I think I'm becoming Daniel. Everytime I see the same flow of thought in a famous person that I myself have been contemplating, or even better, practising, I get somewhat high. Hehe ... in response to a recent controversial argument by Don Norman that design research is useless when it comes to innovation, someone wrote:
Roberto Verganti in Design-driven Innovation outlines three innovation strategies: 1) technology-based; 2) analysis of user’s needs (user-centred design); 3) Design-driven (radical innovation of meaning).
Both Norman and Verganti define user-centred design as an incremental innovation strategy. But what Norman misses is design-driven innovation or innovation of meaning. To achieve design-driven innovation, Verganti argues for the need of interpreters who conduct research into how people give meaning to things. While some in the UXD community would argue this is what they do, Verganti says the problem of UXD is its focus on users instead of people:
"When a company gets close to a user, it sees him changing a light bulb and loses the cognitive and sociocultural context – the fact that he has children, a job, and, most of all, aspirations and dreams.” Refocusing on people and meanings means asking different types of questions, questions like “How can we make a person feel better when she comes home after work at seven at night?” This question led to Metamorfosi, a system that emits a “human” light, a light that made people feel better and socialize better.
To radically innovate meanings, Verganti argues we need to step back and “investigate the evolution of society, economy, culture, art, science, and technology.”
Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean.
Yes, yes, yes, and absolutely. I've always advocated this as a practising design researcher, but many times, the company or even some colleagues don't see this. But true value will show in time.
My original thoughts on the subject on reading DN's piece last Tue:
Hmmm ... while I agree that design research can probably add the most value to product improvement (that means fast innovations), I disagree that it does not play a part at all in radical innovations, or that needs necessarily come last.
I will see design research as 2: the formal (ethno, focus groups, etc) and the informal (when we observe, think, dream and create everyday in our heads possible scenarios of what it might be in future). I think the informal sort of design research is the trigger for technologists and innovators to create, not simply to prove that they can do it.
I also believe that technology and needs run parallel, and when one outruns the other, that's when a product fails because either the technology or the user is not ready for it. So it takes time to realign and product improvement, through rapid innovation driven by design research, kicks in.
Glad to find that Frog's Adam Richardson shared some of the thoughts:
... the reason these ones took off was because someone recognized a user need, and shaped the technologies to address that need, adjusting the form of the technologies as the need evolved. So it was not formal design research, but it certainly was an attentiveness to understanding how the technology would be used, which is a key element of design research.
And I find these points that Adam raised thought-provoking:
The seductiveness of evidence and insight that comes from design research can push inspiration, intuition, hypotheses, hunches and nonlinear thinking to the sidelines. Analysis overwhelms creativity.
Design research can be, and should be, much more than user research. It should include research into technologies, brands, macro trends, retail settings, competitors and comparatives, and a company's own IP and capabilities. I refer to this as multivector research--where we examine multiple vectors of data types simultaneously, and seek insights by finding the patterns across the vectors, not just within a single vector (e.g. user research).
