LOOP: AIGA Journal of Interaction Design Education
June 2003 Number 7

s with other forms of cultural production, products of industry do not carry the same meanings from place to place. While a food processor in Massachusetts may be considered a time saving device for housewives–to be stored in a high cupboard–the same appliance in France may sit on a kitchen counter and provide indispensable service to a professional chef. The same appliance may remain boxed in an Indian dining room showcase as a sign of affluence while a family servant grinds food on a stone so as not to consume expensive electricity. It is these culturally idiosyncratic considerations–not just those of aesthetics, engineering or marketing–that precisely describe the success and failure of artistically rendered and cleverly engineered artifacts all over the world.
       Since product standardization does not guarantee the standardization of its use, it is imperative that a product–interface, package or other design artifact–make meaningful connections to the people encountering it. By undertaking exploratory cultural research that feeds directly into design ideation and concept development, a company can gain significant advantage over its competitors. The proprietary knowledge of specific people and their lifestyles that it acquires can become a valuable resource in and of itself, providing a rational basis for strategic design decisions. Over time, discoveries derived from research can be internalized, built upon and transformed into conventional ways of doing things.
 

A Need for design research
Research in design is nothing new. Apprenticeship, personal association, life experience, customer specifications and feedback, market performance and competing products have supplied the information from which products have been designed to order and by which they have evolved over time. With the introduction of new technologies, such research has been unavoidable. Even so, applied research for design as a tool of business is essentially a new idea if only because it attempts to explicitly bridge the gap between the analytical bias of business and the synthetic approach of design. Accordingly, design research is challenged to characterize present-day situations in a way that gives equal consideration to both design possibilities and the realities of business.
       Design research begins with the assumption that products succeed when they resonate with people’s values and behaviors, even if they result in changes to those same values and behaviors. In other words, when a product appeals to an individual, it does so relative to that individual’s cultural framework, worldview and experience of daily life. The individual falls in love with products that seem designed to order. But to accomplish such fit on a large scale is difficult. Too often the business planner speaks in statistical aggregates and designers are confronted with the task of designing for almost everyone–or namely, for no one. When design research is omitted, the design team resorts to imagining people and their experiences by using familiar design tools such as brainstorming and collage.

       Constructing user profiles through media images can be a risky business. Consider the example of a user profile developed by a major American web design firm that named its prototypical user "Joyce." A collage generated by the design team characterized Joyce by combining images of the television sitcom character Mrs. Cunningham from "Happy Days," the late British Princess Diana, a Lexus automobile and a bottle of Neutrogena lotion. Their Joyce was clearly a woman over 30 with enough money for name-brand cosmetics and a really nice car. But then what? How does one reconcile a British, globe-trotting, Dodi-dating, royal divorced-mother-of-two Diana with a contented wife, mother, suburban American household manager Mrs. C? It cannot be done. Better to design for Diana alone, since she at least was a complicated, real-life person about whom most of us know something. Marion Cunningham was a fictional character to begin with, a stereotype. Stereotypes are built from generalities, while reality is in the details. And to find the details, you have to search.

(1) This article is an abridged version of a longer essay written by Melody Roberts while she was a graduate student at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Professors Sharon Poggenpohl, John Heskett and doctoral candidate Jay Melican, advised the writing of this essay.

LOOP June 2003 Number 7