Hasta La Ideas

Luke Williams addresses Prediction vs. Provocation.
Reporting and Images by Ciara Taylor

The speakers at the Design Research Conference, held in Chicago recently, explored a variety of topics relevant to design researchers. An underlying theme of their presentations, relevant to design professionals in general, was change. More specifically, the designer or design researcher’s roles and responsibilities in the process of enacting change, and the resources they can utilize to advocate change in their organizations. Key talks highlighting these themes were given by Luke Williams, Todd Cherkasky, Ilya Prokopoff, and Peter Mortensen and Joyce Chen.

Luke Williams, a Fellow at frog design, gave a talk surrounding Reflections from the World of Consulting: Techniques for Inspiring Change. Williams challenged designers and design researchers to be agents of disruptive change in their organizations. He began with an illustrative example contrasting prediction with provocation, interposing an image of “the happiest guy on the Internet”, according to Williams, with an image of Marion Crane, the protagonist from Psycho. Williams uses these images to show attendees what the client’s reaction should be when designers introduce disruptive change. He reminds the audience that it is the designer’s responsibility to provoke. It’s the designer’s role to discover insight and areas of opportunity for their clients. In service of this responsibility, he gave attendees a five- stage process for disruptive thinking: craft a disruptive hypothesis, uncover a disruptive market opportunity, ideate, shape a solution and make a pitch.

While Williams spoke about the role of the designer or design researcher, other speakers touched on their responsibilities. In his talk, Tactics for Collaboration in the Age of Analytics, Todd Cherkasky, Global Lead of Research and Insights at SapientNitro, suggests that designers and design researchers have a responsibility to educate. He presented four tactics to consider: talk about the services we provide as designer, not the methods we use; use tools that encourage collaboration across disciplines; build an asset library; and audit your organization’s ability to deliver a cohesive customer experience. To elaborate on a few of these tactics, Cherkasky suggests reframing the way designers talk about their work by being specific about the services they provide versus the methods used, such as field studies, research photography, and user interviews. He recommends creating a journey or opportunity map as tools that can be consistently understood across disciplines. He also stresses that a designer’s asset library should consist of patterns and user insight.

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