Hasta La Ideas

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pemGuest post by Tara Mullaney./em/p

p”What’s Next?” was the question posed to the speakers at this year’s Design Research Conference held by a href=”http://newbauhaus.id.iit.edu/index.html”IIT’s Institute of Design/a on May 10-12. In its 9th year, the DRC has seen Design Research go from a niche field to being internationally recognized as the leading way to understand people. In response, this year’s organizers, student chairs Raphael D’Amico and Gene Young, focused on the new challenges Design Research faces now that it has become widely accepted.br /
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Kicking off the conference was the ever-insightful and purposefully controversial a href=”http://www.jnd.org”Donald Norman/a. Rekindling the fire he started earlier this year in the Design Research community with his article a href=”http://interactions.acm.org/content/?p=1343″”Technology First, Needs Last: The Research-Product Gulf,”/a Norman challenged the crowd with his assertion that none of the major innovations to drastically alter society were the result of a needs-based approach. Instead, when it comes to revolutionary innovation the “technology comes first, applications second, and needs last.” He argues that fundamentally Design Research does not lead to new product categories, despite the fact that radical innovation is what design companies prefer, what design contests reinforce, and what most consultants love to preach. Norman suggests that the most frequent gains provided by Design Research are incremental changes that fit comfortably into the existing product-delivery cycle. However, if innovation is driven by technology and not needs, what does this mean for human-centered design? /p

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pemDonald Norman (top) and Rick Robinson./em/p

pa href=”http://rickerobinson.com/”Rick Robinson/a, co-founder of Elab (http://www.elab.com/), agreed that considering needs is “entirely beside the point, and an outdated way of thinking.” Quite the loaded statement, Robinson supports this concept by explaining that needs refer to the motivations and drives of one person, and only captures a small piece of a complex and dynamic system. He contends that the field of Design Research has been in a “methodological malaise” for the past twenty years due to its preoccupation with methodology and its search for needs. To become “unstuck” the field needs to embrace openness and uncertainty. Doug Look of a href=”http://usa.autodesk.com/”AutoDesk/a concurred with Robinson in his comment “its time to get over our fascination with methods and tools and focus on ways to influence.” Look suggests one way that Design Research can be influential is by increasing communication and integration between business silos./p

div class=”article_quote””Ethnographic research has become the security blanket of Design Research.” – Rick Robinson/div

pThe next step for Design Research then is to get out of its own way. The methodologies that drive us to find “key insights” are simply bogging us down. According to Tim Brown, CEO of a href=”http://www.ideo.com”IDEO/a, “we should spend a little less time scripting the play and more time building a stage for people to collaborate.” Other conference speakers such as Martha Cotton of a href=”http://www.gravitytank.com”gravitytank/a and Heather Fraser of a href=”http://www.rotmandesignworks.ca/”Rotman DesignWorks/a reiterated the value of collaboration in their talks./pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/events/moving_past_user_needs_reflections_on_iits_2010_design_research_conference__16638.asp”(more…)/a
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