Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-g78kv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-27T16:37:22.919Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Seeking Insights into an unknown Future: Exploring Designers’ Strategies to Discover Key Insights

Part of: User-Centred Design

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Line Sand Knudsen  and
Louise Møller Haase

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Insights play a significant role in creation of new products. Insights provide the designer with an understanding of the user, market, technologies and trends, and how these might change over time. This information is critical for the designer to get an understanding of how and why present products succeed or fail. Hence, insights serve as both triggers and drivers for envisioning future products, but they are also fundamental to ensure that new products created will provide meaningful experiences to the users. In design literature, there is a significant amount of research on how to gather information about the user, market, trends, etc. However, very little research is focused on how the designer addresses this information to discover or uncover key insights. Through interviews with expert designers behind twelve products, we identified three strategies that designers use to discover insights. We found that designers search for insights that could be used to: 1) establish the product's future identity, 2) identify core challenges based on the new identity in the existing user experience and 3) identify solutions that could meet the core challenges and accentuate the new identity.

Keywords

Design insightsEarly design phasesDesign practiceNew product development
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , July 2019 , pp. 3999 - 4008
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019

References

Atkinson, P. and Hammersley, M. (2007), Ethnography: Principles in Practice 3rd edition., Taylor & Francis e-Library.Google Scholar
van Boijen, A., et al. (2013), Delft Design Guide, BIS Publishers.Google Scholar
Brown, T. (2009), Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, Harper Business.Google Scholar
Buijs, J. (2012), The Delft Innovation Method: A Design Thinker's Guide to Innovation, Eleven International Publishing.Google Scholar
Christiaans, H. (1992), Creativity in design. Department of Industrial Design, Phd Thesis.Google Scholar
Cooper, R. and Evans, M. (2006), “Breaking from Tradition : Consumer Needs, and Design Futures”, Design Management Review, pp. 68–74.Google Scholar
Cranz, G. (2016), Ethnography for Designers, Taylor & Francis Ltd, New York.Google Scholar
Cross, N. (2007), Designerly Ways of Knowing, Birkhäuser, Basel, Boston, Berlin.Google Scholar
Csikszentmihalyi, M. and Rochberg-Halton, E. (1981), The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Dong, A. and MacDonald, E. (2017), “From Observations to Insights: The Hilly Road to Value Creation”, In: Christensen, B. T., Ball, L. J. and Halskov, K. (Ed.), Analysing Design Thinking: Studies of Cross-Cultural Co-Creation, Taylor & Francis, London, pp. 465–482.Google Scholar
Dorst, K. (2006), “Design Problems and Design Paradoxes”, Design Issues, Vol. 22 No. 3, pp. 4–17.Google Scholar
Dorst, K. 2015. Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design Friedman, K. & Stolterman, E., eds., London, England: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Dorst, K. and Cross, N. (2001), “Creativity in the design process: Co-evolution of problem-solution”, Design Studies, Vol. 22 No. 5, pp. 425–437.Google Scholar
Dragt, E. (2017), How to Research Trends: Move Beyond Trend Watching to Kickstart Innovation, BIS Publishers, Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Edeholt, H. and Ek, A. (2008), “Research design and the professional model”, 5th Interim Conference of the International Sociological Association, pp. 1–14.Google Scholar
Eisenhardt, K. and Graebner, M. (2007), “Theory Building from Cases : Opportunities and Challenges”, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 50 No. 1, pp. 25–32.Google Scholar
Harrison, S., Tatar, D. and Sengers, P. (2007), “The three paradigms of HCI”, Alt. Chi. Session at the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems San Jose, California, USA, pp. 1–18.Google Scholar
Hekkert, P. and Dijk, M.v. (2011), Vision in Design - A Guidebook for Innovators, BIS Publishers, Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Knudsen, L.S. and Haase, L.M. (2018), “The construction of meaning in design-driven projects: a paradox initiated process”, International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation, pp. 1–15.Google Scholar
Kolko, J. (2011), Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner's Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis, Oxford University Press, New York.Google Scholar
Lawson, B. (2005), How Designers Think: the Design Process Demystified, 4th ed., Elsevier Science.Google Scholar
Lee, Y. and Evans, M. (2012), “What drives organisations to employ design-driven approaches? A study of fast moving consumer goods brand development”, Design Management Journal, pp. 74–88.Google Scholar
Institute, L.U.M.A. (2012), Innovating for People: Handbook of Human-Centered Design Methods, LUMA Institute, Pittsburgh.Google Scholar
Milton, A. and Rodgers, P. (2013), Research Methods for Product Design, Laurence King Publishing, London.Google Scholar
Miron-Spektor, E., Gino, F. and Argote, L. (2011), “Paradoxical frames and creative sparks: Enhancing individual creativity through conflict and integration”, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Vol. 116 No. 2, pp. 229–240.Google Scholar
Morrison, A., et al. (2014), “What We Talk About When We Talk About Design”, Toward a Taxonomy of Design Competencies. FORMakademisk, Vol. 7 No. 2, pp. 1–17.Google Scholar
Otto, T. and Smith, R.C. (2013), Design Anthropology: A Distinct Style of Knowing. In W. Gunn, T. Otto, & R. C. Smith, eds. Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice, Bloomsbury, London, England.Google Scholar
Patton, M.Q. (2015), Qualitative Research & Evaluation Methods 4th revise., SAGE Publications Inc.Google Scholar
Ravasi, D. and Rindova, V.P. (2008), “Symbolic Value Creation”, The SAGE Handbook of New Approaches in Management and Organization, pp. 464–466.Google Scholar
Rittel, H.W.J. and Webber, M.M. (1973), “Dilemmas in a general theory of planning”, Policy Sciences, Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 155–169.Google Scholar
Roozenburg, N. (1993), “On the pattern of reasoning in innovative design”, Design Studies, Vol. 14 No. 1, pp. 4–18.Google Scholar
Schneider, J. and Stickdorn, M. (2011), This Is Service Design Thinking: Basics, Tools, Cases, BIS Publishers, Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Tomitsch, M., et al. (2018), Design. Think. Make. Break. Repeat.: A Handbook of Methods, BIS Publishers, Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Ulwick, A.W. (2005), What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services, McGraw-Hill, United States.Google Scholar
Yayici, E. (2016), Design Thinking Methodology Book, Emrah Yayici.Google Scholar
Ylirisku, S., et al. (2009), “Framing Design in the Third Paradigm”, Proceedings of the 27th Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 2009, ACM, pp. 1131–1140. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1518874Google Scholar
Yuan, S.T.D. and Hsieh, P.K. (2015), “Using association reasoning tool to achieve semantic reframing of service design insight discovery”, Design Studies, Vol. 40 No. 64, pp. 143–175.Google Scholar