Sara L. Beckman & Michael Barry: Innovation as a Learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking

2007 Article
Article in the California Management Review linking innovation, design thinking and ethnographic methods. Awarded the 2009 Accenture award by CMR. Authors work at PointForward, where you can find lots of short case stories of ethno-informed design.

Download article PDF, or, yes there’s a lazy option, see the Vimeo video.

AIGA: Design Meets Research

2008 Article
Article from AIGA giving a concise history of the evolution of market research for design and discussing the pros and cons of different approaches. Argues for ethnographic methods as a way to dig deeper into a consumer’s mind.

Read it here

Dori Tunstall: Design anthropology: What can it add to your design practice?

Adobe Design Center Tutorial
Quote extensive introduction to design anthropology (not a tutorial of any sort, in fact), underlying ideas, challenges, possibilities, etc. Written by Associate Professor of Design Anthropology at University of Illinois Dori Tunstall, who’s also worked for Sapient, Arc Worldwide, and AIGA’s Design for Democracy.

Read it here. The author’s blog, posts tagged ‘design anthropology’ here.

University of Dundee: Master’s Degree in Design Ethnography

Degree
If you can’t get enough of design + ethnography, well, there’s the opportunity of getting a master’s in design ethnography from the University of Dundee, UK. (Actually it sounds quite tempting … I love Scotland.)

More about the degree.

(A little disclaimer: sometimes, the design world uses the word ethnography a bit more liberally than I would. I’d say some degree of immersion would be necessary? Sometimes, the simple word observation would seem to cover some of these practices just fine. Which is fine. Non-participatory observation is fine. If you’re designing new airport signage, say, you’re very much helped by observing how many travellers that are currently confusedly circling the arrivals hall hunting for a restroom. But it won’t really help you gain much deeper insight, will it? Anyway, in one or two of the links in this review (not necessarily in this part though) it’s not all that clear how ethnographic their ethnography is, but the links might still provide for some interesting thoughts.)

Christina Wasson: Ethnography in the Field of Design

2000 Article
Much quoted academic text on the use of ethnography in a design context. Christina Wasson is an anthropologist, and associate professor of anthropology at UNT. She’s has worked for E-Lab, a design firm that uses anthropological research to develop new product ideas, where she developed an interest in design anthropology. She’s also done consulting class projects for clients like Motorola and Microsoft.

Download PDF of article here, or if you unlike me don’t have a certain sentimental fondness for badly scanned academic article PDFs, it’s online here.

Leslie MacNeil: Design Ethnography: Strategy for Visual Communications

2009 Graduate Thesis
Very, very good text that covers just about every way design and ethnography can meet (at least when speaking about tangible design and not applied design thinking), including case studies of designer-ethnographer collaborations. And, which makes it even more relevant for me, it specifically discusses visual communication, as opposed to product design which otherwise tends to be synonymous with “design” in this context (all those mobile phones!). Academia-phobics have nothing to fear, either, from downloading this since it’s a beautiful and inviting booklet designed by MacNeil herself.

Download PDF here.

IDEO + WKK Foundation: Tangible Steps Toward Tomorrow

2007 Case Study
IDEO is a human-centered design agency more or less impossible to miss talking about these subjects. In this case study, they’ve used ethnographic methods + design thinking to come up with solutions for evolving early education. Do explore other case studies from IDEO as well, many are interesting.

Download PDF case story here.

AIGA + Cheskin: An Ethnography Primer

2007 Information Leaflet
Quite basic primer, veered towards how design can be helped by ethnographic insights. As it’s targeted to designers and pitches ethnography to them in their daily practice, the role of designers solving other types of problems with the aid of ethnographic fieldwork (as in the IDEO case study) is not covered, however, it’s a nice introduction text. Cheskin is a US-based consumer insights consultancy.

Download PDF leaflet here.

The problem with much product innovation, according to Verganti, is that is largely user-driven – changes are done to products in response to what consumers say that they want. This will create incremental changes; when asked about what more they want from their phone, say, few people will think up a radically new use for it. Rather, they will talk about small nuisances with their existing product that they would like to have fixed. More radical innovation has traditionally been driven by the emergence of new technologies, it’s technology-driven. Technology has created some groundbreaking products, but is it the only way?

No, Verganti argues, really radical innovation should be design-driven. With this term, he’s not referring to design in its everyday meaning but in its etymological essence, as “making sense of things.” The really interesting point Verganti makes, I think, is that innovation needs to be centered around the meaning of things. People don’t buy products or services – they buy meanings. They use things for various emotional, psychological, and sociocultural reasons, not just utilitarian ones. Companies should therefore look beyond the actual product and its technicalities, and instead try to understand the real meanings given to it by consumers.

Understanding these means being able to innovate radically, by redefining such meanings. This can not be done by standard consumer research. Instead it takes a broader approach to getting to know both the context in which the product is used and general trends in society (I’m thinking that ethnography, anthropology, possibly semiotics are the methods for this?). Additionally, it demands an analytic, creative mind – an interpreter – that can come up with a way to create a new, appealing, meaning.

Verganti uses some very well-known brands as examples of this type of innovation. For example, when asked what they wanted in video game consoles, users said more power, more virtual reality … Enter the Nintendo Wii, a product that doesn’t give you those things, but instead redefines how video games are used. Or, in the service sector, who would have thought that they could see shopping organic, healthy food as a pleasant pastime, pre-Whole Foods? Well, now they are. As these examples show, this approach to creating innovation is not detached from what the user wants at all. It aims to find what he or she wants, but doesn’t know yet. And who doesn’t like to be pleasantly surprised?

You can also hear Roberto Verganti speak about the main ideas in his book in a recent Harvard Business Ideacast.