| Design research is the act of investigating, through various means, a product or service's potential or existing users and environment. Design research uses a hodgepodge of methods drawn from anthropology, scientific and sociological research, theater, and design itself, among other disciplines. The methods (some of which I'll detail later in this chapter) range from silent observation to lively engagement with subjects in active play, such as role playing and model making. Designers use these research methods to obtain information about the subjects and their environment that the designers otherwise may not know and are thus better able to design for those subjects and environments. It behooves designers to understand the emotional, cultural, and aesthetic context that the product or service will exist in. Only through research can designers find out. Why Bother with Design Research? Interaction designers aren't usually required to do design research. And as noted in Chapter 2, most designers don't; instead, they trust their instincts, knowledge, and experience to create useful, usable, and desirable products and services. In some cases, especially on small projects, this may be the correct approach. But on larger projects in unfamiliar domains, cultures, or subject areas, this approach can be lunacy. Designers usually work on projects outside of their area of expertise (design), which most designers, being curious people, enjoy. (I've personally worked on projects for active stock traders, maintenance workers, teenagers, teachers, physically impaired elderly people, and news junkies, to name a few.) The only way, aside from being an intuitive genius, of understanding these diverse groups and the environments they live and work in is to do research. Meeting even a single user will likely change your perspective on a project. Spending a day observing someone do his or her job will give insights into that job that you would never get otherwise. Most designers will do some sort of research, even if it isn't formalized. Design research helps give designers empathy when designing. An understanding of the users and their environment helps designers avoid inappropriate choices that would frustrate, embarrass, confuse, or otherwise make a situation difficult for users. Brenda Laurel on Design Research 
courtesy of Bill Moggridge Brenda Laurel, Ph.D., is the chair of the Graduate Media Design Program of the Art Center College of Design as well as a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. She has written and edited several seminal interaction design books, including Computers as Theatre, The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, and, most recently, Design Research:Methods and Perspectives. Why is design research important? Perhaps the single most pernicious sort of folly I have seen over nearly thirty years in the computer field is the belief on the part of engineers, designers, and marketing people that they "just know" what will work for their audience. For an extremely observant, experienced designer, this may indeed be true, but such people are exceedingly rare, and those who are most successful have "trained" their intuition by carefully observing and reaching deep understanding of certain kinds of people, cultures, and contexts. For the rest of us, that first "great idea" is usually a shot in the dark. Examining the idea to discover the hypotheses that are implicit in it gives the designer a platform for inquiry that will inform the project. It may also surprise and delight the designer. Full-blown ideas for great, innovative products do not come from research subjects. The designer need not fear that engaging in research means that one is the slave of their findings. Design research includes the careful analysis of findings, turning them this way and that, looking for patterns. At the end of the day, well-designed research findings can spark the imagination of the designer with outcomes that could not have been dreamt of by either the research subjects or even the designer herself. Good design research functions as a spring-board for the designer's creativity and values. You've said that good design needs to understand "deep, roiling currents of our dynamic culture." Is research the best method for divining those currents? Well, "research" is a pretty broad term. Exploration, investigation, looking around, finding out are all synonyms for research. In the business of cultural production, exposure to popular media is essential research. Television, movies, news, games, nonfiction, science fictionall facets of the Spectaclecan provide a great deal of information about the trajectories of change, what people long for and what they fear; what sorts of stories are told and why; how people are likely to greet particular changes in their world. What should designers look for when doing research? The dictionary definition frames research as "scholarly or scientific investigation or inquiry." The first step is to deliberately identify one's own biases and beliefs about the subject of study and to "hang them at the door" so as to avoid self-fulfilling prophecies. One must then frame the research question and carefully identify the audiences, contexts, and research methods that are most likely to yield actionable results. Those last two words are the most important: actionable results. Often, the success of a research program hangs upon how the question is framed. You've said that design needs to be a more "muscular" profession. How can research help in that? Research helps design to become a more muscular profession because knowledge is power. Identifying the deepest needs of our times and carefully examining the complexes of beliefs, practices, attitudes, hopes, and fears that surround them can empower designers to do more than embroider the Spectacle. Muscular design can lift the veil and open new pathways through the challenges that confront us, from the everyday challenge of opening a bottle of medicine with arthritic hands to the global challenge of designing everything for sustainability, increasing delight while decreasing the weight of the human footprint on Earth. |
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