On Tue, Jan 31, 2017 at 6:21 PM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I feel there is a  more challenging question in the history of design
> research about  whether surveys of customers and users are better regarded
> as market research rather than design research? That is they are part of
> marketing research history rather than design research history.


​Terry

This starts to move the discussion into another one, better titled
something like "On the differences and similarities between marketing
research and design research."

I have long thought that these two fields are (or should be) more related
than they are. Instead, they are often fraught with disciplinary fights and
disputes about "who owns the another." And, for accidental historical
reasons, a dispute over the efficacy of quantitative research (with large
numbers of respondents, each studied rather shallowly) versus qualitative
research (with sometimes very small numbers of respondents -- but studied
in depth.)​

To my mind, the differences are minor. The qualitative/quantitative fight
is starting to go away with the realization that both forms of data are
valuable, but that each provides different information.

In addition, the goals of the two groups differ:

   - Marketing tends to focus upon what people actually purchase
   - Design tends to focus upon what people actually need.

But just doing market research can lead to products that do not satisfy,
and just doing design research can lead to products that people do not buy.

====
I beleive that the earliest attempts to gauge the interest and needs of
customers was probably closer to the marketing research side of things, but
nonetheless, it helped inform early designers of true needs.

Many of the early designers (and all the good ones that I know today) are
excellent observers of the behavior of themselves and others. Even the guru
designers who do not like design research actually do a lot of it, but they
don't call it that. They watch, they oftentimes go and visit the sites, try
the tasks they are designing for, and do a lot of field work.

Is that design research? Yes, I would argue so.

When did it start? I can only believe that it started when the first
designing started. How else can one design unless there is some
understanding of the people and activities? The reason that hand tools,
crafts tools and sporting and athletic devices are often the best designed
implements available is that the designers are often also strong
practitioners of the activity.

This is not formal design research. I think it might even be better, except
that it clearly is biased toward an elite set of expert performers.

SO, I consider research on people to all be a form of design research,
although with different approaches and nuances and goals.

My question many posts ago was when these activities became recognized with
a codified set of standard tools (which today, measure in the hundreds for
both market and design research)

Don



Don Norman
Prof. and Director, DesignLab, UC San Diego
[log in to unmask] designlab.ucsd.edu/  www.jnd.org  <http://www.jnd.org/>


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