How to sell Design Research: SonicRim

SonicRim’s Uday Dandavate pitches the value of Design Research: succinctly and persuasively…

Design Research. The roadmap and justification for our creative activity, the underpinnings of creative work in the commercial realm. Many designers have a love/hate relationship with Design Research, which they erroneously see as an impediment to the creative impulse.

As Dandavate points out, most “design businesses worldwide, especially boutique design practices and firms that are branded around the personality of a single designer continue to be focused on strategy and embodiment of design with relatively less emphasis on design research. However, design practices that employ multi-disciplinary teams typically will employ design researchers on staff to better align their consulting services with strategic objectives of client firms.”

Being in Design Research is certainly not cut and dried: “In this market space design researchers compete for jobs with traditional market researchers, business process consultants, HR consultants, and motivational consultants… However, (clients) do not always approach a firm for “design research services. They may approach a design research company for Ethnographic Research, Co-creation, Design Thinking, Business Transformation Research, Sense making, Innovation research or Market research.”

Dandavate also talks about the significance of  information design as “opportunities for design researchers to make people’s interactions with information more useful, usable and delightful”, and Human Computer Interface (HCI) design.

For a full review of SonicRim’s take on this dynamic field, download the full article here.