Thursday, May 22, 2008
6 Standards for Good Design Strategy & Research
One of the issues facing the design world is a lack of standardized vocabulary found in other professions. "Innovation" is perhaps the most obvious example, but "research" and "strategy" are two others. To some people "research" means going to the store and looking at products on the shelves, to others it means exhaustive qualitative and quantitative studies that take months. In my opinion, both could be valid in certain contexts, and the right way to judge their validity is through a set of universal, context-free criteria.To that end, I came across Harold Kincaid's set of standards for good science that also apply very well to design research & strategy (as presented in Philosophy of Social Sciences, by Robert C Bishop, page 349):
Falsifiability
Hypotheses and theories must be capable of standing before the court of experience and being proven wrong. (See Karl Popper's work)
Predictive Success
Empirically adequate theories exhibit both a high quantity and high quality of predictions borne out of observation and testing.
Scope
Theories should predict and explain a wide variety of phenomena.
Coherence
Good theories exhibit logical consistency as well as cohering with the best information available from other sciences.
Fruitfulness
Theories should lead to new insights and developments, suggest new avenues for research and guide experimental investigation among other results.
Objectivity
Our best theories should reflect the way the world is, not the way we want it to be.
Labels: innovation, research, strategy
posted by Finn McKenty at 2:25 PM
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