Presumptive Design

Design Provocations for Innovation

Leo Frishberg, Charles Lambdin

• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780128030868
• eBook ISBN: 9780128030875
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Desktop Applications
• Index: Computer Science

Everything you know about the future is wrong. Presumptive Design: Design Provocations for Innovation is for people "inventing the future: future products, services, companies, strategies and policies. It introduces a design-research method that shortens time to insights from months to days. Presumptive Design is a fundamentally agile approach to identifying your audiences' key needs. Offering rapidly crafted artifacts, your teams collaborate with your customers to identify preferred and profitable elements of your desired outcome. Presumptive Design focuses on your users' problem space, informing your business strategy, your project's early stage definition, and your innovation pipeline. Comprising discussions of design theory with case studies and how-to's, the book offers business leadership, management and innovators the benefits of design thinking and user experience in the context of early stage problem definition. Presumptive Design is an advanced technique and quick to use: within days of reading this book, your research and design teams can apply the approach to capture a risk-reduced view of your future.- Provides actionable approaches to inform strategy and problem definition through design thinking- Offers a design-based research method to complement existing market, ethnographic and customer research methods- Demonstrates a powerful technique for identifying disruptive innovation early in the innovation pipeline by putting customers first- Presents each concept with case studies and exploration of risk factors involved including warnings for situations in which the technique can be misapplied

Part 1

Context

Introduction

Chapter 1: Introducing Presumptive Design

Chapter 2: PrD and Design Thinking

Chapter 3: PrD and an Agile Way of Business

Introduction

The three chapters in this part address why you should consider using PrD as a part of your practice, whether as a part of business strategy, or innovation pipeline management or in service of product and service development.

If you are a business leader or manager, you may wish to read Chapters 1 and 3 to understand how PrD supports your business strategy and operations. If you are a project manager, we recommend reading all three chapters; they help position PrD in the broader landscapes of business, design, and research. If you are a researcher, designer, or other UX professional, we hope you’ll find all three chapters invaluable to your practice.

We begin in Chapter 1 positioning PrD within the broader context of design research as well as offering a quick flyover of PrD’s five principles.

In Chapter 2 we introduce the design thinking model underpinning PrD. We differentiate PrD from more traditional forms of user-centered design approaches.

In Chapter 3 we argue business strategy, innovation management, and product development have been irrevocably changed by notions of agility. We illustrate PrD’s advantages to reduce risk within these contexts.

Chapter 1

Introducing Presumptive Design

Abstract

PrD is a research tool that places design thinking in service of innovation. Innovation, by definition, is fraught with risk. Regardless of the target of the innovation—a new product or service, a new market or business, or a new strategy—by its nature, innovation involves unknowns. For situations in which teams “don’t know what they don’t know,” a step-wise process will not reduce risk. PrD is an inexpensive, powerful means of reducing risk by rapidly and iteratively forming hypotheses, taking action, capturing and analyzing the results, and quickly offering insights about and tests of those hypotheses. Before we invest in any project, large or small, we engage in PrD: The cost/benefit is just too compelling not to.

Keywords

design thinking

design research

introduction

value proposition

principles

The future does not just happen. Except for natural events like earthquakes, it comes about through the efforts of people ….

—Jacque Fresco

Overview

PrD is a design research technique. Organizations, large and small, use PrD to quickly identify their target audiences’ needs and goals. It is fast. It is cheap. And it is definitely good enough. If you are looking for ways to rapidly and inexpensively reduce risk to your project, PrD is the best technique we’ve found in our 30 years of experience.

PrD differs from (and is complementary to) traditional market research methods. It provides intimate insights into the desires of end-users (for products and services), communities (for social innovation), and internal stakeholders (for strategy). The method reduces risk to our projects by capturing our target audience’s reactions to a future we have envisioned. As we describe in detail throughout the book, the devil is in the details: How we envision that future and how we capture those reactions is what sets PrD apart from other research methods.

Consider a typical example from industry: A firm has technology with competitive advantage (it’s faster, more robust, smaller or requires less power than the competition). In traditional market research, the research team identifies target audiences, crafts a quantitative instrument (a survey, typically), and performs a conjoin or other multifactor analysis. The team discovers the technology’s competitive advantage to address current customers’ needs as well as those in adjacent markets. This is absolutely necessary when placing big bets—necessary, but insufficient.

Quantitative research takes time and money; to do a conjoin correctly takes months and many tens of thousands of dollars. In contrast, PrD takes a week or two with the cost of a few days of travel. The insights gleaned from these rapid, inexpensive sessions are fundamentally different from the results of a quantitative approach, but they are no less valuable in reducing the risk of the venture. PrD’s qualitative results inform the design of a quantitative instrument, and vice versa. Although both can be done at the same time, we’ve found greater advantage in using one to inform the other. PrD costs less to execute than a quantitative instrument; its results are much broader.

Here’s how a typical PrD approach would play out: We invite key internal stakeholders (product marketing, technology leads or architects, sales leads, UX design, and the key organization leader) to a “Creation Session” (a “visioning” workshop). The outcome of the Creation Session is an “artifact” encapsulating the team’s presumptions about the new venture. The artifact is something an external stakeholder (a user or customer external to the team) will interact with. Depending on the size of the venture, the Creation Session could take a few hours, or perhaps as long as a few days. Subsequently, a small research team goes on the road with the artifact and works with external stakeholders in “Engagement Sessions.” During these sessions, stakeholders are tasked with using the artifact to accomplish a goal. Each session may take as little as 30 minutes, and there only needs to be a few of them (again, depending on the size of the venture). Within a couple of weeks, the team will have captured hundreds of data points, reactions, and, most important, clear indications of how the internal team’s assumptions resonate with external stakeholders’ needs (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 A typical Presumptive Design timeline

PrD isn’t limited to a product or service. When we use the word “project,” we mean any endeavor with material impact or risk. PrD is an inexpensive and easy tool to inform a strategy. It is a powerful means of identifying disruptive innovation. Disruptive innovation, by definition, is high risk: Discovering latent customer needs may expose an organization to gaps it can’t bridge. For companies facing emerging competitors, PrD illuminates threats early letting teams address these gaps strategically.

This Book’s Value Proposition

PrD will be familiar to any designer because it involves the creation of artifacts for the purpose of engaging with stakeholders. It will be familiar to any UX researcher because it involves understanding end-user needs through a form of interviewing. With that said, PrD shifts traditional ways of working in ways that may be disorienting to both designers and researchers.

For product managers and market researchers, PrD provides a rapid, qualitative-based research method. It supplements large-scale aggregate statistical investigations. PrD is an inexpensive way to explore the customer/user landscape, identifying “white spaces” that would otherwise be hidden or unavailable through quantitative methods. It is a customer-centric approach relying on small numbers to reveal important data.

For business leaders, PrD enables frank and open discussion about pain points in the organization. When rolling out a new strategy, changing the organization’s culture, or providing a vision for moving forward, PrD rapidly identifies the underlying values of the group. PrD, because it is a “codesign” approach, establishes a two-way conversation about what the vision could be. It engages constituents before the final vision is rolled out, starting their investment in it by incorporating their contributions as a part of it.

PrD is not limited to the for-profit world. It is an easy tool to empower communities seeking to improve services, representation, access, and civic engagement. In the world of social innovation, in which communities make their voices heard, PrD rapidly uncovers issues that matter to community stakeholders.

Although one of us (Leo) discovered the process independen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: Context
• Part 2: Principles and Risks
• Part 3: How-To Manual and Recipes
• Appendix A: The Cases
• Appendix B: The Art of Box Breaking
• Contributor Biographies
• List of Figure Credits
• References
• Index