Friday, May 14, 2010

Design Research Conference 2010: Day 1, part 1

Day One of the Design Reference Conference seemed a little disjointed. The majority of the schedule was skewed toward opinion or state of the industry talks by leading personalities with a few case studies and research how-to talks thrown in. Some of these felt more like advertisements for the presenter's design firm than real knowledge-sharing. In retrospect, I could have voted for throwing out some of the presentations in favor of giving more floor time to Don Norman and Rick Robinson.

But I generally collected something useful from each talk. Here's the run-down, in approximate order of presentation, broken into two parts (since there were a lot of presenters).

Don Norman: There are two kinds of innovation, incremental and radical. Design research and designers deal with incremental innovation to improve and find uses for existing technology. No major innovations came from design research. Radical innovation comes from technological inquiry and scientific discovery: ideas first, justification later. Technology --> Applications --> User Needs.

Design research <> new product categories. Design research shifts the market by finding a change in meaning for a product. For example, mechanical watches vs. digital watches. A traditional mechanical watch is equivalent with status, fine jewelery and craftsmanship; that market is small. The arrival of digital technology let the market shift the meaning of a watch to an everyday tool - but you still only needed one. Swatch changed the meaning to fashion creating a market of users who changed watches multiple times a day to match their mood or clothing.

But there is a fundamental (Design) Research - Product gap. Design research does not know how to produce product. Product producers (engineers, marketers) do not engage with/know what to do with design research. What's needed is a new specialization, Translational Engineering, which fills in the gap between the two to complete the communication flow. (Yep, that's what senior business analysts and tech leads/architects are supposed to do for software development projects.) The challenge for design firms is to figure out how to deliver that translational service and, by the way, do it faster and just good enough to keep things moving forward incrementally; it's not necessary to deliver perfection all at once. (Oh, I get it, agile product/service design.)

Gerald Lombardi: Discussed corporate pressure to deliver 80% of the value of ethnographic research for 60% of the cost in one-half the time. To satisfy such demands, you either have to increase workers, increase velocity (longer hours, faster pace), or change the process to de-skill each step. In all cases, wages on average will go down. But this approach implies inevitable failure to the corporation by narrowing the ability of the company to evolve and adapt. (For example, see Trapped in the Net, by Gene Rochlin and Corporate Failure by Design by Jonathan Klein.) The illusion of endless growth historically ends with societies that ultimately destroy their base. Lombardi challenges design firms to figure out how to set expectations so they can take more time and charge more for their work.

Eric Wilmot: argued for the "fail fast" approach to innovation and collaboration (another proponent of agile design). See the TED talk: How kindergartners think like lean start-ups.

He gave some other interesting numbers: 75% of new products fail, 85% of new service firms fail, 80% of corporations believe they are getting it right, 8% of customers agree. 50-90% of learning occurs through direct experience. So design firms and their clients should allow for experiential learnings to disrupt business paradigms.

Case Studies: There were two. Very similar in that each dealt with improving an existing product that aided people with physical disabilities: hearing aids (Ron Pierce) and braillers (Yanz, Patadia, Pulik) . Each presentation followed this pattern: background info about the problem --> we did research --> examples of problems to solve --> final solutions --> happy ending.

I preferred Ron Pierce's talk as it included more direct evidence of the research techniques (video clips of interviewees) and it tied the story to a persuasive concept he called 360 Degree research. By persuasive, I mean you could take this presentation to a prospective client and show them that they have to do user research throughout the product improvement cycle; you can't just do a little fact-finding at the start and then throw a problem over the wall for engineers to fix in one cycle (which happens a lot, at least in software development).

But others preferred the brailler presentation for its slick story flow, a definite feel-good piece that would be effective for fundraising. In hindsight, it would have been very cool if the conference organizers had set up a brailler comparison station at the event so we could play with the before and after machines but at least you can click here to check out the variety of Perkins braillers and see the difference.

Bill Lucas: This was the most fluff piece. I took very few notes. The presentation was a description the types of programs the LUMA Institute is evolving to introduce design research concepts to non-designers. He gave examples of workshops with corporate employees, college students, high-school students and a (his?) toddler at home. The message was that anyone can learn to identify a problem, think of ideas to solve it, and make a rough model of one or more of their ideas.

More about Day 1 to follow...

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