At the beginning of each year I (try to) set my agenda for the next 12 months? This year I threw all my RSS feeds away and started to rebuild them so they reflected present, not past, priorities. I guess I eventually end up with 50% of previous links and the other half are new finds! So I have just refound some links "from the past" that have made me think allowed! Risk is, in my experience, the topic that erects most barriers to the progress of innovative ideas. Often we do not realise it is Risk aversion that is the root cause. Having just written a piece on the design journey I was intrigued to resubscribe to Niblettes and be RSS'd this piece on design research "Where does research belong?" In my experience people who believe research is in a different silo to design don't innovate much. These people seem to believe you find out a customer requirement and design "it" (the solution), or design "it" and test out the solution to confirm a successful outcome. In fact my all experience in a variety of industries points me in the direction of believing that the best customer/consumer/user research is a dialogue. A dialogue that takes place all the way along the Design Journey. It should be a dialogue around rapid prototypes that drives us to successful outcomes. this does not mean that there is a need for expensive research at every stage... viability and risk drive big budgets; validity and success are driven by small conversations.
If we follow this drift then research becomes reaction to the prototype and is a natural consequence of design iteration. It may not be separate but that does not mean skilled researchers should not be involved; if they are they bring depth of knowledge to mix with everyone else's in Design Space then the outcome can be stunningly positive... after all much innovative thinking comes from connecting what we know in different ways to create thing we didn't know!
Don Norman suggests "So let’s separate the field and observational studies, the conceptual design work, and the needs analyses from the actual product project. We need to discover what users need before the project starts, for once started, the direction has already been determined. " which means that the sort of project we are doing is not very innovative (see "What sort of project is it?" ).
One way out of the dilemma is to do upfront research in parallel with initial design and before long we get into rapid iteration which affects the next iteration and so on... my experience is we can trade-off design time for dialogue and it does not change the overall budget just the way it gets spent. It depends on how much curiosity we can get away with......
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