To conduct an ethnographic study, hire ethnography firms, not design firms. Would you go to a firefighter to sequence DNA to check for mutations? No, you go to a geneticist. When I was at Nissan, we hired the best design firms and the best qualitative research firms in the country. It made designers look like idiots when they didn’t know their place and presented laughable research papers. In design’s myopic understanding of research, we tend to think we can conduct it, let alone conducting it well. We invent jargon like “design research” to give ourselves a false sense of credibility. “Design research” is far too young to have the level of credibility, originality, or relevance compared to other sciences. (Don’t get me wrong, we DO need to keep developing this so that within the next hundred years, we can have that credibility). Our appropriation of methods from other fields is disingenuous to clients who can have better results hiring actual statisticians, anthropologists, astronomers, firefighter, geneticist etc. Design firms are only trying to take a piece of their pie, when they should be expanding the pie.

How designers can add what’s missing in research

Our advantage-one for a designer is when we use our area of expertise in research. I want to point to “Translation of Abstraction” as an area where designers can shine the most. The role of a designer helps us absorb the research (from credible research and datasets) and translate it to the application of that research. Research is often filled with abstract descriptions like “consumer wants a sense of elevation” or “the brand is trying to relieve a tortured soul”. The results of research serves as a catalyst for the designs, but rather than taking an immediate leap toward sketching and prototyping, there is an incremental step that is necessary and crucial for the success of a design.

The presentation above is a research on mobiles in relation to echo boomers and luxury that I executed last year. There are four components that are key for a design firm or a freelancer when executing research.

1. Opportunity Finding: Research
If you want more insights into real research Doing Anthropology by Rita Denny and Patricia Sunderland is a great start. I’ll talk about specifics research tactics in a future post so subscribe to the rss feed if you want to stay posted.

2. Synthesis: Findings
Let’s face it, we’re all busy people, dumping raw research data onto some one’s lap and expecting them to find the patterns is just mean. The experts do it best, because they’ve seen hundreds and thousands of different types of patterns.

3. Analysis: Insights
This is where you hire the best-of-the-best. They take the research findings and apply it into the context of the real world. The more they know about how this research fits into the whole scheme of things, the better the insights become.

4. Translation: Implications
Lastly, this is much more strategic in nature and requires a contorting of the research, empathizing with the user, considering economic, technology, and social trends, to output a visionary plan for the design. Designers have an uncanny ability to take research and convert it into a relevant direction and vision for a solution. This uses neither the left brain or the right brain, but the neural pathways of the gap between the two halves.