Introduction

It doesn’t take a lot of research to understand that design is a powerful tool in contemporary business thinking. Nor is it difficult to notice that design is increasingly central to an escalating number of parts of everyday life: more kinds of companies in more and more varied sorts of endeavors are using design, design processes, design partners, and design thinking in their work. And because design work has, in most of those applications, taken deep and considered understanding of the people who are going to use, inhabit, or experience what design makes, we tend to think that a broadening portfolio for design is a good thing. To most, it is nearly self-evident that something designed is better than something that is not. Saying that something is ‘well-designed’ is a compliment for anything from a kitchen tool to a strategic plan. We use the term “good design” almost reflexively as evaluation and often, as explanation. When something is tabbed as “good design” (by a magazine or an award from a professional association) we agree or not in the instance; but we accept, usually tacitly, that good design is different from indifferent design or bad design.

Despite all that, we don’t usually think of ‘good’ in its moral or ethical sense, as in “good vs. evil,” as the sum of choices made against choices not made. Positive, thoughtful, or responsible design has included in it not just a final form, but a large number of distinctions understood and choices about those distinctions made in a particular light, with particular reasons for them. A child’s toy, perhaps, can be safe or unsafe, educational or mindless, responsibly made or using the worst but cheapest materials available. It isn’t a toy made to be bad, but in each of the moments where choice matters, the choice made has been, in the current context at least, toward something less than as good as it could have been.

In this paper we’ll argue that this particular sense of ‘good’ in good design matters not only in the end product, but in the way design works in general, in design processes, in design thinking. We’re not arguing for any one moral or ethical position, but simply that we, collectively as a discipline, as a field, have a responsibility to acknowledge the role that values play in the work that we do. By knowing that that articulation needs to be done, and by using it to anchor the forward end of the design process, we do better work; we do good work. And with that, we can speak more clearly to other interests (customers, users, management, investors) about what ‘good design’ means.

Good Design and Design Research
When we take hold of a powerful tool and use it to shape the daily lives of real people, we are laid under an obligation, a responsibility, to understand not only how that shaping could affect those daily lives, but how it should do so. The “good” in “good design” has, in the last twenty years or so, migrated from the relatively simple appreciation of an end-product’s formal properties to include the ways in which a product becomes what it is: the process of designing. In the course of that migration, “users” and “experience” have become central to the way design works, to how the things which it produces are evaluated. Under any number of labels (“user-centered design research”, “ethnographics,” “anthrojournalism” and so on) the (largely) social sciences-derived research which informs the work of design has grown into a small industry of its own. Taken as a whole, design research has resulted in a collective paying of more attention to people rather than less. That’s a ‘good’ in pretty much anyone’s book. But it is also, in practice, a bit like supposing that because an M.D. is doing rounds, looking into patients’ rooms and signing the charts, good medical care is being practiced. If designers have been less than explicit about the values that inform the choices they make, it seems that design research as a whole has been even less so. The most widely accepted ‘point’ of design research is to inform the work of design. To provide a basis from which the work of design, development, and strategy can proceed. It is a bit circular: we do research to inform the process of design, which requires that we understand the users. Circular or not, it would be just fine if what was required to “inform” design were no more than a scan of current conditions. A pH strip dipped in the pool. A thumb licked and held up in the breeze. But the best design work doesn’t need the thumb in the air; good designers or teams or practices are usually plugged in and working at the ragged front end anyway. What we need from research is more than description, and especially, more than a list of “needs,” explicit or implicit, met or unmet. Although description is an essential moment in the work of ethnography, relying solely on description, and the simplified-empirical position that we are only reporting “needs” is a kind of responsibility dodge which lets research work go forward without taking up the side of the implicit bargain that requires us to say why we are interested in knowing what we want to know. The work of design research too easily takes as justification that we are describing only how people behave, or the perennially-popular-ethno-marketing refrain “what they actually do instead of what they say.” We cling to the position that it is not our job to say what anyone ‘should’ do.

But research and design, especially when woven together, are loaded with hundreds of value-laden choices, and with motives (from our embeddings in business) that are impossible to avoid. When we look at the entire arc of design process, including the research work which informs it, we believe that we need to be clear about what we hope the should will be even while we are depicting the could of design possibility. Understanding the role that our own values play, how they intertwine with the understanding and aims of our subjects, is not a hobble on design work, it enriches it.

I’ve argued in earlier papers that in the developmental side of design research, one has to be comfortable with the idea that research does not provide definite answers to particular questions. And that thinking that the work of ethnographic research should ‘answer’ a question has led to the intellectual shortcut of using ‘unmet needs’ as a catch-all substitute for the much harder interpretive work that great design takes off from. (ref. for “Uncertain Answers” paper). In that work, I argued that instead of identifying needs, research should take as its object (following Clifford Geertz) the ‘thick description’ of how experience is organized for the user. And that the work of design can use that description (aka a “framework”) to understand what could be changed through a new product or interaction or experience – whatever kind of design work was on the other end of the research. I still think that’s true, but incomplete. The idea that the rich, descriptive summary of a “framework” is what design practice needs from research is a good one, but in effect, it has only shoved the issue of choice and direction a bit further off, onto the design itself.

For more years than I would like to admit, I used some version of this argument in almost every introductory talk or workshop presentation I gave. And in the not insubstantial portion of those where my friend and colleague Hugh Dubberly was present, he would patiently raise his hand and ask me some form of the question, “I think you mean what it ‘should’ be, not ‘could’ be, don’t you?” After all this time, I’ve finally realized just how right he is: “Could” vs. “should” is a simpler way of framing potential vs. commitment, chance vs. responsibility. And going back to our opening, when you recognize the power of a tool, values, commitment, and responsibility all become what we should do in the work we do. In this paper, we’re going to look at how we need to rethink the descriptive part of design research in light of values, in order to, put simply, do good.


Design & Research, simplified


Let’s start with a simple proposition: the work of design is getting from a set of conditions which exist at the beginning of the process (now), to a future set of conditions which include ‘now’ to ‘next.’ we are researching then, are the conditions under which those choices will lead to a consumer, user, making a choice themselves.


Here’s a better way to think about the point of design research: understanding frameworks, at a dynamic level, not just a snapshot



Slide Show Notes, story flow:
1. Let’s start with a simple proposition: In other words, taking the present set of ‘what is’ conditions and developing what ‘could be.’
2. There is an idealized, pure innovation view of design that more or less ignores the now in order to shout real loud about ‘next’!
3. Set against that, is an (also idealized) research-driven view embedded in market research which pretty simply extrapolates the now to the next.
4. The truth of good design work is somewhere in between,
5. The rise of human-centered design, design research, and ethnography gave us a more nuanced, more complex, understanding of the ‘now’
6. The main point of those approaches the idea that by understanding the individual, social and cultural influences on why people think the way that they do, why they use what they use, why they need what they need (or think that they do), we’ll be better able to design well.
7. Prior to this, the language of ‘good design’ had been largely confined to aspects of the ‘product’ (even if that product was a logo or typeface). Occasionally, we looked at the process. But with the advent of “user-centeredness” emerged the notion of a “framework” as something that could not only be described, but – especially through the work of interaction design – as something that could be designed.
8. “Experience” as an object of design further established the role of something that was personal to the users, but could also be described and altered through the work of design.
9. Design as imagining the ‘what if’ of a users framework.
10. Design research has lacked an object – a thing to be about. Theory is nice, but that’s not what we’re talking about. And “needs” is neither a useful design construct nor reliably ascertainable.
11. There is a parallel between the work of design and the notion of successive approximation in theory building.
12. Summarized in the abstract-concrete by now to next model
13. A nested set of ideas:
Frames (are how people think)
Models are descriptions of the way that the elements interact
Scenarios are articulations of possible changes to the conditions of the model.
14. Definition of ethnography in the design world: description and interpretation, toward an end, within constraints.
15. The implication that if you can make anything, you need to choose what to make, where to intervene, what to target.
16. Choice, and the ability to affect other folks’ choices, means values play an important role.
17. Two lines from here: the dynamic change story and the values story.
18. The dynamic change story: the difference between designing the object, and designing an object, its behavior, its environments, and where it will end up (the ball and the hole slides). Why it is a model, not a snapshot.
19. Borrow from physics the idea of components to understand dynamics, like force, direction, resistance, spin… control (add or remove)
20. How designing those control the ‘metaphorical’ trajectory
21. The values story -- what sustainable, environmental issues, and design for social impact have done to change the landscape – what Knorr-Cetina calls the ‘fictional symbolic’ the set of things we all come to use, to agree to.
22. Lakoff on republicans. IHI ‘preventable deaths’
23. Redraw the original picture of frameworks with values as the ‘forward anchor’ of the design process – not form.
24. The bigger goal of design work is to clearly understand the values (as both initial condition and as endpoint), the ‘signposts’ (from the World Wildlife Fund paper) and the ‘choice architecture’ involved in getting from the current set of forces to a new frame, experience, and stuff.
25. We do this using a profound and empathic understanding of experience, design is like judo, working with forces to redirect them towards something.
26. Solving for both ends: A context in the future. Has four parts
the initial conditions
the endpoint
the signposts
and the frame architecture. Expand and example for each of these terms. What they provide is a new laundry list of what you can understand and what you can change
27. Good Work comes out of trying to do good within various frames of reference: cultural, social, domain, field…. Not an absolute. But you need to understand the levels.
28. The positive notion of subversion from Marcuse
29. What’s the right word for this values-based, systemically-scaled, experience-frame design? Not sure.
30. Examples (pos + neg): Segway, Hybrid Escalade, IHI