The Concept of Value in Design Practice

Here are my thoughts on the paper The Concept of Value in Design Practice - An Interview Study.

The article is concerned with value in design practice and how designers express value in use. From the authors findings from interviews with 8 designers, insights and empathy are recurring themes so I will discuss these points. 

The designers seem to agree that being able to see things from the users perspective and having strong empathic skills are very important in the design process and indeed in identifying and generating insights. Insights, as defined by the author, include future trends, technology and customer findings. This is the value that the designers say they contribute to a project.

I agree with these comments. However, not only are empathic skills required to gain user insights but so are strong ethnography skills. There are plenty of tools and techniques to help designers empathise with users which can help discover insights through seeing a problem through the eyes of the user. But I think that user interviews and observations are where the real insights are found. I'm sure the designers have these skills but I'm surprised that none of them mentioned ethnography as a tool for building empathy and obtaining insights and therefore adding value to design practice.

Throughout my service design project I interviewed a wide range of stakeholders including numerous users, the restaurant general manager and a manager of the work community campus where the restaurant is situated. I was able to use the techniques which I learnt from service design workshops and seminars, and from other courses taught on the Product Design Engineering MSc. Having recently started to develop design ethnography skills I can appreciate how important they are in getting the most out of an interview and obtaining genuine insights rather than getting the ones that you want through leading the interviewee (this can be unintentional), or not having the skill to get to the insights. My project would have looked very different had I not interviewed the key stakeholders effectively!

A final point I'd like to make is that the designers also talked about their ethical obligations as designers - most of them are industrial designers. I think ethical service design is difficult to define and is much less tangible than ethical industrial design. This is mentioned in the paper and I think this is an area that requires further research to be better understood.