Culture, Behavior and Society at the IIT Design Research Conference

Over the past few days, IIT held their annual Design Research Conference. The conference, run and organized entirely by the students of IIT’s institute of Design and led by graduate students Tal Shay and Kate Pemberton, brings together practitioners and students in an intimate setting to discuss issues of design, research, business, culture and society.

I gave a talk that I’ve been building and refining for the past few months, entitled “A new global design intellectualism: predicting – and avoiding – the commoditization of design research.” The talk articulates what I’ve observed over the past decade as a repeated cycle of offshoring, responsive process innovation, and cultural expectations point to the demise of a particular skill or set of methods in the United States.

Many of us grew up with a popular fear of the end of American manufacturing, and recall the unsuccessful efforts to position “Made in America” as a response to the diminishing core production jobs in this country (and as a response to “Made in China” and “Made in Vietnam”.) In the early parts of this millennium, an equal concern was raised – that sketching, rendering, assembly, 3D modeling, human factors, ergonomics, mechanical engineering, mold engineering, production and branding jobs were all being pushed to China, and American designers had better find a way to retain these skills, or adapt in another way. Innovation was positioned as the savior of our creative efforts, and implicit in this positioning was the idea that this was something “we could do” and “they couldn’t do” (referring to the West and East, respectively). This is already being proven inaccurate. Asian companies like Lenovo and Asus are investing incredible amounts of money in innovative product development efforts, and are turning to consultancies like frog not for product development, but to teach them the methods we use when attempting to bring new products, services and systems to market. It’s safe to assume that these “innovation skills” of research and synthesis will be part of the normal design process in Asia moving forward.

This, however, does not indicate the end of our relevance in the game of design, and my talk – and many of the other talks at the conference – confirm a growing feeling that an intimate understanding of behavior, culture, and society will ensure that contextual innovation in China can continue in China, while contextual innovation in the United States can continue in the United States. To understand the nuance of behavior in a particular culture requires a nuanced set of design methods and a nuanced approach to craft. Additionally, designers need to have an intimate understanding of a particular geographic area, social group, or subculture, and the type of quick, dirty, rogue ethnography commonly commissioned by design consultancies cannot possibly compete with the sociological awareness gained by “true ethnography”, or even better, a long and drawn out existence in a particular social group or class. The discount methods we develop and the shortcuts we offer our clients to stay on budget – that more or less work, in the context of our own, normal cultures –  simply won’t work in the context of cross-geographic product development.

Stokes Jones, Principal of Lodestar Innovation, described how the type of cultural innovation observed in cross-geographic ethnography comes in a bottom-up fashion, through the individuals in a particular society. Particularly in the bottom of the pyramid countries and societies, the “heroic model of innovation” that paints a design consultancy as an author of a new idea is simply proving to be ineffective. Instead, legitimate ethnography and models of co-synthesis allow for a more honest form of innovation identification.

This is similar to Robert Fabricant’s description of the five concerns facing design researchers, which include:

1. Design Research is not new. It’s been going on for decades, it’s common sense, and just because it’s become the poster child of popular magazines doesn’t mean it’s anything special.

2. Design Research doesn’t require any special training. We can learn to be better at it, but it’s simply the skill of listening and observing.

3. Design Research does not have a unique perspective. We don’t immediately get to things that are unique; that happens through a process of synthesis, and it’s related to – but separate from - the research itself.

4. Insights have no inherent value. We need to perform translation in order to make these insights actionable and valuable, and that means that we can’t toss them over the wall – the researcher who did the research needs to do the synthesis in order to get the most value out of the data.

5. Design Research isn’t precise. There’s an urge to make qualitative data quantitative, and that’s misleading.

Points 2, 3 and 4 corroborate Stokes’ message of the bottom-up innovation happening in unique subcultures. And I think Robert’s fourth point is the most important.

When we talk about innovation – bottom-up, or top-down – we seem to be talking about "the ability to appropriately interpret subjective data and transform this data into new and successful design ideas.” That’s design synthesis, and it requires the ability to not only gather data through research, but also to make meaning out of data, to consider frameworks of experiences, and to have a huge amount of empathy and curiosity. Marc Rettig, Principal of Fit Associates, agrees, as he claims that our work is the work of change, and “the work of change is social.”

What’s implicitly lurking in all of this discussion of design, synthesis, innovation, research, experience, and empathy is the momentum of design as it breaks out from the confines of business. The economic state of the world, the rapid embracement of sustainability as a baseline principle for life, and the realization that we are larger than our respective countries is driving towards a break from the “American Dream.” In my talk, I offer several examples of my former students who have graduated with design degrees and are now doing amazing things, but things that were unheard of even a decade ago – things that fly in the face of the rat race, the corporate ladder, the 9-5 job.

One of my students, Dan Grossman, graduated and went on to work with Project H to build and design an educational math tool at the Kutamba School for AIDS Orphans in Southern Uganda. Dan explains that “In today's world it's apparent that good design is a privilege instead of being a right. In order to get good design into the hands of people who need it most you ask many questions; how much does it costs should not be one of them.”

After graduation, another of my students – Steve Aboud – went to work building boats. He can claim a majority design of the Super Air Nautique 230, a luxury boat produced in a very personal, hand-crafted manner, costing close to $85k. And as he describes, “I do think that the design of high end things will stay in the US, but only when it pertains to small family-started companies that have established the credibility of being ‘high-end’. Plant employees are craftsmen and the designers have to be there every step of the way to guide them.” He’s pointing out the nuance of designing for culture, and illustrating a trend away from the mass-produced, away from the proliferation of stuff.

Another of my students, Jeremiah Schwarz, has been living in Shanghai for two years after graduating. His move would be unheard of years ago, but as he describes, “I estimate that, even with the growth of Chinese designers, there are still another 50 years worth of opportunity for many westerners to find work in China for design. Primarily, these vacancies can be found in OEMs, trading companies or large companies utilizing design.”

All three of these junior designers are rejecting the normal paces of our college-corporate-retirement culture, and all three of them help evidence the truth in Fabricant, Rettig and Jones’ message. The future of our profession – design, and design research – is in a deep and passionate embracement of the emotional, the cultural, and the behavioral. These require an intellectual approach to design, a broader view of the designed artifact, and implicitly demand a rejection of the “normal way of doing business.” While there’s money to be made, the goal of our work isn’t in generating massive profits for businesses. The “designer in the boardroom” model may already be out of date. To quote Robert Fabricant, “our value is in the long-term conversation.”

Jon Kolko