

The View screen shows the finished protocol, area by area, with each guidance prompt above your answer. Use Print for a clean, sidebar-free copy to attach to an ethics application, a grant submission, or a thesis appendix.

Write once, reuse

A Method Protocol is designed to be referenced by other parts of the platform - a thesis methodology chapter, a grant application, or an ethics application can pull the protocol's structured content instead of you re-typing it. The Studio exposes the protocol as clean structured data at /research/projects/{id}/method/{protocolId}/reuse, so once you have written your methodology here you do not have to write it again.