Friday Stories: The Idea
How do we know the (designerly) things we know?
Design Research has been called many names and projected onto many different platforms. From observing like a fly on the wall to role-playing as a participant; from collecting personal stories through an eclectic collage of images to utilizing focus groups as dipsticks to approximate product success rates; these methods have been useful in gathering (social and cultural) knowledge that design needs to know in order to do designerly things.
But questions of utility lead us to designing for task accomplishments; are there human events or experiences that current design research methods have yet to lead us to explore? Can questions about the internal lives of people and fragmentary clues provide us with a sensibility towards radical design?
To put the objective in its simplest form, I hope that we can uncover new ways of knowing and interpreting internal human events and experiences that existing methods are not designed to accomplish.
I’d like to run a little experiment to see if the field could use this method of inquiry to inspire design concepts. And I’d like you to do this with me.
The experiment
Each week on Friday, I will post a random question on Design, Thunk. Tell us your personal story: what happened? what led to it? how did you feel? what struck you most about the incident? Your story can be as short as 2 paragraphs, or a long page. It’s your call. And, there isn’t an ideal answer. We just want to understand your world.
Email your stories to me by the following Tuesday, and I’ll publish them anonymously (or with your initials, if you prefer) on Design, Thunk on Wednesday.
We can run this for 3 weeks or so, then have a discussion about the methodology (what works and what doesn’t). If it proves to be good fun for everyone, we can extend the experiment for a period of time. Hopefully, with time, we’ll gain some ground towards a new and plausible design research method that is useful for designers and innovation strategists.
So.
To be honest, I have no idea how this experiment will turn out, but I’m hoping that we can uncover some cool new stuff about design research in the process.
So, how’s this? Yay or nay?
Leave your response!