COLUMN BODONI, BAND-SAWS, AND BEER
JON KOLKO
Trusting the Design Process
leave the design studio and enter
the context in which work and
play are done. Designing for the
homeless? Go spend time with
the homeless. Trying to improve
community agriculture? Go spend
time with farmers and gardeners.
There is both an art and a science
to conducting qualitative research
effectively, but being there is one
of the best ways to get started.
• Synthesize the research to arrive
at the “big rocks” of innovation. An
insight is a provocative statement
of truth about human behavior that
may be wrong. A two-hour research
session will generate more than a
hundred discrete utterances, and so
research with 10 participants will
create a thousand pieces of data.
By marinating in this data—liter-
ally embedding and immersing
yourself in a war room of quotes,
pictures, artifacts, and ideas—you
will start to form connections
that are otherwise hidden. You’ll
identify behavioral anomalies that
fit outside your worldview. And
by constantly asking and answer-
ing the question “Why?” you will
arrive at these “big rocks” of
innovation: statements about the
future to hang your design hat on.
March + April 2013
interactions
Photograph by Steve Ryan
In most professions, process is a
dirty word. Process usually indicates a top-down, autocratic set
of gates that have been arbitrarily
prescribed—steps that are imposed
to keep people in check and to
keep the industrialized machine
humming. But in design, nothing
could be further from the truth. For
designers, process is the language
of rigor, and a particular process
nearly guarantees a desired outcome. Often, that desired outcome
is innovation. I challenge my students to target appropriateness.
The process I teach my students
is simple, and it looks like this:
• Conduct immersive, ethnographic
research. It’s a bit of a paradox: The
first thing to do when starting
a design project is not to design.
Instead, it’s to seek to understand
and empathize. The most direct
path I have found to achieve this
goal is through a form of partici-
patory ethnography. Simply put,
