Thanks for the great comment.

Thank you for such an insightful post.

We must embrace design research methods that fuse research practices borrowed from anthropology (principally an ethnographic practice that emphasises time spent in the field), with ergonomics and usability (understanding how people use stuff) and participatory design techniques (workshops and creative tools that enable participants to ‘own the exchange’ and contribute their ideas freely).

Users must be involved in (co)designing the solution. A user just telling a researcher about their concerns and worries gets us nowhere (well, it gets us a research report). Design research methods don’t separate research from action – they are one and the same thing, focussed on creating a better experience. This means that users must be directly involved in co-designing the solutions to their problems (and then maybe later maintaining the resulting service design), alongside expert designers who can bring their ideas to life through prototypes.

Last and most important, designers must be involved to create prototypes. Participatory, user centred design research techniques give us the framework to understand and diagnose the real issues and problems behind users’ experiences of our products. However, in order to act on that framework, to imagine a better situation or system, you need designers, developers who can make things real through developing and iterating prototypes of the solution. Prototypes bought to life through drawings, mock-ups and models create tangible evidence of progress and change and allow stakeholders to evaluate and improve on options through a hands-on process of iteration.

The key to sustaining relevance requires an iterative and efficient cycle of ideation, experimentation, value capture and re-ideate.