12.22.2009
hm. need some time to digest this and come back to it again.

Don Norman believes Technology comes first, User Needs Last. What?

Yep. That’s what Donald Norman (of Design of Everyday Things fame) wrote in his latest essay on his blog. You get the gist of his view in this introductory paragraph:

I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs. I reached this conclusion through examination of a range of product innovations, most especially looking at those major conceptual breakthroughs that have had huge impact upon society as well as the more common, mundane small, continual improvements. Call one conceptual breakthrough, the other incremental. Although we would prefer to believe that conceptual breakthroughs occur because of a detailed consideration of human needs, especially fundamental but unspoken hidden needs so beloved by the design research community, the fact is that it simply doesn’t happen.

This essay has set off a furor of blog responses from the design industry, many of which I also share. Some interesting ones include Design Thinking Consultant: Steve Portigal and Creative Director at Frog Design: Adam Richardson.

I don’t think Donald’s essay should come as a surprise. The Palm Pilot, iPod or even SMSing (or texting) was not a result of rounds and rounds of consumer research and analysis trying to figure out the next big thing/solution/money maker/brand etc.

Honestly it seems incredible that we finally need to have some kind of academic endorsement, especially from someone as famous as Donald Norman, for this simple fact. Designers have always known that the people they design for are great at explaining what they dislike, but are terrible at describing what they like. If fact it is a key skill of designers and design thinkers to be able to describe why they like something and why a solution works.

It all sounds logical: study people. Discover hidden, unmet needs. Fulfill those needs, and leap ahead of the competition, producing yet another wondrous advance. This is the mantra of the design research community. The research community does a wonderful service. It investigates the way people live. It makes voyeurs of all of us, and the results of their studies provide important titillations to our understanding of human behavior. And it’s fun to do: you get to go to exotic locations, to watch people do intimate acts, and then to come back and tell the world what you have seen, carefully disguising the identity of the “informants.” Oh yes, I know it can also be dull and dreary, exhausting and depressing, and sometimes even dangerous: but even these aspects can serve to embellish the final story.

But the real question is how much all this helps products? Very little. In fact, let me try to be even more provocative: although the deep and rich study of people’s lives is useful for incremental innovation, history shows that this is not how the brilliant, earth-shattering, revolutionary innovations come about.

While I fully agree with Donald, that design research has a huge application in incremental innovation that results in products that optimize rather than breakthrough, I believe he misses that Design Research is informative and predictive, but does not synthesize solutions. The role of synthesizing solutions is where a multidisciplinary team needs to come in.

A team of designers, marketers, business leaders AND researchers. Design Research should never be tasked to provide solutions, no, they apply best in building on a baseline direction or assumption. This direction could be anything; a marketing solution, critical insight, iconic form etc, but in most cases this baseline is technology.

Take for example Wi-Fi. This technology as been farting around for, I dare say, 10 years or more? The benefit of Wi-Fi was not only clear but also downright awesome. We could now do things and not be limited by wires. The problem is that no one sat down and figured out how this technology can be transformed into something that is easy for the consumer to use. In fact technology complicated and hindered the progress as no one could agree on a common platform. This is where Design Research or even Market Research could have come in to help in crafting a very integrated solution.

Assuming and expecting Design Research to be the Pandora’s Box, silos the competence and is frankly so very 90’s. While Design Research does have a creed to uncover untapped user needs, the competence can be so much more with wide ranging applications in many levels of the development process. So yes, Mr. Norman, while Design Research did not come up with a lot of the innovation technologies we have today like the internet or cellphones, without the input of Design Research, these technologies will likely just be brain farts in the minds of scientists or technologists that will benefit no one.

So yes, Technology first, but if you put needs last or if technology does not collaborate or “handshake” with consumer needs, what is the point of being first?

Source: http://www.designsojourn.com/don-norman-believes-technology-comes-first-user-needs-last-what/

exited: 01:50
12.18.2009
cataloging a thought
gaming devices, mobile devices, computers, laptops...
the internet, web-based applications, computer programs...
leads to a growing importance of product features, such as the user interface.

the product form gradually becomes a vessel for experiences.
when the tangibility of our possessions fail to appeal,
materialism may no longer be as literal as before.
what happens next then?

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exited: 12:04
12.15.2009
post-exam.
The business use—the specific goal that motivated the client or sponsor to initially fund the work—often fades away, sometimes quickly,” he says. “In some ways, you might argue that aesthetic value—for an enduring design, at least—is the only lasting value, since over time functional needs can change and business moves on to the next goal.” Approaching heresy at a time when aesthetic quality is the last thing we are supposed to consider, Bierut goes so far as to modestly propose that “just making something look nicer” or “replacing something ugly with something not so ugly” is an admirable goal for designers.

That probably sounds woefully simplistic to design thinkers. Where is the system? Where are the charts and diagrams, the Capitalized Concepts, the new ways of thinking uniquely suited to market conditions now? To understand why it isn’t at all simple, to appreciate how hard it is to create something special, of lasting quality, you need to know a little about design.

The problem that designers face now is the same problem they have faced all along: how to communicate with clients who lack a basic grounding in the visual arts and don’t seem to think it matters. Businesspeople don’t need to become designers. They need to learn that there are types of awareness and understanding expressed through visual form that even a team of the finest poets would be hard-pressed to summarize as a list of handy PowerPoint bullets. Music, dance, and the visual arts operate on a different plane from words. As Dori Tunstall, design teacher and anthropologist, says: “There is an inherent intelligence to beauty, which is about the depth and passion we feel for the world.” Design thinkers like to wax lyrical about the elegance of their strategic thinking as a form of design in its own right, as though this could ever be a substitute. They can keep it— in 2108, if there are museums then, no one will queue to see a strategy. Give me something tangible, something brilliant and extraordinary that illuminates our perception of what human life can be. For that, we still need designers.

Source: http://www.id-mag.com/article/Down-with-Innovation/


my 2cents worth.
durable products are not sustained on pure aesthetic value. think of fashion. some (classic lil black dress) may withstand time, but most that appeal to you now, will someday run out of its appeal. aesthetic value, like functional needs are never lasting. because a person, a community, a society, the world is dynamic and not static.
however, neither can design thinkers afford to put strategy on a pedestal. like all other things, a fine balance is required. a balance which requires someone with foresight to identify. and to once again create a shift in things.

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exited: 12:16