Chiming in on the role of design research

There was a collective raising of eyebrows around the office recently when a somewhat provocative essay by Don Norman made the rounds. The essay, titled "Technology First, Needs Last," looks at the practice of design research and its ability (or inability) to generate truly groundbreaking innovation on the scale of such technologies as electric lighting or the airplane. The argument put forth by Norman is that the methods of design research, while great for understanding target users and furthering what he terms "incremental" innovations, do not lead to the more revolutionary innovations that truly change our way of life. Let's go to the thesis quote:

But the real question is how much all this helps products? Very little. In fact, let me try to be even more provocative: although the deep and rich study of people's lives is useful for incremental innovation, history shows that this is not how the brilliant, earth-shattering, revolutionary innovations come about.

Major innovation comes from technologists who have little understanding of all this research stuff: they invent because they are inventors. They create for the same reason that people climb mountains: to demonstrate that they can do so. Most of these inventions fail, but the ones that succeed change our lives.

It's true, history shows that transformative technologies often spend quite a bit of time looking for the right application or a critical mass of adopters. Take for example the telephone, which saw itself marketed first to city-dwelling professionals for business purposes. Telephone companies failed to recognize the utility presented by the telephone to farmers for such things as weather forecasts, communication with merchants in the towns, as well as the  social benefits for a somewhat isolated demographic. In fact, social use of the telephone was regarded as "frivolous and unnecessary" by those companies providing the service until the late 1920s.

It's a pattern of introducing technology, discovering what people are really doing with it, then iterating the form in which that technology is offered to better meet those purposes. The iPod went through four generations before seeing mainstream success [Buxton], in large part because the ecosystem built around it (iTunes, OS X, etc) took time to establish itself as well. In some cases, it's hard to pinpoint where the key moment of invention occurred...do we credit Mosaic for the current state of the web? Tim Berners-Lee's W3? Nelson's hypertext? Engelbart's NLS? Another good example of how users/consumers find their own suitable uses for technology can be found in the "street innovation" discussed by Jan Chipchase in his 2007 TED talk.

I would thus agree with Norman, but I think the issue of how major innovations come about was intentionally simplified in the essay to make his point. We can no more attribute them to design research than we can attribute them to a lone genius or any number of isolated causes; they most often result from the collective interactions of engineers, designers, marketers, and consumers alike, sometimes over many years. Good discussions have been in full swing for a while now (honestly, I feel a little too late to the party at this point), with Steve Portigal and Bruce Nussbaum notably chiming in. They call out some of the above points as well as others; for example, they distinguish invention and innovation as I do above, and point out that innovation is a collective, progressive process.

So where does this leave design research? After all, our work is not exclusively about invention; it can be about designing the right experience around either new or existing technologies. The IDEO techbox is a good example of how existing inventions and knowledge are stored to be later applied to potentially new application areas. A former colleague at InContext has a nice post about how design research led to a new product for my current employer.  (Note: I would go a little further than Norman here and argue that a degree of creativity is necessary here as well to make these connections and later apply the insights generated by our research.) There are examples everywhere of how this kind of "incremental innovation", as Norman describes it, works; how a effective search engine changes the way we treat email, how materials from other domains can affect practical or aesthetic aspects of designed objects, and how machine learning can be applied to the way we consume media. Radical new inventions? Maybe not, but certainly a big part of the process described above.

In the end, I feel like Norman's article, provocative as it is, should not be regarded as belittling or even dismissing the role of design research in the process of innovation. Instead of scrambling to find counterexamples or point out the generalizations he makes, we should be looking, as he does, at what that process looks like historically, and how we can understand and support it through understanding elements such as creativity, application, and diffusion.