Hello,
Dear Don and all,
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.
This would follow the convention and history in, for example, car design.
In the 70s, a major change in design process occurred in car design. Prior to that had been what was colloquially referred to at the time as 'over the wall' design, styling, manufacturing and sales.
The exterior styling of a car was produced and sketches form the stylists sent 'over the wall' to engineering designers to create designs for the car. These designs for the car were sent 'over the wall' to manufacturing who created the cars that were then sent 'over the wall' to marketing and sales.
Typical comments went something like:
'How the heck can we create manufacturable designs for something like that?! Don't they know we can't make those shapes?' (from engineering designers)
'How the heck can we manufacture that?! Don't they know we don't have those kinds of manufacturing processes?!' (from the manufacturing engineers)
'How the heck can we sell them?! Don't they know customers want something different to this?! (From the marketing and sales professionals)
In the early 70s, the major design process change was to first have the marketing people do research about the markets, users, ergonomics and usability issues before the design started. Then this marketing research was handed to the vehicle project managers who engaged a multidisciplinary team of vehicle stylists, engineering designers, manufacturing engineers, accountants and marketing personnel to ensure the final product as designed was what customers wanted to buy and would make profit.
The surveys of users etc was regarded clearly as marketing research, and that position hasn't changed significantly since then. Nor have the reasons for its use, and the relationship to product styling and engineering design.
So, the challenging question for the history of design is whether it is better in terms of disciplinary clarity to continue classifying user research as marketing research and in the discipline of marketing, rather than design research?
If not, I'm interested in the reasons why.
Best Regards,
Terry
==
Dr Terence Love
FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI, MAISA
Director
Design Out Crime & CPTED Centre
Perth, Western Australia
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www.designoutcrime.org
+61 (0)4 3497 5848
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ORCID 0000-0002-2436-7566
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Don Norman
Sent: Wednesday, 1 February 2017 1:14 AM
To: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: A question about the history of Design Research
Thanks, Lubo
All excellent points. Defining the start of any subject is always difficult. Should we consider alchemistry as the start of the scientific field of chemistry? My readings convince me that we should -- but not all alchemists, only some.
Practitioners of a field have to exist long before the field itself. After all, in order to have a field, there have to be some critical number of people who believe in it and who are already practising it. The earliest practitioners can exist many decades before the field is officially recognized and named.
thanks for the comments
don
On Tue, Jan 31, 2017 at 8:53 AM, Lubomir Savov Popov <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> Before we look at the history of design research, we need to define
> design research and which human activities qualify for design
> research. Do we search for and include the inquiry method of the
> craftsmen? Do we include everyday inquiry methods? Or we consider only
> scientific research (again, with all varieties of paradigms and
> movements). If we consider only scientific research, I would go with
> Victor Margolin and several other authors like him.
>
Don Norman
Prof. and Director, DesignLab, UC San Diego [log in to unmask] designlab.ucsd.edu/ www.jnd.org <http://www.jnd.org/>
Executive assistant:
Olga McConnell, [log in to unmask] +1 858 534-0992
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