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Act First, Do the Research Later
The design world has become infested with "researchers" - design parasites who have mastered the art of nebulus conversation, yet offer no practical skill or trade with which to build, help or change the world.
As conclusion, Research is a must to help refining design until prototype. Starting research is depending on how much information you have at hand at the time. If you are confident with current result of research, you have a little advantages in solving issues for design. Not enough, you have to confident yourself with doing more research and use the research to refine the design. Start at what stages, end at what stages, it doesn't matter, because the end result is the same: A design of solving project. In case of time and budget, well, we must spend it wisely in anything: Design, Research, Production.... Use those limit as smart as possible.
I suspect that you were referring to a milestone during a lengthy product development effort between the notion of a product and delivering the product to an abundant number of appreciative customer. Often this milestone is coincident with the generation of a documentation artifact that is several pages in length. In the glossary at www.pdma.org/npd_glossary.cfm, this document is called the Product Innovation Charter. The definition includes:
The Product Innovation Charter... "contains the reasons the project has been started, the goals, objectives, guidelines, and boundaries of the project. It is the "who, what, where, when, and why" of the product development project. In the Discovery phase, the charter may contain assumptions about market preferences, customer needs, and sales and profit potential. As the project enters the Development phase, these assumptions are challenged through prototype development and in-market testing. "
When the individuals at the "executive table" have enough information to commission and review a Product Innovation Charter, your five arguments apply.
What happens before that?
In my experience, two of the actives are:
- A small number of individual contributors evolve from a notion about a product to documenting their ideas.
- A small number of executives evaluate all current opportunities (including ideas, investigations, project-in-progress, and project maintenance tasks) to make decisions regarding portfolio management.
Individual contributors and executives do this by asking 'biased' questions.' For example, they might ask an engineer or programmer, "How big of an effort is to do X? How long will that take?" Answers to these questions are combined with other external data to make a "go," "wait," or "no" decision about each product opportunity. Answers to such questions form the project parameters (including budgets, launch dates, and resources)
I have found that this pre-Product-innovation-Charter period or pre-Portfolio-Decision time provides the opportunity for designers (and others) to have a virtual place at what you referred to as the "decision making table."
Imagine what would happen when a properly prepared designer was questioned prior to the step of formalizing a Product Innovation Charter or before a Portfolio Planning meeting. Instead of providing a context-dependent answer to a biased question, the designer would insist on a dialog to explore the solution space.
To the first point, what case studies are there to prove this point? And how common are the successful projects compared to the number that fail because they miss the target?
I agree with your article. But how do you reconcile this with what you have written elsewhere, about the naivety of designers, who go into an area without appropriate background knowledge?
One other thing, about some differences between the design profession, and the sciences, perhaps. I've been fortunate enough to begin my career as an electronic media artist/designer, but now am completing my PhD at the intersection of Informatics and Cognitive Science. I was well aware of the dangers of "design fixation" going into the PhD (though I didn't use that word to describe it at the time) and started developing my own ideas without the "proper" background knowledge.
Then I compared my own ideas to the existing literature, after my ideas had solidified a bit. I don't think that I would have come up with my current theories, if I had started with a "proper" understanding of my area, because I would have been fixated on what came before. Recently, I've realized that I was probably unwittingly using a trick that I must have picked up from designing. As I said to by adviser (who is from the sciences): "I will never get this naivety back, and so I need to run with it while I can!"
In a nutshell, when designing, I always come up with several solutions before I look at prior work in the area. I think that the same concept works in science, as well. This isn't so easy in a PhD program, though. But my dissertation -should- have all of the necessary parts. They are just coming together in an "incorrect" order!
Sounds good. Let's just remember that this is not a new field of design--even though it may be new to some designers. It already has a name: problem solving based on experience is called "engineering".
Curious to see what name people will find for it, when popularizing it as a new approach to design...
http://wp.me/pkQcg-xe .
An important part of XP is working in pairs for the implementation - the actual typing of code - to provide what I used to refer to as the 'cardboard programmer' that spots the missing ; and the mistyped name and the missed opportunity to factor things better. In the ID world I suspect a similar protocol would have a lot of value, a sort of continuous incremental critique. An excellent learning tool for less experienced designers as well.
That aside, the key decider is the quality of the people/professionals. If you have experienced people who keep up to date with what's going on, yes you can get away with no research. Otherwise, research is pretty vital to reduce wasting time redoing mistakes that were solved ages ago.
Yes!
Where are the articles about how a designer cut tooling costs in half or reduced the assembly from 30 parts to 20? Where are the articles about specific examples where a designer preserved his design intent by working with engineers and manufacturing engineers who told them NO it can't be done but found a compromise that turned out better in the end and could be done? To me, that is so much more valuable than a neat-o concept, slick park bench that is made from exotic materials and cost 7K to fabricate one, or a green initiative that doubles the cost of a product or gives it inferior packaging that kills sales in the end.
This article, to me, reaffirms the notion that design is, or should be, a lifestyle. Collective experience (work+life) and inherent creative talent should allow a designer to hit the ground running in a manner of speaking. I'm a strong believer in cross pollination. A designer's interests, tastes, hobbies, experiences, personal and professional projects all contribute information and ideas along the way resulting in a perpetually fertile problem solving foundation.
What is taught in schools and books is like high school physics where everything takes place in a frictionless environment, it's pretty close to reality, it's a complete system and it makes sense but you can't really model real-world behavior with it.
Research (i.e. looking things up, talking to people) is all part of the making process, arming yourself with information to help inform the decisions you make.
"Too much research can inhibit creativity"?
Yes, but so can too little. If you just get told to "make something to open cans" and all you've got to go on is your own experience, then you're going to create, for sure, but creating is not creativity. Design without awareness is masturbatory. It only pleasures yourself.
I'm not keen on this argument - it gets trotted out all the time and it's rubbish. It's like Apple claiming they don't do research. Of course they do. What they don't do is focus group testing outside the company because they happen to be in the fortunate position of designing for people like themselves.
There's no such thing as too much research, just bad conclusions.
To give you an example: I had my students go and play bingo one night. There were various reasons but one of them was I wanted them to understand the power of just being somewhere and looking at it critically. At the way people behaved, at the rules of behaviour, at their own responses, and their friends'.
Afterwards I asked them to use the same methods everywhere - in the bus queue, in the canteen or coffee shop, on a train. I didn't want them to wait for a brief before they did research, I want them to be researching constantly. It should be as natural as breathing.
Re-read this article and replace the word "research" with "breathing" and you see the issue. If we think research is only something we do when you get a brief, we misunderstand research. That is where we go wrong when we teach research. We separate it out.
Or as the article states: "The researchers should always be studying the domain."
That's what I call research too. Experienced designers (what Jeff calls "pragmatic designers" don't just bring design experience, they bring life experience. What we sometimes call "intuition" is just knowing stuff. We often don't need to "do research" because we've spent the last 20 years doing it, and now we're bringing it to bear on a problem.
"Intuitive" design is informed by a lifetime's research.
I like the article but the title's rubbish, and that's what's going to be quoted at me in the future. "Act first, do the research later" suggests that research isn't action, and action isn't research. They're the same.