Design Thinking makes research more tangible

Scientific research is sometimes performed in too abstract a way. Scientists should consider design in the first stages of a project and follow an ‘experience design’ vision. Giving more thought to materialization and early prototypes will also facilitate communicating the projects to the outside world. During a recent Friday Food, researchers Pieter Heytens and Dries De Roeck presented their ‘Design Thinking’ framework.

Pieter Heytens (iLab.U) and Dries De Roeck (Center for User Experience Research) say not enough attention is given to the user experience in the first phases of scientific research. Researchers keep working in the ‘fuzzy front end’, which eliminates a number of evaluations. By staying in the fuzzy front end for too long, not enough focus is placed on the end product, which in turn leads to the postponing of decisions and subsequently them being given a lower priority. If research only sees fruition as a working product late in the process, the audience or the stakeholder does not get a complete view of the research process. 

To Heytens and De Roeck, Design Thinking is a collection of methods that demonstrate how to provide input for an ‘experience design’ vision. Heytens and De Roeck see three phases in their Design Thinking framework:  defining the research; choosing materials and producing software or hardware prototypes; and implementation whereby the ‘lo-fi’ prototypes evolve into to high-end prototypes. This last phase also includes learning from the implementation. These phases do not necessarily proceed in a linear fashion, which enables the early testing of applications. The higher the number of iterations, the more likely a project will succeed. And if a project fails, it will fail graciously. 

During their Friday Food session, Heytens and De Roeck discussed a number of projects in which good use was made of prototypes:

• PecMan, a joint project between Alcatel and iLab, in which users were shown pages and icons for a website, in the early stages of development. 
• Pressto, a pager system for orders in restaurants: prototypes were used extensively to evaluate how customers were using the pager and what they expected from the system. 
• HiMasquarade, also in collaboration with Alcatel: researchers presented gaming children and grandparents with a storybook to see how they reacted to the game and how they were drawn into the game.
• TranseCare, a communications platform for people who need extra care: early in the project a simple prototype was built using a wooden board as a prototype for a tablet pc. 
• MuTable, research into multitouch interaction: this project also used very rudimentary prototypes.
• DarkMatr, a ‘digital art’-project, in which the artists spent a lot of time on their vision, and built prototypes as a means of communication. 

Heytens and De Roeck learnt from these examples that a prototype can be ‘low fidelity’: a drawing may suffice and a rudimentary model sometimes gets more comment than what looks like a finished product. Users hesitate to criticize finished products because of the large amount of work that has already gone into them.

De Roeck and Heytens stress the fact that experience design can only happen if the project team embraces the principle early on, and considers experience design as a part of its vision. It is of the utmost importance that all key players in the project are of the same mindset.

Early prototypes or drawings do not only further the research itself, De Roeck and Heytens claim. Better communication will also bridge the gap between research and industry and will also increase the chance of attracting investors for a project, early on.

Back