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Darrel Rhea, CEO, Cheskin Added Value
23 April 2010, The Design Council, London, UK
(US session to be announced shortly)
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| Darrel Rhea |
Consultative Design Research skills have become a core competency of a contemporary designer and design organization. For that reason, DMI has tapped one of the field’s pioneers and a leading world authority on the subject to create a Design Research Master Class Series for our global DMI community. Darrel Rhea has been inspiring designers to elevate their careers for many years as instructor of one of DMI’s most popular and highest-rated seminars, “Design Research for Product & Service Innovation.” He has updated his seminar as the first offering in DMI’s new Master Class Series, which will provide you with the perspective you need to raise the level of your contribution in your organization, and the skills to interact with, participate and manage Design Research. Most importantly, it will make you a better designer.
Design Research and the Customer-driven Innovation Strategy
Module 1 in the master class series
This seminar is a great standalone overview of Design Research, while providing a path to future modules that dive more deeply into the subject.
What you will learn:
Getting the Big Picture
Design Thinking as an approach to innovation: a framework for understanding what design thinking is and how to apply it to innovation initiatives Why innovation fails: what designers can do to assure initiatives succeed Design Innovation as a growth strategy: facilitating strategic conversations and building alignment to define innovation strategy Evaluating the business opportunity: an introduction to conducting Market Opportunity Assessments Cultural trends: using cultural trends as a framework for generating and designing new offerings Introduction to semiotics: leveraging the cultural meaning of visual design Profiling Customers: making segmentation useful for design and bringing customers to life Making meaning, the basics of value creation: uncovering what is most meaningful and most valuable to customers to create an innovation platform
Design’s unique role in customer-driven innovation
Mapping the design space: creating conceptual frameworks to facilitate concept generation Driving creative breakthroughs: using insights to redefine the problem space Design principles: translating insights into prescriptive design direction Systems design: designing holistic approaches for the organization Iterative research: during design research processes to evolve and refine concepts Validation research: building confidence in design outcomes
The Design Researcher’s tool box
Introduction to research methodologies: what tools belong in your tool box, and how to select the right method for your research objectives How to think about research data: Research as inspiration vs. useful guidance vs. prescriptive direction vs. gospel truth
Specific methods
Design Ethnography: using observational research to build empathy, bring customers to life visually, and develop models/frameworks to see opportunities and patterns Levels of ethnographic inquiry: the differences between causal observation, structured in-context interviewing, formal ethnography, rigorous commercial ethnography and academic ethnography
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Why Design Research is now critical for Designers & Design Managers
The field of design has been evolving dramatically in ways that require new competencies, new tools and higher levels of professionalism. Only a few years ago, designers expected to be provided a “spec” that defined the problem that they were to solve. Being a competent designer meant being a skilled problem solver. Today, designers and design managers are expected to be leaders that drive an organization’s approach to defining:
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Innovation strategy: The principles guiding organizational growth strategies that use design to create value
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The business problem or opportunity: The articulation of where to focus investments in design
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Customers profiles: How we define which customers we should design for (and those we shouldn’t design for)
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What matters to customers: How we discover the most meaningful unarticulated or latent needs
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What to design: How we will apply our design skills to address those needs
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Success criteria: How we determine what the evaluation criteria for a design
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Design platforms: How we create systems to manage design across the organization
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Generative facilitation: How we use insights to inspire and facilitate the design development process
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Design evaluation: How we evaluate and validate the effectiveness of our designs
Unfortunately, few design professionals have had formal training on these aspects of Design Research. Traditional Market Research approaches offer up some useful analytical tools but don’t provide the context for driving design or innovation, and B-school curriculums provide only small pieces of the puzzle. Recent design graduates might have some exposure to Design Research while in school but often lack contemporary real world experience and professional perspective to implement it well. In addition, the field of Design Research has been rapidly changing as shifts toward Design Thinking and the role of Design as a driver of innovation have evolved. Like many other fields, research processes and tools have been revolutionized over the last few years.
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The second module in the Master Class series will be announced shortly.
Dates and locations:
23 April, 2010, London, UK
The seminar will be from 9:00 until 5:00 on Friday. This seminar will be held in the Presentation Area at the Design Council located at 34 Bow St., London, UK.
We strongly encourage registering at least two weeks prior to the actual seminar date.
Register Now
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