Feature: Muscular Design is Design supported by Research

Our book begins with a look at human-centered research. Immediately, we are off on a controversial discussion. To many, human-centered research is equivalent to market research; it smacks of commercialism and is rejected by many on those grounds. The traditional goal of market research has been to find ways to sell stuff to people. In the colloquial view, the function of market research has been to validate existing and proposed products and to figure out how to persuade people that they need to buy them. Occasionally, we think of market research as finding out what potential customers want. Here again, the colloquial view is overly simplistic. Customers typically can’t tell you what they want, and they can’t design a product, service or experience for you to sell them. If you had asked any number of people in 1957 what they would like to play with, none would have suggested a plastic hoop that they could rotate around their hips.

In the old model, market research was a back-end process, devoted primarily to the final stages of development including styling, packaging, branding, marketing and advertising. In the emerging paradigm, the process is being inverted, with design research as a front-end method, informing the development of products and services from the concept stage forward. In this way, design research can enable the product to speak for itself, freeing branding and marketing to move toward honest communication and away from persuasion and the creation of desire. Human-centered design research encompasses a set of methods and practices aimed at getting insight into what would serve or delight people. It investigates behind the scenes, looking at individuals, situated contexts, cultures, forms, history, and even business models for clues that can inform design. Furthermore, good human-centered design research amplifies the designer’s ability to shape popular culture and to smoothly transmit values through design.

Designers have their own "old models" to contend with. Brand/identity designer David Canaan wryly observes that most designers seem to see their mission as "educating the general public about good taste." But over the last decade, the balance of power between those who sell products or services and those who buy them has undergone radical change. Thanks in part to the rise of the Web, communication between companies and audiences has moved from one-way persuasion to two-way dialogues about needs, desires, problems and dreams. Customer support, enabled in no small part by advances in telecommunications, has evolved to have ears and eyes as well as a mouth. The most stunning evidence of the growing power of the people may be the organized boycotts of companies over issues of child labor, animal treatment or genetic engineering—and the fact that many have achieved substantial results with large corporations.

While marketing, advertising, distribution and customer service functions have been forced to adapt to this new state of affairs, the design disciplines have lagged behind. Design curricula in higher education rarely include design research as a set of skills with extremely high strategic value. Designers need to understand the tools of research, how they are deployed, how they map onto the various stages in the design process, and how research findings can contribute to both innovative and evolutionary design practice.

Many years ago, I worked with a Jewish colleague who owned the biggest Swiss Army knife I ever saw. It was at least 2 inches thick, containing virtually every tool made for it. I asked him, "What is that?" He replied, "It’s a Jewish army knife." Deciding to go for it, I said, "OK, so why do you call it a Jewish army knife?" Shifting from his vowel-neutral, California manner of speech into a thick Yiddish accent he replied, "Because you never know."

Designers find themselves in a similar predicament today. Beyond the massive changes in dynamics among customers and companies, we work in a context shot through with rapid, often unexpected change along several vectors. Previously unimaginable technologies — from MP3 to nanotech — are blooming like time-lapse flowers. Shifting conditions in trade, politics and culture are forcing radical changes in the business models and operating methods of companies. Designers today work in a transmedia world: brands spread like viruses from print into video, web, email, sports-arena banners, LCD billboards, temporary tattoos and signage on spacecraft. Transmedia forces are at work in areas beyond branding, in the design of products, services and properties as well. Who knew, twenty years ago, that franchises as unlike as Citibank and the Harry Potter would live in every media type from atoms to bits? What next? One goal of this book is to put as many tools as possible on your belt, because "you never know."

Brenda Laurel

Excerpted from "Muscular Design" by Brenda Laurel, the introduction to "Design Research: Methods and Perspectives", edited by Brenda Laurel and published by MIT Press at £25.95.

Associated Link: Further details from Laurel's site

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