Phillipa Ashton responded to
'... Prashant ...[who] seems to be probing the difference between design and market research and I wonder if he actually means where one stops and the other starts within a commercial design process.'
And asked
'So what is the difference between market and design research in the industrial context?'
I would like to offer a slightly different perspective. I have been working with an associate in a knowledge transfer project during the last two years. The objective from the commercial point of view was to develop an integrated design and marketing function within the company. The particular market situation of the company tended in the past to distort product development processes to the needs of commercial buyers for retail chains - for example, the company had little scope to engage in end-user research.
One insight gained is that research that helps one understand what the market wants and research that helps one understand what will create a market are not incommensurable. The former is a crude expression of orthodox marketing research the latter a similarly crude expression of design-led research. One characterization perhaps is that, in terms of understanding the dynamics of the production and consumption of designed goods and services, market research tends to work from the outside in and design research from the inside out. In some situations the adoption of parallel research activities facilitates fast track projects and the opportunity to design in better timed time- and resource- saving decision points, for example, on concept selection, tooling up, or abandonment of the project.
We will be producing a paper over the next few months.
One idea I found interesting was how design futures research turns many market research assumptions on their heads. See: James Woudhuysen in Oakely, M (ed.) (1990) Design Management: A Handbook of Issues and Methods, Oxford:Basil Blackwell.
Does anyone have any partcularly good references on Design Futures Research?
Dr Geoff Matthews
Course Leader MA Interdisciplinary Design
Lincoln School of Architecture
University of Lincoln, UK
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