Don Norman recently authored an essay titled Technology First, Needs Last. While I agree with the title, I couldn’t disagree more with the content of the essay, starting with the second opening sentence, “design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs.” And it’s all downhill from there.
I’m not sure how Don defines design research as he doesn’t give any definition in the essay, but I would expect based on the content of this essay his perspective is significantly different than how I define design research.
There are two widely accepted definitions of design research according to the Design Research Society. The first is research into the design process. The second is research within the design process. The definition which is most commonly used today is the second. Another way to think of design research is research that is done during and with the purpose of informing the design process. Using these definitions, I find it difficult to ascertain most of the claims Don makes in his essay. Let’s have a look.
Don sets the stage by putting innovations into two groups: conceptual breakthroughs and continual improvements. Conceptual breakthroughs have a huge impact on society. An example of a conceptual breakthrough would be the mobile phone. Continual improvements are more common and are merely an improvement on an existing product, service, or technology. An example of a continual improvement would be intermittent windshield wipers, which improved on the original design of windshield wipers. Sounds pretty good.
It’s the next claim that I find just plain silly:
“New conceptual breakthroughs are invariably driven by the development of new technologies. The new technologies, in turn, inspire technologists to invent things, not sometimes because they themselves dream of having their capabilities, but many times simply because they can build them. In other words, grand conceptual inventions happen because technology has finally made them possible.”
Now hold on just a second. The technologies that seemingly drive these new conceptual breakthroughs are driven by the lack of a product or service to fulfill a particular want or need, more so the former than the later. That lack of a product or service is something we as designers call an opportunity. It’s the opportunity that drives the technology that leads to innovation.
Don cites a number of products that he claims were driven by technology, including: flush toilets, indoor plumbing, electric lighting, automobiles, airplanes, cellphones, the internet, etc. Saying that design research didn’t lead to these innovations is widely inaccurate claim.
Let’s take flush toilets and indoor plumbing as an example. At some point someone got tired of doing their morning constitution in an outhouse and saw an opportunity to make a better product. Did they need to do an in-depth year-and-a-half ethnographic field study to determine this? Um, no. You can thank Sir John Harrington and George Jennings for taking the plunge and designing the flush toilet based on the desire not to do their business in the woods. They invented the technology needed to create something they saw as an opportunity, not the other way around.
The Wright Brothers researched, designed, prototyped and failed countless ways before their epic win at Kittyhawk. All that work in designing, testing and prototyping is design research. Howard Hughes made a number of innovations in aviation, including the flush rivet, based on observations that rivets that stuck up above the service created drag and were less aerodynamic. Again, that’s design research.
The Internet? DARPA created it as a means to share information on defense research between a number of universities and researchers. They made an observation and used design research to come up with a crazy idea that drove to the creation of the technology that is now the Internet.
Technology didn’t drive these innovations, it was merely the road. The driver was an opportunity for invention and design research was right behind the wheel.
One last quibble I have with the essay comes at the end where he calls designers and researchers to step aside and let the technologists lead the way, because design research is largely irrelevant. According to Don, we should leave innovation to the technologists. I’m not making this up:
“…although creativity and imagination are essential, design research, market research, and our beloved careful assessment of people’s needs, whether visible or hidden, are largely irrelevant. The inventors will invent, for that is what inventors do. The technology will come first, the products second, and then the needs will slowly appear, as new applications become luxuries, then “needs,” and finally, essential.
Once a product direction has been established, research with customers can enhance and improve it. Beforehand? Leave it to the technologists.”
No, Don. Innovation doesn’t lie in the hands of the technologists. Innovation lies in the hands of those who see an opportunity. That can be a technologist, a designer, a research, or a soccer mom. Maybe you want to step aside and let technologists innovate, but as a designer and researcher I will continue to leverage design research in my design practice. Regardless of what you claim, I have first hand experience with it leading to both evolutionary (over 20 to date) and revolutionary (too many to count) innovations.
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by use_this: A Rebuttal to Technology First Needs Last http://bit.ly/8SLupZ #ux…
Nice one Todd. It’s amazing to me that DN can take such a hard-line stance on the matter.
Given the simplest analogy to Mobile that you briefly note, a good friend (@haigarmen) teaches IxD at Emily Carr in Vancouver and has held up his iPhone and previously coveted Nokia device that, on paper, beats the crap out of the iPhone’s “technical” capabilities still to this day (6MP camera, playback of any audio & video formats, significantly larger on-board storage capacity, etc.). That said, he moves on to note that he switched to the iPhone after a ridiculiously short period of time using it due to the experience of interacting with the device, which clearly draws relation to your point that technology does not explicitly drive innovation and design research deserves it’s due recognition in the innovation cycle.
Thanks for your insight…
Thanks. Really.
I’m getting tired of the spate of “everything you know is wrong” articles. I was just talking about this and Jon Kolko’s recent article on JohnnyHolland.org falls into that realm.
Here’s a thought–let’s just do the work. Let’s design stuff, let’s ensure the stuff owrks for users, and then let’s move on to the next thing.
Well articulated response Todd.
Some of Don’s examples are borderline absurd. Inventions like airplanes and mobile phones revolutionized society! No design researcher, or client, would reasonably expect to discover insights that revolutionize society. Most companies are not trying to invent the next airplane. I think Don is pretty far out of touch with what is happening on the ground if he thinks that design researchers are selling that idea to their stakeholders.
Incremental improvements inspired by, or driven by, design research can lead to dramatic increases in business revenue. No new airplanes needed.
Saying that DARPA created the internet using “Design Research” seriously undercuts your argument. Unless you are redefining “Design Research” as to be so incredibly broad as to be “everything and thus nothing” then the statement is patently untrue.
The same is also true (though to a less absurd level) of your claims vis a vis Howard Hughes and the Wright Brothers.
Where I do agree with you is in that innovative breakthroughs can come from anyone.
In theory.
But in practice…
The vast majority of truly innovative breakthrough products and companies throughout history have arisen out of technologists and engineers. This is of course partially due to the fact that (by definition) innovative breakthroughs come from inventors – and almost all inventors (historically) have been engineers and technologists.
Designers – meanwhile – have created a tiny handful of bits of breakthrough innovation and have really never created the sort of massive innovation that creates a company like Google (or Coke or LVMH or GE or Nike).
Sure.
You can be angry at Don Norman. I’m sure many are.
When an icon of the industry attacks a sacred cow – it’s upsetting.
But the through is that Design Research is due a correction. The pendulum will swing. I think most of us know that it’s not the holy grail – but some have acted as if it were. And that’s created this situation.
PS. Just to be clear…. people were identifying business “opportunity” long before Design Research became a concept. Then (and now) these people were largely not designers and were (and are) largely uninterested in Design Research. They were (and are) business people and entrepreneurs and marketing people and (gasp) MBAs.
I’m saying that Design Research played a heavy part in DARPA’s development of the Internet. Look at the second definition, which is the one most commonly used our field today—research applied within the design process. Are you claiming that DARPA didn’t conduct research during the process of designing the Internet? That they didn’t make observations that it was difficult to get information back and forth between universities and researchers? That that observation didn’t lead to researching ways they could overcome this obstacle? That they didn’t conduct research within the design process that ultimately lead to the development of the technology that lead to the development of the Internet?
That’s hardly everything is nothing. And the same holds true with Howard Hughes and the Write Brothers. They both used research during the design process. And that is the second fundamental definition of design research.
Norman says nothing to get too excited about in this meandering essay. He starts with a grand position and bold sensationalist statements to get us riled up but in that boil down to his mid essay takeaway of, “In reality, innovation comes in many shapes and forms. Most new product development is innovative, but at a very tiny, incremental level. Costs are trimmed. Manufacturing and distribution efficiencies are introduced. Costly features of little use are removed, new features thought to enhance competitive value are introduced. Simple, small, yet very important in the life cycle of a product.”
Norman goes on to discuss the merits of the design research process and where it mostly plays a role but he already gave up on his own argument. His odd list of “inventions” shows the lack of follow through on the basis for the initial position by comparing things that were developed over time and forged in the complexity of human needs and behavior as overnight transformations. A short hand that is a slippery slope.
Brian Arthur, economist referenced in the article, believes in “combinatorial evolution” of inventions. i.e. incremental understanding and development. “There are not magic wands or bright ideas in bathtubs.” While I have not read his book I suggest that would be more of a reason to continue doing design research to add up to the potential for a breakthrough rather than the idea of the genius Norman seems to imply when describing inventors.
http://www.miller-mccune.com/science_environment/where-does-innovation-come-from-1446
Norman argues that needs do not come into the conversation till after the technology but I would argue that needs are the reason for the development of incremental innovations which ultimately help us develop the big ideas. His example of Edison’s phonograph seems at odds with itself. Edison invented for a need, just not the one that made the phonograph the most successful. Maybe Edison just needed better design research?!
He follows with the idea that we should wait for the Edison’s to come up with the idea which is at odds with his support of Arthur’s premise for breakthrough invention as incremental.
Another bit of related subtext that goes unaddressed is that successful innovations may not be new technology but the right technology brought together on the right problem and the right time rather than just providing the right primary science. So guess what helps companies know what to make and why? Design research. Guess when an invention is considered a success and therefore an innovation? When it meets peoples needs.
Ultimately I believe that there is no need to be so extreme in the way we discuss the development of innovations. We need everyone. All of us are smarter than one of us.
“Are you claiming that DARPA didn’t conduct research during the process of designing the Internet?”
You are amazingly wrong (I hope this is polite) from a variety of perspectives. First of all, DARPA did not invent the Internet, however you choose to define the Internet. Even a very cursory reading of history will show that the Internet came to be through a fruitful collision of a LOT of preexisting technology research on packet switching and network design. And private companies (like BBN, Mitre, RAND, Xerox…) and universities like Stanford played fundamental roles there. If you look at what has happened after the ’90s, when the Internet becomes a truly global phenomenon, the processes where even less designed (and certainly not by design researchers).
But even if you just stick to DARPA, if you define “design research” as “finding out that something is not perfect, and working towards improving it with innovation” or even “research that happens withing the context of design”, nearly every design activity (and also gardening) qualifies as design research if it contains a bit of research.
I am afraid that “the Internet” is just a bad example, and a very difficult thing to appropriate as a “design research” outcome.
Todd, when I read your rebuttal I think “Necessity is the Mother of Invention” and that Don can’t claim the various inventions he mentions were not responding to a necessity (pooping inside, traveling distances efficiently, communicating over distance in real-time). Nor do I think he would suggest that. But “need acknowledgment/prototype/test/iterate” is not the process I understand Don to be critiquing.
i think there’s something being glossed over here, both in norman’s strange piece and here.
i think there are two domains where innovation occurs, and sometimes they overlap, and they are the preconditional domains to technology and design research, respectively.
in the STEM world (science, technology, engineering, math) there is is a predisposition to study and describe what works, what exists, in our natural world. and STEM looks at human scale, but also micro and macro scale, atoms, bits, DNA strands, aerodynamics. that’s the preconditional bias of STEM. once things are understood and peer reviewed, then the insights are capitalized on, and i mean that literally, inviting business and capitalistic opportunism into this equation. oftentimes, innovative breakthroughs from this realm are based on fundamental displacements of existing ways that we understand the world, and in this exposure comes opportunity to apply new learnings.
the other world is the IDEA world (intuition, design, emotion, art) and its predisposition is not to study and understand the natural world (to a peer reviewed end) but to persistently make things to suggest what might be, always with a bias toward action and realization. i agree that innovations can definitely happen in this realm, but it’s of a different sort. perhaps innovation “lite”. it, generally speaking, is not structural disruption its after, but banal improvement (and there’s nothing wrong with that).
design research fortunately or unfortunately sits squarely in the middle, the in-between, in the interstices of these two domains (STEM/IDEA), and therefore has inherited the left brain rigor (and conceit) of STEM as well as the right brain impulsiveness (and conceit) of IDEA.
norman is basically saying that STEM is better than IDEA, and you are saying that the intersection of STEM and IDEA is better than STEM, which of course, doesn’t make a lot of sense.
here’s a nice sketch by john maeda that captures the STEM/IDEA thing: http://our.risd.edu/2009/08/20/stem-to-an-idea/
obviously he is suggesting that STEM and IDEA are related quasi-hierarchically, that there is a stem that holds up the flower (in this case, a lightbulb), but they are the same plant, simply composed of different yet related parts.
norman’s piece was kind of a head-scratcher to me in that i really don’t think anyone really cares about this distinction, except design researchers, and if he simply wanted to quiet their claims, then i can name 100 things that he could better spend his time on. the claims of design researchers are, like any discipline defending its honor, can be overstated. but, again, really, who cares?
nb – the wright brothers were two nerds in a garage who had a chip on their shoulders about contraptions being developed in europe that were just wrong. this was less design research or even innovation per se, than a grudge match between flight geeks. once the balance of structure and aeronautic dynamics were “understood” (STEM) through trial and error (like, if it flew, they were right, if it didn’t fly they weren’t) then the glory of capitalist opportunism reared its head….and that was what ushered in modern aviation. STEM+CAPITALISM. IDEA came later, with david kelley’s (IDEO) “vacant/occupied” lighted airplane bathroom signage. both the wright and kelley innovation were equally important, but for obviously different reasons.
Problem solving is not by definition equal to design.
I’m actually saying that there WAS NO “design process” in the development (DEVELOPMENT) of the internet by DARPA.
there were no designers working on it.
there was no DESIGN.
if you redefine “design” to be any problem solving – or anything that creates value – or anything the looks at identifying opportunities – then you have made “design” meaningless.
Fundamentally, I agree with Norman’s piece.
I think that “Design Research” (when defined as designers applying traditional and non-traditional consumer research methods to the design process and applying traditional design ideation methods to research-derived data to help with conceptualization) is effective at incremental improvement — but fundamentally is not optimal when it comes to arriving at creating truly breakthrough new ideas and innovations.
I’m not sold that this means that breakthrough innovation is the purview of technology – as I don’t believe this is a simple binary decision. But I do believe that “Design Research” is a non-optimal approach for truly orthogonal, breakthrough and innovative creation.
[...] Warfel replies to Don Norman’s [...]
I think that there are actually 2 major problems with Don Norman’s original hypothesis. One has been described quite well by Gong and that is that Mr Norman actually tries to compare two unrelated things, design research and technological innovation and, unsurprisingly, finds that technologists are more suited to the latter. One could similarly argue that technologists are not nearly as good at making profound artistic breakthroughs as artists are.
The other major problem with his assertions is that he lists a number of important cultural phenomena and claims that the technology alone is responsible for their importance. The technologies of the Internet or the personal computer can be traced back to specific people or groups of people as the creators but the PHENOMENA of the internet and the personal computer owe as much to GUI designers and business pioneers as any technology.
The same could be said of those who created groundbreaking content for early radio and television that actually made people care about those technologies.
Technology is great, but it is only a contributor to the cultural change it engenders. The cultural phenomenon does not fall directly out of the technological innovation.
[...] Todd Zaki Warfel writes he “couldn’t disagree more with the content of the [Norman] essay. He singles out both “how Don defines design research” and Norman’s claim that innovations “are invariably driven by the development of new technologies.” Read article [...]
[...] Steve Portigal and Frog Design’s Adam Richardson have also written thoughtful responses to Norman’s piece, which is how I came across it in the first place. Todd Zaki Warfel has also written a rebuttal. [...]
Not sure why the UX community is rising to the bait on this one. Norman’s article is uncontroversial. It is also largely uninteresting because he is arguing against a position that no one takes. It is a made up argument. Whoever thought that groundbreaking innovations came from observing customers? What’s important is understanding the way customers work so that we can design products and interfaces that fit their lifestyles. That’s why we do design research. Game-changing innovation doesn’t enter into it.
Thanks Philip (Hodgson) for writing what I was thinking.
Don’s article starts with what I can only call a supposition that in my mind doesn’t hold water which sort of negates the rest of his thinking. It reminds me of how an if–then statement works, if the beginning is true then proceed, but if the beginning statement is false it negates the rest, which I realize doesn’t always directly translate to prose (versus programming), but it does for the most part here.
On a separate note what Don speaks to does touch on a bigger issue I’ve been having with the term User Experience Design—it tends to give a connotation (rightly or wrongly) that that’s where the focus lies in creating effective (design) solutions, which oftentimes cannot be further from the truth.
Kudos Todd for taking on the big guy. Very well rebutted.
[...] be. If you found the original article interesting, then Nicolas Nova’s discussion as well as Todd Zaki Warfel’s rebuttal will give you something to think about (also read the comments on the second [...]
I think you’re redefining the term ‘design research’ from what Don Norman is calling it, and I think that’s a little unfair. If you replace ‘design research’ with ‘ethnographic studies’ then his stance makes a lot more sense, and indeed you agree with him in some of your points above.
Does research lead to innovation, of course, but research is such a broad term that it’s almost meaningless.
What I would like to know is regarding your final point. You said you’ve seen first hand how design research has led to revolutionary innovations. I’d love to hear more about those, and the role design research/ethnography played.
Ethnographic studies is just one form of design research. Look again at the definitions supplied the the org behind design research, which essentially define it as research into and applied during the design phase of a product or service. That’s the definition I’m using. Design research could be ethnographic-based studies, surveys, usability testing of an existing product… it’s any form of research used to inform the design of a product.
On the note of innovations and my first-hand experience. Nearly a decade ago I conducted some ethnographic based field research that lead to a number of innovations in iTV and distributed home networks. The company I was consulting with at the time, Ucentric Systems (now owned by Motorola) designed and developed a distributed home network that allowed you to push video to any screen in the house (computer or TV) and sound to any speaker in the house (computer, TV, stereo). Think of it as Slingbox meets the Airport Express. It was way ahead of it’s time and never got past the demo stage. Not because it was ahead of it’s time, but because the head of engineering could never focus enough to ship the thing (same fate as Duke Nukem Forever). A number of the innovations like VoIP that we designed into that product are widespread today (and a number still have yet to see the light of day).
I’ve used design research for a large grocery chain to provide a number of innovative ways to do things like auto-populate shopping lists (the implementation has yet to see the light of day, because the company we designed it for is slow to execute). Another example is a product we’re redesigning right now for the IT/Help Desk field. We’re pushing the design of this application into an entirely new direction that will put the IT/Help Desk field on its head.
One big lesson I’ve learned through this: the first two examples never saw the light of day and I put partial blame on the fact that I wasn’t deeply involved with the development and implementation, but rather just the design. This last example, the one we’re working on right now at Messagefirst, we’re deeply involved in the execution of the design and it will see the light of day in the next 12 months. It’s going to change the field of IT/Help Desk applications. It’s going to do to the IT/Help Desk field what the iPhone did to the mobile market and put the other vendors on their heals struggling to play catchup.
Hey, I mentioned your rebuttal in my article (Why You Should Care About (Post)Human Factors).