On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 1:22 PM, Dan Saffer <d...@odannyboy.com> wrote:
> > I've seldom seen designers or researchers then propose a new technology > that would then do what is necessary. At many companies, this would be > laughed at. I agree they would be laughed at. This discussion at core is about human needs driving technology versus technologists driving technology further. Unable to construct a response in a few lines, I wrote a short essay on this and include it below. It is cross posted to the BusinessWeek forum. ------ Don Norman's argument in his latest essay "Technology first, human needs last" goes something like this: *Because* Because the technology behind the 5 major things that made the industrial and information revolution possible came from tinkering/mathematics/engineering without deep consideration of human needs... (example technologies: automobile - the internal combustion engine; airplane - aerodynamics of flight, 3axis control; telephone - conversion of speech to electromagnetic signals; the computer - binary arithmetic, vacuum tubes, transistors) *Therefore* I prove to my audience that design and design research isn't the first step in innovation. I prove to my audience that technology is a major leap and everything else is incremental, value-added tweaks. This argument is wrong, and really a statement of the cultural and political status quo in technology development. This argument suggest that the status quo should continue. This must be countered by designers. As I show below the implications go well beyond innovation that is better targeted for human use, but affects the progress of the human race across the board in many fields. Let's unfold this... *A few successes and many failures does not suggest a model of success * If we limit ourselves to the 5 major things in the world that yielded major technology breakthroughs, we are pitting 5 things of historic value versus millions+ of things of no value at all. There are millions of theories, research, and technological advances which YIELD NO SIGNIFICANT returns. That is why they say that human knowledge doubles every 5 years whereas major breakthroughs certainly do not. It would be easy to counter Norman's argument by saying that on the whole the vast majority of technology-led projects produce no major benefit to humankind (at least on the product level) and so it is a hit or miss strategy (low success rate). So why do we have so much faith in the wasteful engineering-driven approach? *The Ugly Truth - The Bias of Engineers* Anyone who has spent more than a few years in a technology industry knows the ugly truth. There is a massive bias when innovating towards those ideas that offer interesting technical advancement. Engineers prefer to work on "hard" engineering problems. Why the bias? The culture/personality/training of the engineer is techno-focused and DRIVEN to a WORLD of problems within this focus. Problems that that may, for example, require a system level solution or insights beyond his trained domain are NOT SO INTERESTING OR EVEN GO UNOBSERVED. This insular focus is why hard drive companies keep trying to build a bigger hard drive, or a faster hard drive, and all the while more pressing real customer needs - like managing information and warehousing data - go ignored. Their customer intimacy is mostly wasted, they do little design research. Many startups have a strong sense of human needs they are trying to tackle, the founders live or die on the basis of being profitably useful to people in short order. So it is not like "design thinking" never existed in the business cycle. But after the startup phase, engineering culture dominates and peering into the needs of the customer and designing for them is almost heresy. I've seen this over and over. Hard drive companies stay hard drive companies all the way to their grave (even with beautiful industrial design). Why do design research if your strategy won't be affected by it!? As an example, I'm sure design research would show that few people understand what a hard drive is, let alone what backing up is, let alone how to navigate the "scary" windows file system. But everyone wants their data safe! Engineers of course, do not suffer from this dilemma between conceptual understanding and desire - they fully understand hard drives and can keep their data safe and sound if they wish - so they are not personally motivated by such "human" problems. Their PREFERENCE is to work on technical and scientific problems like higher capacity disk drives based on space-age materials. Yet, a designer amidst the aforementioned problems may see a "radical" opportunity. He might imagine a device that keeps a person's data perputually safe rather than a traditional hard drive. The only reason for such a perpetual vault to exist and its entire form would be to meet human needs, desires, and even their fears. *Most Grand Ideas Are Ignored or Go Unseen By Engineers* The findings of design research are usually human needs, and often the appropriate response is not technology but complex design (which may then require a technological advance). Innovation must crystallize mercurial human desires in a tangible form. But we've shown that among engineers there is a bias towards techno-centric innovation. It turns out that this bias against design research is symptomatic of a much larger, more profound problem. You see, design research whether formal or informal (akin to the designer's intuition) reveals human needs, but human needs aren't just elaborated in observational (aka design) research. They are elaborated continuously in many fields of study. To be explicit, the parts of the world which include deep analysis of people, environment, aesthetics, ie fields such as medicine, psychology, finance, culture, and language (to name a few) are mostly ignored by engineers. *This results in the fact that no significant technology innovation occurs there.* MOST OF THE HUMAN WORLD IS IGNORED by engineers; it's not just observational research that isn't driving technology it goes far beyond that. How many physicians, psychologists, economists, or linguists have a clue about software engineering and can "think" technology? The result of this gap? While we see a myriad of similar products vying for attention - like cell phones with lots of "breakthrough technologies" (like mega-pixel video recording) - we have almost nobody working on many of earth's most pressing and interesting problems. Having worked in various tech companies I believer that major shifts in focus will only come from polymath designers (and accompanying scientists) willing to deep dive into the technology world. Don Norman, call me when a computer can transcribe anyone's voice, or read a story with human inflection, or analyze traffic flows and figure out how to improve them, or analyze the DNA of someone and predict disease and MILLIONS of other things....YOU IGNORED. MOST "radical problems", or "grand ideas" in Norman's words, are never seen by the eyes of an engineer. We have a GAP of WORLDS. It is impossible to believe that "they (the engineers) will get the grand ideas running" as Don Norman suggests. *The Reason for Status Quo - Technology Companies are Driven by Technologists* Don Norman's idea - technology first, human needs second - is nothing more than a statement of the status quo. Anyone who works in technology knows that most technology development is led by Chief Technology Officers and not Chief Designers. The minds in this space are wired around technology first and what it can do for people last. I'm reminded of Samsung ex-CEO Yun saying that he realized that without a Chief Design Officer, the company would never be able to have enough muscle to produce a flat-loading printer which users preferred, to the top-loading printer preferred by engineers because it was 10% cheaper to build and familiar. Flat-loading versus top-loading was a struggle!?! That makes the mind boggle. How do you think the engineering group would have reacted if CEO Yun had told them they aren't building printers at all, but solving the paper records-digital records divide? No op. I've been the one to propose "radical" things like that and I can say the majority of companies cannot entertain such shape-shifting ideas because it takes individuals like the CTO beyond their expertise. It requires different leadership, with different skills. "Radical problems" that are people centric don't get focus because they require both deep domain insights and design talent to "envision" potential solutions. Designers by their consitution are strategically positioned to lead through these difficult waters to profitable new worlds, but let's be honest here. How many designers are in a position to actualize their vision? How many control the means of production - the engineers - and are likely to get their way or able initiate small skunk work investigations into new open-ended technologies? Very, very few. And if they pitch their ideas and fail, heads would roll. Whereas, costly "architectural refactoring", or skunkworks projects led by the CTO are commonplace. However, these engineer-led projects are usually not pushing the envelope into solving new human problems but are technical investigations into substituting one technology for a newer one (like changing programming languages or platforms, a favorite of engineers) or making the architecture vaguely "better." Rarely do heads roll over engineering projects led by engineers, side-projects are seen as the cost of "keeping up" and there is little management insight or accountability into these efforts. Sometimes companies fail because they became so focused on their technology (versus their users), at which point everyone moves on and the industry rewards them for the experience they gained at their last outfit. A lot of the effort in the tech industry is wasted effort. What about corporate design teams you ask? If they exist, they are there mostly to soften technology's rough edges for human use and provide "lipstick" to boot. Let's not mistake these tweaks on existing technology, with a potential world in which human needs are placed front and center in envisioning what new technology must be created. *A New World Focused on Human Needs First Is Possible* Where Don Norman is in a blur - and I'm not sure how he got himself in it - is in taking the 5 large successes of 100 years and saying "see that's the way it's done! it's the technology that comes first! And the engineer guides it!" Talk about drinking the koolaid! What would the world look like if a new set of "grand ideas" was made the focus of technology, and the synthesis skills of designers were brought to bear on problems of a different sort? What if the problems were soft ones, or system-level ones, or nuanced ones but even more lucrative ones? How do we get great designers (who tend to be polymaths who can hone in on people's needs and consider technological constraints) to work with scientists and economists and psychologists and musicians to push technology driven by unmet human needs? I admit that refocusing engineers and redirecting their efforts with design and design research will not be easy, it is an immense cultural and political challenge. But if I am right, when the money is tight more projects will be led by designers because investors will be more selective in what they sponsor. Projects with a well researched premise, and a proven set of unmet human needs coupled with some innovative design vision will drive what technology needs to get built. Designers will get more of the "grand ideas running" in the future. What a cruel joke it is that we go to Best Buy and see a gazillion similar cell phones and scream "What a wonderful world! They did it!", but I can't go to a bookstore and find something that will teach me a language (and provide analysis and feedback on my speaking) or a music store and find something that will teach me how to play guitar with all the subtleties that might entail. As you move away from hard technology to almost everything else you realize what a small swath of the world we are innovating in because of a GAP of WORLDS. Don Norman you've fallen into that gap. You are an important figure so crawl out and see the light! Navid Sadikali User Experience Designer ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
