From the course: Learning Design Research

Design research is designing in context

From the course: Learning Design Research

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Design research is designing in context

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- Research is not a new concept in design. Historically, designers of all disciplines have learned to use research to better create and craft their solutions. I'd like to start our conversation by looking at some historic examples of research in the design profession. The study of consumer behavior is probably one of the most common examples of research and design. It's been used ever since the early 1920s to study everything from the effectiveness of advertising to the design and packaging of a product. In the 1950s, industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss pioneered the concept of human-centered design, declaring the user's needs and wants as the main priority of a design process. He created Joe and Josephine to represent potential users that would interact with the objects he designed. Joe and Josephine embodied a culmination of research that included everything from average body measurements to personality traits and their likes and dislikes. Dreyfuss and his design team would use these fictitious models to test whether their designs would be successful. He said of the pair in his influential book "Designing for People," "Our job is to make Joe and Josephine compatible with the environment." The Bauhaus, a highly influential design school that existed in Germany from 1919 through 1933, often required students to test finished designs with real users. The feedback they collected helped to validate their solutions and also inform future iterations of their work. So when we talk about design research, we're really talking about a research-driven process that can help define how a problem is solved and communicate the value of the solution. One of the reasons design research is at the forefront of today's profession is that contemporary design problems have become increasingly complex. 20 years ago, we might have been asked to design a poster to promote an event or a brochure to help sell a product. Now we're being asked to create a lifestyle around a product. Consider the iPhone and how advertising alone has changed the way it impacts our lives. So as designers, we need to not only be experts in form but also experts in how humans interact with what we create. And I'd like to share a quote with you that I believe sums this up quite well. "Lately, I've sensed that we're in a third phase of modern design, what I sometimes call its ethnographic turn. We've seen periods of great formal experimentation, exploding the visual vocabulary of modernism. We've seen periods focused on the meaning-making of design, its content, symbolism, and narrative potential. For me, this new phase is preoccupied with design's effects, beyond its status as an object, and beyond the authorship or intentions of designers." Let's look at that last part one more time. "For me, this new phase is preoccupied with design's effects, beyond its status as an object." So what this says is that we're thinking more about the effects of design rather than the design itself. And when we shift our thinking to the effects of our designs, our process needs to be much more centered on the people and the environments we're designing for. We'll talk about context a lot throughout this course. Context is understanding everything relevant to a design problem. It's a general awareness of the user, their needs, wants, and motivations, and also their environment, what it looks like, sounds like, feels like, and more. Understanding context allows designers to take a critical look at what they're creating and figure out whether or not it will generate the desired outcome. I'd like to point you to our resource files in our exercise files folder. Here, you'll find a great list of publications that feature more about design research and show the value it can add to a solution. Take a look through them before moving on in this course. They'll help you gain a sense of the impact research is making on design.

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