Why do I love design research?

First, I love new ideas. Performing design research early in a project generates fresher ideas. Yes, the ideas are better informed, but more importantly, they are better inspired. When we know something we are selectively filtering what seems irrelevant. But what is deemed relevant to any industry gets overcropped by experts and it loses its vitality.

Yet, it is to this expert-blessed depleted ground we go when we want to generate new ideas.

The real opportunities to innovate are hidden in plain sight as irrelevant stuff nobody thinks is important enough to talk about.

Just as importantly, new ideas are impossible to argue in the conventional way, relying on success of precedents. Newness always loses that kind of argument. But prototype arms (good) new ideas with evidence of viability and gives them a fighting chance.

Second, I love reason. We often think of intuition as a purely benevolent force. Think of all the names it goes by: inspiration, imagination, insight, idea. All great things begin with an intuition — and a heroic will to champion it and actualize it. But this neglects to notice that the most horrible things have resulted from malformed intuitions and tyrannical wills acting in the name of heroism — and these vastly outnumber the successes that have given intuition its good name.

And really, isn’t the essence of tyranny to have an intuition — an imagined thing, an alien inspiration, a spurious insight — imposed as a reality you must accept whether you believe it or not?

Reason is what allows intuitions to be accessed, assented to, internalized and shared. Reason is the ethic that feels an obligation to show, demonstrate, persuade and share ideas to anyone expected to treat them as real.

Reason is not just logic. Any horrible idea can be argued logically, and the logical structure is rarely what makes a horrible idea horrible.

Reason is not just adherence to what seems correct. All intuitions seem correct. What make ideas horrible is that they take their own self-evident correctness at face value and sees this as sufficient to require all others to treat the idea as fact, whether it is self-evident to them or not.

Reason means to establish truth socially through experiment. Where people will not submit to experiment — (because there’s an emergency, or there’s no time, or there’s no money, or there’s no point, etc., etc. etc.) —  unreason is at work. Unreason is another name for tyrannical intuition.

Third, I love transcendent truth. That is, I love the kinds of truth that cannot even be imagined until the moment they appear. You cannot go out looking for any particular transcendent truth, because, by its very essence you cannot know what to look for. All you can do is create conditions where it can appear and to expect specifically the unexpected. When things feel constricted, played out, used up or settled, and you cannot imagine how anything new could possibly happen in your industry, your field or your organization — you are failing to factor in the innately surprising nature of transcendent truth. Again, what we know secondhand cannot produce transcendent truth: only de-filtered reality with some of its chaos permitted to shine through.

Fourth, I love dialogue. Dialogue is a very specific kind of conversation: one that allows groups (usually small ones of two or three) to gather in the name of reason, in contact with a reality, and in the urgent struggle to find-create-instaurate something new together, to experience transcendent truth, not only of the situation and its possibilities, but also of one another.

Last, and very much least, design research produces better products. I really like great products. There’s a lot of them, though. We are drowning in great products. What is rare — if we are honest with ourselves — is great work. So, the principle cultural value of good products is that they increase the urgency to make even better products, and the urgency can grow so enormous and so unavoidable that organizations will sometimes resort to doing design research to create them.

I’ve done work with research, and I’ve done work without it, and the difference is total. But you have to want that difference. Powerful people and complacent people rarely want it. But the world needs it.