Re-summarization of an old idea:

Both pre-artifact and post-artifact research turns up two kinds of findings: facts and insights.

Fact is observational data, the reporting of attributes and behaviors, from the perspective of the observer, without anthropological thickness. The interpretation is left to the intuition of the observer.

Insights, on the other hand, uncover the perspective of those being researched, and yield new modes of interpretation, new fields of relevance and significance: new ways to understand what otherwise appears self-evident.

Most UX professionals call all pre-artifact research “generative” but the generative value of pre-artifact research lies in the insights it turns up, not the facts it gathers. The facts are valuable, and do guide the design, but the facts themselves do not inspire innovation. The factual dimension of pre-artifact research is better characterized as “informative” research. And likewise, post-artifact research, known as “evaluative” tends to focus on the suitability of the artifact — a sort of QA process. But post-artifact research is also a test of a team’s understanding of its users. Every tested artifact is a hypothesis: “If I understand you, this design will make sense to you, be valuable to you, speak to what you care about, and resonate with you.”

Both are needed, but due to the ontic (objective, thingly) orientation of the average non-philosophical mind which predominate in most business settings, only the factual is recognized. “Insight” tends to be dismissed as “bullshit,” “fluff,” and the like, or it is reduced to synonymity with mere fact.

And for this very reason a lot of what has been passed off as “generative” research has in fact been nothing but informative research, which is experienced by designers as “dry”, and which has done nothing to inspire innovation.

This does much to explain the current trend of dismissing generative research as passe. Nonetheless, to anyone experienced in doing or consuming real generative research this whole meme is nothing more than the opining of the ignorant to one another. People never show their blindness quite as starkly as when they parade their cynicism and tell “the Emperor wears no clothes” stories.