Design Thinking Roles - Design Thinking Researcher
Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.
Roles are central to Ibbaka’s Open Competency Models. We see jobs as being bundles of roles. One can also play a role on a team and then there are all those ad-hoc roles that we play (‘I am doing this off the side of my desk’).
There are currently six roles in the Design Thinking competency model (an additional role for diversity and inclusion is being developed).
You can access the Design Thinking Competency Model here.
The six current roles are as follows:
The Design Thinking Research Role
Most design thinking projects will start with a research phase. The research phase gives the context needed for the Empathize part of the work, but that is not all. Design research is also an input into the Definition phase and can inform Ideation and help in the Test phase.
Design thinking projects that skip the research work generally fail. Design thinking requires rich contextual knowledge about …
Larger social, cultural and environmental factors that create the overall context
Past solutions, what has worked or not, in what contexts
Root causes, what has led to the situation, what forces keep the situation in place, what could be changed
Stakeholders, their experiences, situation and aspirations (often captured in persona and journey maps)
Design thinking research combines qualitative and quantitative research and often includes some form of ethnographic research. This last point is interesting. We have learned a great deal from ethnography on how to understand communities of users. Research here can range from simple observation and the study of artifacts to a full participant observer study.
Dora Farkas has a good introductory article A Less Known But Powerful Helping Hand In Product Design: Ethnographic Research.
Note: In the design world, ‘design research’ is used in two distinct senses.
(i) Research into design, such as that celebrated by the Design Research Society. Ibbaka is conducting design research into the design of competency models. Design research - How do people approach the design of skill and competency models?
(ii) Research used to inform design. This is the sense in which the term is used in this model.
MUST HAVE SKILLS for a DESIGN THINKING RESEARCHER
Posts on Roles in the Open Competency Model for Design Thinking
Design Thinking Project Leader
Design Thinking Project Member
Design Thinking Researcher (This Post)
Stakeholder Engagement Leader (coming)