A merging of the ability to design and the ability to understand the full and widening arc of the design process is a continually growing aspect of what defines the current role of designers. Everyone from management to production must be involved in and understand the process in order to fully contribute and fully take advantage of its benefits. We’ve come to understand that design and strategy are not in a contentious relationship. Rather, they depend on one another in the realization of successful products, services and brands. From a strategic design perspective designing can be research and research can be designing.

I wondered aloud to Etienne Fang what it means to be involved in the strategic design process. Etienne is Strategic Director of the Cultural Insights Studio in the New York office of Cheskin, a global design consultancy. Her work is focused on leading strategic engagements with consumer packaged goods companies. At Cheskin, she’s worked with Levi’s, Walmart.com and several other Fortune 500 companies. Etienne explicates her perspective on just what strategic design is and what makes it both valuable and enjoyable.

From what history do you approach strategic design? What led you to this perspective on designing?

I approach strategic design from a social science and design background. I have a masters in education, and taught and designed for a number of years. I came to the design field looking at things analytically, and approached designing pragmatically.

As a designer at Rockwell Group, designing environments, I was always wanting to rationalize the theatrical design magic they’re known for. I always wanted to have good reason for making the choices that we were making in a design sense, and also understand the motivation behind the users of the resulting space or brand.

As Design Strategist at Studio Red—the consumer experience design studio within the Rockwell Group, that began as a think-tank for Coca-Cola—my role was to use insight to inform the design. There we worked in interdisciplinary teams that include technologists, architects, industrial designers and graphic designers. The design process at Studio Red always began with an immersion—in the brand, product category, channel (from gas stations to hypermarkets), and market (we worked with global markets from Asia to Africa). As strategists and designers, we would take the learnings and apply them throughout the process of design.

At Cheskin, it’s really about applying serious rigor to the development of design strategy, which informs our clients’ designs. This can be in the form of brands, products or services. Sometimes the work we do is so early in the process that it invites further investigation from either us or even on the client side about what that leads to in terms of design.

You’re helping your clients understand what their needs are and how design can address them. Do you help them then draft briefs for design projects?

Our work can sometimes lead to a concrete outcome, like a brief. Or, it might lead to a group within their organization further exploring something that we uncovered in our research. The results of our recommendation can take shape in a number of ways. We generally work at the front-end of a long process.

In the world of strategic design, “innovation” is used to describe the nature of the process you enable. What does that mean in tangible terms for designers in the “making” part of that process?

I think that designers who are in the “making” part of the process should be involved in the upfront need-finding part of that process and the definition of the insights that will then lead to their design. If they’re not involved or not able to be involved, they should at least be aware of this front-end part of the process—how it works and how it will impact their outcome. Innovation for the designer really makes use of those insights to inform the making of any artifact whether it be a logo, a product or a package.

You’re describing a situation where the makers are actively involved in that process. It’s not something that is done in isolation and then the research is handed over to the designer. The process you describe seems far more benign than the fear of market research that some designers hold.

What I think you mean is this commonly held definition of a “traditional” designer as someone who is primarily concerned with form-making independent of outside factors. I do believe that this is an old-school mentality at this point. Designers themselves, along with major design organizations, like AIGA and DMI (Design Management Institute), have redefined the designer of today to be a lot broader, and more accurate.

Designers generally tend to resist market research, because typical market research is evaluative, meaning that the research happens after the designs have been created. For instance, you show multiple design options to consumers, and they say they like C more than A or B. That’s often very difficult for designers to deal with or act upon. First of all, designers have a real strong sense of authorship and a pride in their work. To hear the honest opinion of a consumer may not always be the most welcomed response. That’s typical market research. I can’t say it’s “of the past,” because it is still used today, however, at Cheskin, we really focus on design research.

Design research is different in that it is generative, and its purpose is to feed the innovation process. It has the user in mind as a source of inspiration for design, which can be exciting for designers. Designers have an opporutnity to apply the insight and research in their design. It helps them understand what questions to ask, when to ask them and the context in which to ask them, in order to create the best possible designs. Design always needs outside factors to begin with—and by leveraging design research, designers aren’t designing in a vacuum.

Some people think that creativity and research are opposites, but in fact, they can work together toward innovative design. The designer of today is more accepting of research. Because of the growing importance that the business world is placing on design, designers understand that design success goes beyond winning an award for the design alone. Design success can mean success in the marketplace—design that makes a difference in the lives of the users or in their clients’ bottom line.

You use this to describe the working process that you’re using now. If you’re describing the designer of today, what is the designer of tomorrow like?

I think the designer of tomorrow has an awareness of the overall process of design—design thinking that encompasses every step from the problem definition to the final prototype. Design does not begin at putting pencil to paper. Even the design of a process that will lead to a great design is essential to the role of a designer today, and of tomorrow.

You’re using this alternative application of research and testing that acts as a strategic spark in the creative process. How do you get designers to buy in to the research?

Another aspect of this, is what we call “storytelling,” now a pretty common term in the design industry. Storytelling is really the key to instilling the ownership of the end-users of the research. Research should not collect dust in a binder on a shelf, but it really becomes a catalyst or source of inspiration.

Whatever the story is that’s enveloping this data, research or recommendations, needs to be compelling—if it’s not, then we haven’t done our jobs as good consultants. Our recommendations that we deliver need to be actionable, first and foremost. Oftentimes the users of our research are designers, and our recommendations need to be something they can use.

What’s an example of research really informing the design process as opposed to a post-design evaluation?

A good example is the work that Cheskin did in the nineties which led to the Resolve workstation system by Herman Miller. Cheskin’s involvement with the project began with understanding the office worker of today. Researchers set out understand how work today is different from the 1960s when the square cubicles were first designed—such as, what collaboration, openness and privacy mean to office workers today. This fed into Herman Miller’s design process. After they came up with the initial prototypes, Cheskin did some user testing. What came out of the testing was that the perceptions were polarizing—about as many people rejected the design as those who accepted it.

How is that different from the typical application of market research?

Well, had Herman Miller just gone with this and said “the users don’t like this let’s scrap the design,” we never would have seen the Resolve system as the truly innovative product that you see today. However, what Herman Miller did with Cheskin’s help was look at the results to see who these people who accepted the designs were, and marketed the product to them initially. What they found was that the influencers within the workstation category was the group who really liked the Resolve system. The influencers in the workstation category—those who were leading the masses and were first to adopt—have helped to make it the successful product that it is today.

That’s an example of where research was a very important part of the process. The research isn’t there to kill a great idea or a great design, it’s actually there to inform teams and lead them to come up with breakthrough innovations.

Etienne Fang joins Rie Norregaard, Elizabeth Pastor, Leslie Wellott and moderator Chee Pearlman at The Future of Design in a Global Market, a panel discussion on what’s driving change in the design industry.

Wednesday September 5 2007

7:00-9:00pm

Cooper Union’s Wollman Auditorium

51 Astor Place

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Etienne will also be co-teaching the Design Research Methods course in Parson’s Design and Management undergraduate program this fall.