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El blog de Mikel Niño
Industria 4.0, Big Data Analytics, emprendimiento digital y nuevos modelos de negocio

Using "generative research" in solution design

The discipline of "generative research" and its use in solution design has a very strong connection with methods like customer development. As an example, we could quote the presentation words in the book "Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design" by Liz Sanders, one of the main experts in this area: "Generative design research is an approach to bring the people we serve through design directly into the design process in order to ensure that we can meet their needs and dreams for the future".

As we can conclude from those words, this discipline has a lot to do with integrating the customer into the design process to build a solution to the problem we focus on. "Generative design research" looks for inspiration for solution design in people's daily lives, in how they work and interact in their usual environments. Such a philosophy is strongly connected with the idea of "getting out of the building" and the need for observing the real world in order to validate our "lab hypotheses".

As another example of this connection, it is also relevant this entry in Grace Ascuasiati's blog (in Spanish), another expert in this field, where she explicitly mentions the evolution of "design research" concept during recent years and its clear connection with the methodologies that are rapidly spreading across our entrepreneurship-intensive environment, where direct communication with customers plays a crucial role since the very first stages of the process.

Frank Bentley and his book "Building Mobile Experiences" is another important work of reference, where he applies this research discipline's key points to the specific context of building mobile apps. As we can infer from its title, the book focuses on the concept of "experience" for users, something that we have already seen in other reflections about solution design in this environment. Frank Bentley addresses in his proposal the need for identifying the "research questions" that must be answered in order to correctly orientate your app's design, so that you identify for each of them the right method to gather information from the people answering them: direct observation, interviews, daily visits to users' workplace, daily logs written by them registering their actions,... In short, methods which share a philosophy of going beyond lab simulations and getting out to the "real world".

[Haz clic aquí para la versión en español de esta entrada]

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