Design Research for Innovators

When you have an existing product or service then research techniques and methodologies already exist to gather and analyze information about it, to start planning the next version and future improvements. Building up a data collection and then analyzing existing users and systems through market research tools and surveys, as well as focus groups will yield a lot of great data to wade through to help incrementally improve existing designs.

However, if you are starting a new product or service that no one has ever seen before or had the opportunity to use, what methods can you use in this situation? There is not always something to test against and people cannot have accurate opinions about something they have never seen or used. Jane Fulton Suri chief creative officer at IDEO, suggests in her article about design research, that innovation requires a new approach to tackle the unknowns. Design research techniques can help in future thinking of new products and service insights. She explains that innovation is mostly open ended in its requirements and can be very subjective in nature. She suggest that what is required is what she calls "design research" opposed to more traditional research techniques, that still uses the analysis of objective evidence as before, but the research is enhanced with extra exploration due to the lack of applicable data. These include:

Synthesizing of evidence,

Exploration of analogies and extreme cases,

Recognition of emergent patterns,

Empathetic connection to people's motivations and behavior,

Intuitive interpretation of information with impressions from multiple sources.

These considerations are used to expose patterns with peoples behaviors and experiences, as well as, explore reactions and responses. The purpose of this research is to extend our knowledge and understanding. These allow the researcher direct efforts to probe and prototype against, which will more likely give key insight on unknowns through hypothesis and experimentation.

Design research's value is in inspiring our imaginations and inform our intuitions. Successful design research as Jane suggests requires both a cultural transformation in organizations and perpetuation of those transformations to allow innovation to survive and grow. Design research requires the individual to get out of the office and be where the customer is and see what they see. It is important to get first hand experience out in the field. Design research can be rich and delivers not only facts, but insights into those facts and reasons behind them. She goes onto emphaize that people have needs, motivations, habits and perceptions that all need to be taken into account in new product and service design thinking. Good research should uncover these nuances and allow the experimenter to gauge their ideas against this knowledge.

She summarizes with three different approaches to design research that can address open questions with regards to innovation and how they can be performed and implemented.

Generative Design Research

This is an empathetic exercise, it is descriptive and factual but also speculative and interpretive. We are looking for emergent patterns, challenges and opportunities that can be address with innovation and design thinking. It can be performed by shadowing specific people and observing their behaviors. Having people keep diaries of moods and significant events. It is interactive and contextual and not based on self report or opinions. There is also room for more traditional market research, and trend information searching. The aim is to create a framework for thinking about the domain for innovation.

Evaluative/Formative

Learning feedback loops are useful here, with user input and consumer insight gained from using sketches, telling stories. Producing videos and prototypes can be very valuable here to help demonstrate the issues and try potential solutions. The aim is to tangibly represent an idea, probing and asking questions. It gives a chance to address questions and uncertainty as it occurs. It allows you to check peoples reactions and refine assumptions. Collaborative discovery and creation works well in this research method. Using prototyping techniques such as theater(bodystorming) and paper prototyping.

Predictive

How confidently can we predict success? Looking ahead to estimate the potential of an idea and the future opportunities that maybe be available. This requires more of a business mindset, and is a good skill to acquire, especially for designers. Looking for potential markets and determining viability of ideas. Running live experiments and having labs that run experiments online is good practice.

Are we domesticating ourselves?

Whilst driving through Seattle, I was listening to an interesting broadcast from a local radio station (88.1 KPLU), in which they were discussing an experiment that was still going on in Russia that had been started over 50 years ago. Dmitri Belyeaev, a Russian scientist had setup a breeding project in 1959 to see how the domestication of dogs may have occurred, from Wolves. They went on to describe the experiment and some of the interesting results, of the domestication of Siberian foxes over 50 years. More about the experiment can be read here. I do not necessarily agree with the experiment but, the results are facinating

What is most fascinating to me about this experiment was less that indeed the foxes could be bred to be domesticated and not afraid of people, but I was intrigued by the results of what it had done to the foxes as a result of the domestication. It seems that as a result of the selective breeding of the foxes that exhibited the correct responses to good behavior, that other aspects of their physiology altered too. Their teeth became smaller, their ears were more droopy (less cartilage), their tails less straight and their bones smaller and lighter. It seems that the selective breeding had focused not only the desired character traits but has also funneled certain genetic mutations that altered their appearance and structure. Through the filtering of good behavior and removal of the otherwise necessary aggressive traits that would keep them alive in the wild the foxes had begun to alter to suit their new temperament. So of course this is very interesting, from a scientific stand, and definitely goes along way to explain how Wolves may have become domestic dogs. The next thing the talk moved on to thinking about humans and our own evolution. This was when I started to get interested what was proposed.

The premise was put forward that humans too have through group behavior and social exchange actually evolved themselves and arguably domesticated themselves. The thought is that once we were like apes in small groups and the strongest mostly survived and a strict hierarchy could be seen. Then as time moved on and we became wanders and probably grew larger groups we had more people fighting for the top spots, soon it was necessary for progress to get along the friendlier males would have more success with females than the fighters and aggressive males. Jump forward a few thousand years and today we see that we are in large groups and in very close proximity and getting along is a very valuable trait to have to survive, aggression will only get you so far. They mentioned how if you placed 100 chimps on a long haul flight across the Atlantic not many would survive they would definitely kill each other, being so close for so long. We however, have learnt to get along and can tolerate such closeness and are generally friendly. Does this mean as the radio show suggests that we have domesticated ourselves into a more passive and friendly animal just like the Siberian Foxes. Certain it is suggested that we have altered genetically in a similar way, we have smaller bones, smaller teeth than our ancestors. The concept of become a domesticated species is interesting to me, not so much that the idea of a "pet" human, but because it shows that as we grow as a society and population that lives in closer and closer proximity, we are having to alter how we react and respond to each other on a daily basis and it seems it would be fair to suggest that we are altering not only our personalities but potentially our physiology as well.

Of course this may all be an interesting parallel and really we of course are far more complex creatures with our ability to rationalize, but none the less it was an interesting radio talk show. As a follow up I discovered there is a book on the subject by Peter J Wilson called interestingly enough "The domestication of the Human Species", it is now waiting in my Amazon wishlist.