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Currently, design research methods encompass more than 150 approches. These are Observation, Shadowing, "Day In The Life", Home & Contextual Interviews, Videoethnography, Analogizing, Pattern Recognition, Body Thinking etc. and etc. Russian design research consultancy Lumiknows is experienced in most of them. Our approach proved to be successful while conducting design research projects for Russian (Optimed, the Moscow Metro, Ocsmet) and global brands operating in Russia (Samsung, Danfoss, Renault, Philips):
Design Researching is a sort of qualitative research which "tends to be faster, less expensive, more flexible, and more likely than their quantitative counterparts to provide useful answers to important questions", as Cooper & Reimann in "About Face 2.0" put it.
To us, the outmost aim of design research is to safely pass through the most dangerous phase of NPD: identifying real-life customers needs and synthesize this knowledge to inspire and validate the designing itself. Usually, this ends up with creating "A Perfect Design Brief"...
We agree with Dan Saffer who stated in "Designing for Interaction", 2007 that "Design Research encompasses the emotional, aesthetic, cultural context that the product or service will exist in". By this, we are quite sure that if to teach how to, for instance, shadow people is quite easy, to "deconstruct" the process of synthesis which is behind any Design Research is much more difficult. Nevertheless, there is one thing which is clear to us - to become a "design researcher", you should have a special ability: to look at the world from your customer positions, see any situation in the context and then put together bits of this really ill-defined information into something new, which can give life to new brands, products and services.
For more information please see presentation "What Marketers Should Know About Design Research".
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