June 2010
Insights must incite. If a fantastic insight falls in the forest and no one hears it, is it still valuable?
What Design brings to research to make it more suitable for innovation is not better research methods.
The creative-thinking and rule-breaking of design does little to improve the reliability of research… what it does bring is a new perspective on the problem:
- Seek more interesting users (extreme people with strong ideas and opinions)
- Ask more surprising questions (to learn the unexpected)
- Look between the lines (discover the latent needs that describe opportunity areas)
- Focus on the future (forget describing what is currently happen, predict what logically comes next)
- Focus on what is actionable (forget describing the entire experience, illuminate what has potential)
- Deliver findings in a compelling way (use visuals to make insights more accessible)
- Design the experience of receiving the insights (no more PowerPoint– get your listeners involved)
I have been practicing Design Research for nearly ten years now, in various contexts. And a recent conference hosted by DMI helped me take a critical look at how I can improve my practice.
Roger Martin has contributed foundational work to the conversation of what Design Thinking is and why it is valuable. From his definition I am able to see that Design contributes two distinctly different benefits to problem-solving:
1. A new way of looking at the problem
2. Creative tools for finding solutions
To me, this breaks down into two steps– though for many people these may happen instantaneously. When I think about my own current work, conducting user-centered research to help inform the future of Communications products, I realize that I haven’t been pushing hard enough on the second point. I enjoy the process of developing insights. Insights are compelling and exciting, and it’s rewarding to read between the lines and discover new opportunities. But to fully participate in Design Thinking, I need to deliver insights together with possible solutions.
In my current project, I am not partnered with a Designer to help me find creative solutions. I choose not to look at this as a barrier, but as an opportunity to engage others in my mission to find new solutions. I see now, after listening to a series of Design Thinkers at the “Re-Thinking Design” conference, that I need to turn my glossy presentation of exciting insights into a working session that engages different teams in helping me to shape the final part of my presentation– together we can propose solutions that make the insights more compelling and real.