Core77

Photos by Tara Mullaney (top) and Junyoung Yang (bottom)

Guest post by Tara Mullaney

Robert Fabricant, Vice President of Creative at Frog Design, opened IIT's two-day Design Research Conference in Chicago this past week with a slide diagramming the peak and collapse of the housing market. At the click of a button, he swiftly compared this slide to one diagramming the recent rise in demand for design researchers. The two were almost identical, with one exception; the market for Design Researchers hasn't crashed, yet. Fabricant goes on to describe this phenomenon as "an ethnography bubble," and he posed this question to the audience; "Where did we go wrong?"

Despite the recent corporate inflation of the need for ethnographic research, Fabricant reminded us that designing based on observations of humans isn't a new way of working. He used Henry Dreyfuss's Designing for People, written in the 1950s, to illustrate his point. Fabricant argued that design research is really just "common sense," and he emphasized that you don't need special training to do it. Indeed, many of the Design Research professionals I talked with at the conference come from diverse backgrounds. They were once mechanical engineers, AIDS researchers, journalists, and actors, not trained ethnographers. What brought them to the field was a strong interest in human behavior and "being good at listening and talking to people." Fabricant explained in simple terms how the "bubble" we are currently experiencing stems directly from the treatment of design research as a commodity instead of an integrated part of the design system. He postulated that as researchers, we are "selling the wrong thing." The user insights we currently find at the end result of design research projects, "have no inherent value, and must be translated into meaningful ideas." Fabricant's call for a "drive to results and outcomes" is one method for revaluing research's role in the design process as well as the market.

Photos by Miguel Cervantes (top) and Junyoung Yang (bottom)

Over the next two days, I heard the call for change repeated throughout the conference's talks and workshops. During a panel discussion moderated by David Armano, Jon Kolko, Associate Creative Director at Frog Design, asserted his opinion that, "Design research insights aren't worth the paper they are written on if they can't be taken forward into action." According to Kolko, companies are increasingly concerned with seeing results, due to the current economic downturn. He often hears, "If we're paying you this much you'd better be making something." His solution for bridging the gap between design research and production is Synthesis, which he defines as "an abductive sensemaking process of manipulating, organizing, pruning and filtering data in the context of a design problem, in an effort to produce information and knowledge." Or put in simpler terms; "Making connections between what we've learned and why the hell that should matter."

Interestingly, many professionals at the conference felt their companies were weakest at Synthesis, and three of the four discussion panelists agreed. This weakness is attributed in part to a lack of effective communication and strategy between design teams. Dan Saffer, founder of Kicker Studio, was the only panelist fully confident in his company's ability to synthesize research into design outcomes. His team's process, which he described as "painful but powerful," consists of concurrent research, design, and engineering. According to Saffer, his mixed teams achieve synthesis because each discipline gets to affect every step in the design process. He conceded that this more iterative, less linear way of working can be frustrating, but maintained that it leads to stronger, provable results.

Photos by Junyoung Yang (top) and Miguel Cervantes (bottom)