Jon Kolko, Frog Design
Jon Kolko is an Associate Creative Director at frog design in Austin, Texas. His professional work involves the synthesis of complicated business and technological constraints in order to best solve the problems of Fortune 500 clients. The work spans the boundaries of Information Architecture, Interaction Design, and Usability Engineering; the common underlying theme of these problems and projects is the creation of a solution that is useful, usable, and desirable. Kolko is the author of the text Thoughts on Interaction Design; he is also the 2008-2011 Editor-in-Chief of Interactions Magazine, published by the ACM.
Talk: Predicting and Avoiding the Commoditization of Design Research
The last ten years have brought a strange duality to the discussion of outsourced or offshored design. American designers have generally accepted the commoditization of standard design techniques – form giving, design for engineering, and mass production of objects and artifacts – as ODM becomes the norm in everything from soft goods to consumer electronics. Simultaneously, the design community has witnessed an increased quantity of Asian designers, and the increased presence of design education in Asia. American and European design consultancies have pushed towards topics of "interaction design", "system design", "service design" and "design research" in order to remain both differentiated and useful; yet both historical precedence and informed prediction indicate that these intellectual aspects of design will soon too become offshored, with lower prices and competitive offerings from Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean designers leading to the ubiquity of these skills.
There are, however, aspects to all of the aforementioned intellectual pursuits that cannot be commoditized and cannot be distributed to an offshore vendor. These aspects tend to fall within the realm of design synthesis – an abductive sensemaking process of manipulating, organizing, pruning and filtering data in the context of a design problem, in an effort to produce information and knowledge.
This talk will describe how design synthesis is deeply embedded in culture, and will illustrate through example the threat of commoditization for design research, and the sustained promise and benefits of synthesis as a core business differentiator.
Workshop: Methods of Design Synthesis
User-centered design research activities produce an enormous quantity of raw data, which must be systematically and rigorously analyzed in order to extract meaning and insight. Unfortunately, these methods of analysis are poorly documented and rarely taught, and because of the pragmatic time constraints associated with working with clients, there is often no time dedicated in a statement of work to a practice of formal synthesis. As a result, raw design research data is inappropriately positioned as insight, and the value of user-centered research activities is marginalized – in fact, stakeholders may lose faith in the entire research practice, as they don’t see direct return on the investment of research activities.
Design synthesis methods can be taught, and when selectively applied, visual, diagrammatic synthesis techniques can be completed relatively quickly. During Synthesis, Designers visually explore large quantities of data in an effort to find and understand hidden relationships. These visualizations can then be used to communicate to other members of a design team, or can be used as platforms for the creation of generative sketching or model making. The action of diagramming is a way to actively produce knowledge and meaning.
This workshop will introduce various methods of Synthesis as ways to translate research into meaningful insights. Workshop participants will learn about how to manage the complexity of gathered data, and through hands-on exercises, they will apply various synthesis methods to elicit hidden meaning in gathered data.
Jon Kolko on Predicting and Avoiding the Commoditization of Design Research, IIT Design Research Conference, 2009 from IIT Institute of Design on Vimeo.
Panel Discussion: Design in a Downturn
A discussion moderated by David Armano with Dan Saffer, Jon Kolko and Ben Jacobson
It's often a challenge to sell in research or appropriate design methodologies in the best of times. How do designers make their case in the worst of times? The current business climate is pushing for things like measurable return on investment vs. pie in the sky innovation. Yet good design may be one of the best resources any organization can tap to achieve new efficiencies and better solutions. This multidisciplinary panel will discuss the challenges and business realities of designing in an economic downturn.
Design in a Downturn Panel Discussion, IIT Design Research Conference, 2009 from IIT Institute of Design on Vimeo.
Join us Online
Get updates, see who is coming, and who you'd like to meet:
Or sign-up to receive email updates as additional information about the Design Research Conference is available.