Rick Robinson At CHIFOO: 5.410
Rick Robinson’s presentation provided a kind of widescreen meta look at the world of design research full of challenges to established models and assumed best practices associated with that discipline. Robinson is a developmental psychologist who came into this field by accident encountering the “weird people in design” 18-20 year ago. During his career he has been involved in design projects ranging from women’s shavers to the BMW 5 series. “From The sublime to the ridiculous” he said without defining which of these projects were one or the other.
Robinson didn’t come in armed with conclusions, but with ideas and questions for considering how design research can be thought about differently and improved. His slides were not filled with words and bullets but often sketches and models that were intended to provoke thoughtful ideas and additional questions. His presentation is based on a work in progress which can be viewed through his website athttp://www.thinkpulp.com/work-in-progress/good-work-in-design-work-values-process-and-understanding. Those who were at the May meeting will find his latest draft online to be useful to clarify or expand upon many of the points he made.
“One has to be comfortable with the idea that research does not provide definite answers to particular questions” in the development of design research according to Robinson in his paper. At CHIFOO he expanded on that often stressing limitations of ethnographic research and some practices associated with it. “Talking to someone in their home does not really deal with context. For instance he stated that research design requires the observational and that conversation is more useful than an interview. As for field work “user is the expert but you have to expertise too, you can’t be naive.”
The working definition of ethnographic research given by Robinson is “A description, of a system, activity, belief, setting, culture, etc. and interpretation—not just a summary - of that description toward an end both salient and instrumental within constraints - of site, setting, time tools, materials, and solution spaces.” He gave special emphasis on the words and phrases description, interpretation, towards an end and within constraints. Robinson also stressed the responsibility that designers had and the importance of values when being involved in the design process. “Once you accept that you are putting into the world and how it will create change, then that means that the developer has an almost moral responsibility about how it will make the world different.” A child’s toy doesn’t start out to be evil but choices along the way (such as materials) can lead it to become a bad thing. In a brief and similar example he showed a slide of the Nuremberg rally stating that Speer and Riefenstahl were very talented designers but, well, the client they worked for…
Robinson’s talk was also peppered with references to works of others that seem well worth checking out further. Among these are the work of Cambridge anthropologist Danny Miller, whose titles include Stuff, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, and The Comfort of Thing, writer Louis Menand, New Yorker writer and author of the recently released The Marketplace of Ideas, and Hugh Dubberly who has contributed greatly to the literature of usability and design in the Interactions journal and elsewhere.
Ultimately references to these individuals, discussions of how disciplines like behavioral economics can be useful to design research, and the too numerous to mention frameworks and models lead to his conclusion that design could very much benefit by the development of a “values-oriented, systemically scaled experience frame design.”
This conclusion reflects his original presentation title of “Explicit Values for Better Design Research” and his work in progress title Good Work in Design Work: Values, Process, and Understanding” The title slide for the May presentation, however, was “Building Elephants: the Aims of Design Research".
And although he challenged the value of the perhaps too-oft used metaphorical tale of the blind men each with a distinctly different perspective in describing and elephant when applied to design. (there’s not even an elephant there to unearth and discover. Ironically, the evening’s response and Q & A question his presentation was reminiscent of that tale as CHIFOO members saw interpretations and applications of his work applicable or like or unlike architecture, web development relating somewhat to mission visions and values development, etc. Yet most, I believe would agree with an affirmative yes, as Robinson did to the last question of the evening where someone asked him if he is trying to do something big here. Big, just like an elephant with lots of parts and in this case lots of inspirations and influences.
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