Design has come to be seen as inextricably tied to the decisions we make about the lives we live and the worlds in which we live them. Increasingly, the responsibility is becoming clear and pressing for designers to bring ethical objects, ideas and experiences into being, and for design practice and discourse to be concerned with how things ought to be in order to attain meaningful, desirable and enduring outcomes.
My name is Wynand Kok, and I’m a Design Researcher interested in projects that work towards such outcomes.
Over the course of my career, I have had the opportunity to work with visionary UX design teams and immensely talented technologists in delivering value to customers through accessible, design-led and data-informed solutions, getting my hands dirty with a diverse array of exciting digital technologies and user research techniques along the way. However, I've kept coming back to Humberto Maturana's incisive observation:
The question we humans must face is that of what do we want to happen to us, not a question of knowledge or progress.
Most recently, a lot of my interest has been in building high-impact, sustainable design teams within organisations, and the role of design in facilitating structures to support meaningful impact.
What would a Design Research process look like that incorporates continual improvement as a space to explore new ways of approaching familiar steps in the research process?; can Design Research place the experience of human "research subjects" at the center of design of how this research is conducted? In exploring these questions, the Lean Research framework stands out as a guide to how Design Research in practice can create new value.
Emerging from the work of scholars, practitioners and donors in the contexts of international development and humanitarian work, Lean Research offers a guiding framework for conducting research and evaluation. It is an approach to doing research, meaning it involves a set of practices - of things that we do differently compared to conventional research - which makes it suitable to the realm of Design Research. By being founded upon four interrelated principles of good research practice, it also gives us a vital point of departure for conducting Design Research.
High standards of rigor ensure the integrity of the research process and results, a pre-condition for research that is respectful of participants’ time and is usable by research stakeholders.
Relevant research has clear value to stakeholders and addresses priority issues and questions for research subjects, decision-makers, and also the design community.
Right-sized research is only as time- consuming, burdensome, and costly as it needs to be, and all unnecessary questions, activities, and protocols are removed.
Respectful research places the dignity and delight of the human subject at the center of the research experience.
Lean Research does not provide a set of rules to follow, but rather a guiding orientation to encourage innovation and continual improvement in research practice. Our goal as designers is to understand how users interpret their own involvement with the world as meaningful activity, and a Lean Reasearch orientation helps us understand the actions users take and how those actions result in meaning formation.