The increasingly transdisciplinary context of design, where designers collaborate with other disciplinary and domain experts, means there is a growing need to evidence the effectiveness of design methods. We address this need in two ways. First, we propose a ‘chain of evidence’, from motivation to claims, operationalising this in a systematic assessment framework. Second, we systematically review current design method research. Our results reveal that while all links in the chain of evidence are reported across the literature and best practices can be identified, no individual paper either reports all links or consistently achieves best practice. Our framework and results demonstrate the need for standards of evidence in this area, with implications for design method research, development, education, and practice.

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Uncertainty perception plays a key part in innovative product development projects since they have high levels of uncertainty. Consequently, understanding the strategies that teams use to deal with uncertainty can point to key insights for improving project performance. Therefore, it is relevant to investigate this area of uncertainty perception and subsequent activity in product development project teams. In spite of the existing literature on product development and uncertainty, gaps remain in mapping the types of perceived uncertainty in different projects and also understanding of the influence of uncertainty on individual´s activities. We present evidence from a case study of two interconnected projects in a high technology company. The key results were the mapping of several uncertainties that are perceived by the team members in both projects and the activities triggered by different uncertainty types. Key insights from this study are the interconnections between uncertainties, affecting product development activities across projects. Despite taking specific counter actions in the first project, major uncertainties were still inherited by the subsequent project, significantly impacting the project´s early phases activities.This research generates three main contributions in terms of mapping uncertainties and triggered activities. The first is the existing of multiple perceived uncertainties interacting in both project types, which increases the challenges of the projects. The second is the uncertainty sets situations, which have a major role in the project in contrast to the single uncertainties situations, and has significant impact in the product development
projects and their performance, echoing also in the triggered activities. The third is the triggered activities which are different for single uncertainty types situations and uncertainty sets situations. @en