How to sell 3 million widgets, guaranteed!
These are the slides and notes from a talk I gave at the second Lightning UX event in London on the 5th April. There were 10 speakers on the night, each with only 5 minutes to present, so there’s a lot here that I got through in 5 minutes! I hope it was useful to some of the audience and some of you. I like talks as a chance to get a bit abstract, so apologies if that’s not your thing! I’d love to hear some responses in the comments.
At Live|work, we use design research extensively as a way of taking risk out of decision-making and as inspiration for our projects. As I’m sure you’ve guessed, I’m not saying that design research guarantees 0 risk. I’m arguing the opposite, that dealing with the future carries no guarantees, only ways of understanding the environment you’re taking risks in.
Risk management usually involves both tactical and strategic research. This duality is one of the joys of design work, but it can cause a lot of confusion. Clients can brief for the one when they want the other and it’s all too easy to get the balance wrong when you’re flipping back and forth between the two.
So what I’d like to suggest is that design research would benefit from a kind of ‘string’ theory - a grand unifying discourse that clears up some of the differences without building walls between different practices.
I’m going to lift some concepts I’ve found useful from French philosophy to do this. I don’t claim to be an expert in these concepts and if post-structuralism is your thing, I’m pretty sure that you could tell me that I’ve gotten it all wrong!
Social life of ideas
One of the insights we can take from the humanities is that ideas have a social life outside of their technical details. Edison famously didn’t have the best technology for electric lightbulbs and distribution, but the guy burnt the candle at both ends selling a social vision of an electrically lit society and this activity carried the day. The key point is that any artefact is an embodiment of a certain set of ideas and social practices that won out over another set of ideas.
Archaelogy
We can use the idea of archaeology to trace these histories. Instead of digging objects out of the ground, with each layer of sediment marking a thousand years of human history, we can dig up the the social environment that ideas & artefacts were created in. Every designed artefact we see today can be traced back in time like this, it’s past discerned as a network of competing ideas. Each turning point represents a node in this network. New ideas grow over old ideas, spark off in new directions or simply die out.
Rhizome
This model of ideas growing organically, with winners and losers, is remarkably similar to the metaphor of a rhizome. Biologically speaking, a rhizome is a type of plant that grows in fits and starts from roots and offshoots, often underground. Their growth is unpatterned and opportunistic.They simply abandon dead ends and build on successes . These features have led to them being used abundantly as a metaphor for loosely defined networks as opposed to rigid, hierarchical tree structures.
Tying it all together
So how do these ideas fit together to help us understand tactical and strategic design.
We could see the relationship as linear. Here we see the simple development of ideas into artefacts. We might have a number of ‘strategic’ ideas such as location, group shopping or universal healthcare that lead to materialised artefacts in the form of services such as Foursquare, Groupon or the NHS.
I’m not entirely satisfied with this though. I think it implies a 1:1 relationship between ideas and artefacts. I think we need something less linear, more nuanced, to avoid creating a distinction between thinkers and doers. I don’t aspire to be the one without the other.
Time
What if we go back to our rhizome, a network of competing ideas, and the archaeology of those ideas? If we draw a line through this model called TODAY, we introduce TIME as the key differentiating factor.
This implies that below this line lies the past, and above it lies the future. If we can conduct an archaeology of the ideas and artefacts of the past, and they all connect to TODAY at some point, they must also all have some kind of trajectory into the future and we can see design research as a type of archaeology of the future.
Clearly, ideas that have moved into the past have a highly pragmatic measure of their success. They either sold 3 million widgets or they didn’t.
On the other end of the spectrum, scenario-based far future design research involves imagining some point in the future where the environment has a particular shape and then working backwards to TODAY to understand which nodes shaped that future.
Connected, near future design research is about looking at the social environment available to us TODAY and trying to grasp through their embryonic social impacts which of the current ideas carry the most value for people. We want clues about the most promising nodes for the given environment.
Finally, when we encounter ground level, all of these abstract ideas and social factors can be stabilised. Competing ideas become artefacts with firm properties, things get pragmatic and tactical. You can hold Node A or Node B in your hand and ask which actually works. At this point you can start dealing with measured data, such as did you sell 10 widgets or 1000 widgets.
And that makes selling 3 million widgets pretty much guaranteed, right?
Summing up
To sum up, here’s what I like about this model.
1. A physical object is just a highly stable form of idea.
2. There’s no hierarchy between methods. What kind of design research you apply depends entirely on what you’re looking for and when you’re looking for it.
3. It’s unified. One model can accommodate different types of design research whilst still offering some clarity about differences.