IIT Design Research Conference 2009: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger Future

Co-authored by Kevin Wong

A couple weeks ago, Ken and Rob packed their Speedos and traveled to South Beach to attend the IDSA International Conference. This past week, Kevin and I packed our appetites for fatty food and traveled to the almost as sexy Chicago to attend the Design Research Conference hosted by the IIT Institute of Design at the beautiful new building of the Spertus Institute.

If we had to attempt to reduce the entire two-day conference into one sentence, we’d summarize the DRC this way:

To remain relevant and to overcome commoditization, design researchers in the future must learn to influence organizations and their intentions using emotionally charged story telling with diagrams to reveal deeper insights through measurable testing using prototypes on an ongoing basis with real, breathing, feeling humans to create new ideas that solve real problems.

Whew. Now for the details.

Major themes

Changing Role of Design and Design Researchers

If anything stood out the most to us, coming from our technophilic enclave in the Pacific Northwest, it was the focus – for the most part – on people. Understanding different types of people, telling their stories, and making a difference in their lives. This isn’t limited solely to the end-users of the products/solutions that we design; in addition, we need to understand the people (clients) whom we are working with or for.

One of the biggest themes at DRC09 – in speaker presentations, the panel discussion, and in the workshop we attended – was around the role we must play as designers and design researchers. Specifically, it was the exhortation that we move beyond gaining user understanding and designing solutions to actually changing and influencing the organizations (e.g., our clients) delivering the solutions. In other words…

half of our job is to gain insights into end users’ lives, their needs, aspirations, etc. and then successfully synthesize those insights into viable solutions; the other half is about making organizational impact, by communicating the users’ situation and building alignment and buy-in from the organization, in order to catalyze and mobilize action.

Marc Rettig, principal of Fit Associates, talked about this as a journey of change, one that is both personal and collective, and deeply emotional. Kim Goodwin of Cooper advocated the value of storytelling, both as a way to extract rich information from end users during ethnographic studies and as a tool for communicating in a compelling and visceral way those insights from the field back to the organization and the interdisciplinary design team.

Sometimes the client organizations will be slow or stubborn to change. Our job in making this impact and influencing organizational alignment may require us to “go slow to go fast,” as Ben Jacobsen of Conifer Research nicely put it.

The Outlook for Design Research is Good (and Bad)

Another theme was the outlook for design research, both in a world currently in an economic downturn and a world of rapid commoditization. Robert Fabricant and Jon Kolko of frog design presented complementary talks where they outlined some things we can do to remain relevant. Fabricant began his talk by outlining the explosive growth in spending on design research and ethnography services in the economy, with the sudden acceleration in the curve occurring around the same time that Nokia’s Jan Chipchase began his famous design research globetrotting and blogumentation on his future perfect blog. He seemed to be suggesting an imminent bursting of the proverbial bubble. Sharing his “top 5 myths of design research” (see below), the outlook was painted in somber hues… unless, he advised, we do a number of things:

move beyond the search for insights to having more extended conversations in the communities we serve
translate the insights we do gain into meaningful and actionable ideas
make these ideas tangible quickly and push them out into communities to initiate the feedback process faster
remain engaged and immersed in these communities and activate/motivate change

Kolko added, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that short of moving to Asia, giving away our services for free (nothing wrong with social design!), or making it really really really expensive, in order to remain relevant we need to:

make meaning out of data (the challenge, for many of us practitioners, resides in the challenge of sensemaking and synthesis)
build frameworks for emotional experiences
have empathy
draw more diagrams

Conifer’s Jacobson was more optimistic in the panel discussion. Smart organizations, he argued, will double their R&D spending during economic downturns in order to have new products ready to be launched as soon as economic conditions turn for the better.

Fuzzy Wuzzies: The Everlasting Quest to Define What We Do

Patrick Whitney, the dean of the IIT Institute of Design, in his opening remarks at the conference, mentioned the problematic confusion and ambiguity that continues to trouble our industry and those that might benefit from what we do around the meaning of “design.” This issue of language and the struggle with ambiguous definitions resurfaced during the lunchtime roundtable discussion that Artefact hosted on the second day of the conference.

Our topic for the informal conversation was in which other industries or fields does design research have the greatest opportunities to be used, and design thinking applied. Three of the participants in our discussion were approaching design research from “the outside,” specifically from the worlds of government, the fine arts, and advertising/marketing. There was some discernible discomfort and struggle apparent in the confusion over terminology and the use of loosely defined terms (e.g., “design,” “design thinking,” “experience,” etc.).

It seems that we still have a long ways to go to address this seemingly persistent, vexing problem around clarifying what design is and how its methodologies can be applied to a broader set of arenas to solve complex problems.

But Of Course, It’s Still About Empathy. Deeper, Longer, More Immersive Empathy

Empathy and deep immersion into the communities and lives of those for whom we design was, of course, a major theme as it is one of our most fundamental approaches to user-centered design. Richard Saul Wurman – though not exactly advocating empathy! – repeatedly reminded the audience of the importance of “listening” to each other, and that “understanding is power.” Rettig impressed upon us the importance of diving deep in order to cause a “sea change.” Goodwin advocated storytelling and narratives as a way to identify with user pain.

But, the most captivating appeal came from social anthropologist Stokes Jones, Principal of Lodestar, who passionately presented how ethnographic fieldwork helps uncover the embedded innovation that is always and continuously brewing from the bottom up. Leveraging the “knowledgeability” of users and communities helped him and his team innovate in ways no one else on the Vicks VapoRub team would have imagined. After visiting 12 – a mysterious, empirically successful magical number – homes in South African townships, Stokes discovered a mortar and pestle sharing shelf space with the collection of medicine. To these families, “healing” possessed two specific properties: action and sensation. Their “knowledgeability” about medicine led to this DIY approach of combining not only the appropriate active ingredient, but also a component that allowed the patient to feel the medicine. Proctor and Gamble used this knowledge to create products that satisfied both the feeling and effects produced from the observed DIY approach for the South Africa market.

Fabricant’s call to design researchers was to get truly immersed in communities, observe emergent behavior, participate in conversations, and create rapid experiments which are pushed out into these communities for iterative feedback. Fabricant once asked Chipchase about how to keep those connections alive and strong between his team and those research subjects who turned out to be absolute gems of insight. Chipchase responded, “You just hire them.”

Prototyping Faster, Smarter, Earlier

In addition to maintaining extended conversations with communities, the importance of producing tangible artifacts quickly and putting them out there was stressed.

Start producing tangible things (e.g., solutions, parts of solutions) quickly in order to speed up the end-user feedback process. Prototype and experiment quickly. Learn and iterate. Robert Fabricant and, to some degree, Jason Fried of 37signals touched on these principles of consistent, early feedback.

When Fried and his colleagues were building Basecamp, they started off with just one line of text as a way to communicate. Then they added in titles to messages to allow disambiguation with each message. Slowly, they would roll out features that were absolutely necessary to complete a task. Each build would be tested and iterated fully before the next feature would even be considered.

Marc Rettig also shared a fairly typical “eureka” moment during his workshop when he asked some developers to create paper prototypes of their ideas and present them to their significant others when they got home at night. After 3 nights, the developers received the feedback they needed to build the system confidently.

People to People: Service Design is a Huge Opportunity

Just as the IDSA conference closed with Jeneanne Rae citing the size and dominance of the services sector of our economy versus the product sector, the DRC was capped by Ryan Armbruster’s presentation on the business value of service design, where he also cited our economy as consisting of roughly 78% services (note: actual, according to BEA NIPA data, it’s actually about 68% of personal consumption expenditure that is spent on services in the last quarter). Armbruster’s inspiring keynote was all about his experience and dedication to the improvement and design of services in the healthcare field, informed largely through design research and ethnography.

In Conclusion

To summarize, the speakers at DRC09 addressed the critical importance of designers and design researchers wearing more and more “hats” going forward. You have to be many things in order to stay relevant and add value:

a listener
an observer
an analyzer
a translator
a synthesizer
a curator (learn to say “no”)
a storyteller
a mobilizer
a tweet-oholic (this is still up for debate)

Musings & Miscellany

The conference was mostly good, with only a couple duds. The entertainment factor was high this year, as the organizers brought in a wide range of speakers, from the rambling and misanthropic – but brilliant and hilarious – curmudgeon, Richard Saul Wurman, to the well-known and oft-reviled founder of 37 signals, Jason Fried, as well as the stoked oratory of social anthropologist Stokes Jones. Here are some of our unofficial awards:

Most Unapologetic: tie between RSW and Jason Fried
Most F-bomb Droppings: RSW
Most Unusual Usage of Vicks VapoRub Cited: Stokes Jones
Most Inspiring Reminder that We Need to Think More About People Interacting with People: Ryan Armbruster
Most Low-key Yet Profound Purveyor of Pithy Quotes: Ben Jacobsen (“Sometimes, you have to go slow to go fast.”)
Most Snarky Tweet: Jon Kolko (“#drc09 Jason fried speaking about his software dev fundamentals; no wonder basecamp is such a piece of garbage”)

Thank Yous

Tal Shay and Kate Pemberton for organizing a great event
IIT Institute of Design for teaching design research, innovation, design thinking, and producing great future leaders
Spertus Institute for providing a great venue for the event
The Wieners Circle for the late-night entertainment and artery-busting char dogs
David Armano (@Armano) for the photo above of us Tweeting the hell out of #DRC09