’ 53 ’ 54 ’ 55 ’ 56 ’ 57 ’ 58 ’59 ’ 60 ’ 61 Volkswagen.”

Over the years this positioning found fruit and built its constituency. Those who wanted to shift away from the values of American consumer culture (or simply save money) bought the product. It became the car of choice for the counterculture, intellectuals, the young and free-spirited, ultimately symbolizing values in 1960s America diametrically opposed to its start in 1930s National Socialist Germany.

Time and generation-to-gen-eration shifts in meaning provide an inexorable if less overt force for recontextualization. Concert T-shirts, once tokens of an experience, are now sold to those who were not born when the band was together. In “Shirt-Worthy” by David Giffels, which appeared in the October 28, 2007, edition of The New York Times Magazine, (http:// www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/ magazine/ 28lives-t.html) the author, having grown up with the Ramones T-shirt as a totem only available through the ultimate rock ’n’ roll experience of a concert, must come to grips with his nine-year-old son’s request for the same shirt, now $20 at Hot Topic. Elsewhere, concert shirts have been reformulated into “onesies” so that infants can passively yet semi-ironically proclaim their parents’ passion for Black Sabbath. The users who adopt a product or brand can strongly shape its authenticity, but if you pin it a priori to a fixed variable (like its earliest origin or moment of invention), you will overlook what can be—which is the very point of innovation.

This opens up a very important role for design research. Unlike top-down or market-led approaches (based on past category assumptions and orthodoxies), it can intimately identify where users locate the authenticity—and therefore where to focus experience design efforts on delivering it. This approach would also include how to design: the parameters for innovation, what can change (or improve) while preserving the sense of authenticity, and what cannot be changed without risking it (or even to what extent these essential elements can be tweaked or playfully manipulated). If authenticity is a matter (in Schopenhauer’s terms) of “will and representation”—of groups of people’s desire to believe something and to portray it that way to themselves and others—this doesn’t mean where it lands will be random. It will follow a historical process, and design research is crucial to delineate the pattern and guide where and how to design for it.

Even if authenticity is hard to define, this is not true for its opposite. If authenticity is subtle, inauthenticity is flagrant. It’s easy (and effective) to channel Supreme Court Justice Brennan with “I know it when I [don’t] see it.” We’re certainly able to determine when something is not authentic (and there’s probably an evolutionary biologist out there who can tie that pattern-matching skill to some fight-or-flight reflex). If we, as makers of something, strive to be authentic in the thing that we are making, is that really authentic? And yet if

we fail to strive for authenticity, are we likely to fail?

Some advise that the best way to deliver authenticity is to be authentic (either in the art historian’s sense or the philosopher’s sense, though each requires a different set of corporate actions). Perhaps in our goal to deliver authenticity we should strive instead to avoid inauthenticity. Perhaps the straightest path to inauthenticity is to fail to investigate the meaning of what you are delivering, asking not only yourselves, but also your customers, who will ultimately define your authenticity.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Stokes Jones is the princi-
pal of Lodestar, which he
founded to help organiza-
tions innovate by respond-
ing to the emerging chang-
es shaping their customers. Lodestar’s
focus is on understanding the daily experi-
ences surrounding peoples’ use of prod-
ucts and services in order to build strate-
gies for differentiation. His clients have
included the BBC, HBOS, Procter &
Gamble, and Nokia. Jones was trained as a
social anthropologist at the London School
of Economics. Previously, he was Philips
design’s director of Foresight, Trends and
People research. He has won the Emrys-
Peters Prize for anthropology writing, and
an Atticus Award for published thinking in
marketing.

Steve Portigal is the founder of Portigal Consulting, a bite-sized firm that brings together user research, design, and business strategy. Portigal Consulting helps clients to discover and act on new insights about themselves and their customers. In addition to regularly speaking at design and marketing events, Portigal has taught Design Research at the California College of Art and the Involution Master Academy. He writes regularly for Core77 and the Portigal Consulting blog, All This ChittahChattah. He is also an avid photographer who has a Museum of Foreign Grocery Products in his home.

November + December 2009

DOI: 10.1145/1620693.1620707
© 2009 ACM 1072-5220/09/1100 $10.00