Informing our Intuition: Design Research for Radical Innovation

This article, from the innovation and design firm IDEO, begins by discussing the research necessary to improve existing designs and then examines the challenges of design innovation for more open-ended design proposals, such as new technologies, unexplored markets, or improving the unfamiliar. "Radical innovation requires both evidence and intuition: evidence to become informed, and intuition to inspire us in imagining and creating new and better possibilities....In cases such as these, effective research is not just about analysis of objective evidence – there isn’t any directly applicable data anyway; it’s also about the synthesis of evidence, recognition of emergent patterns, empathic connection to people’s motivations and behaviours, exploration of analogies and extreme cases, and intuitive interpretation of information and impressions from multiple sources."

The author, Jane Fulton Suri, a managing partner and creative officer at IDEO, discusses the role of intuition in design research, the limitations of traditional sources of confidence in creating ‘disruptive’ innovations, the integration and engagement of design research in finding innovation, and three kinds of design research:

1. Generative design research - involving "looking for emergent patterns, challenges, and opportunities that can be addressed by innovation. The intent is that ideas about possible new offerings are informed and inspired by in-depth understanding of people’s aspirations, attitudes, behaviours, emotions, perceptions, processes, and motivations within their prevailing and evolving social, cultural, and technology context."
2. Evaluative or formative design research - giving ideas a form, "whether as sketches, models, stories, videos or other kinds of prototypes....[used for] building confidence by addressing questions and uncertainties as they arise."
3. Predictive design research - "Predictive research refers to those research activities that are concerned with looking ahead to estimate the potential of future opportunities and ideas, primarily from the perspective of their business viability"