I think drawing too many general design principle inferences from Apple is dangerous for many of the reasons given. The main one for me is context and purpose. Their approach works for them because of who they are and what they are trying to make. I thought the same thing watching the Palm WebOS guy at UX Week. They could avoid doing much design research because the problem space was really well known and familiar to them (and most of us). At least, that's why they could do what they did, IMO. I'm not sure that what I've seen of that OS is particularly innovative or impressive from my perspective, but it sounds like it is being successful for them.
On the other hand, it seems like much of what designers are called upon to design for are not these sort of horizontal, nearly universal problems we all have experience with. Often we are tasked with designing for problem spaces that are new to us and/or just new in general. In these cases, sitting as a team in a conf room and imagining and speculating only goes so far. I see the need for design research on a continuum with the key factors increasing the need being: lack of familiarity with the problem space and need for innovation. The latter may sound counter intuitive if you are an advocate for "not asking people what they need" to innovate, and that's true, but design research (as I understand it) does not mean that. It means you go out to understand as much as you can of the contexts, needs, desires, activities, and so on and use that as input and positive constraints to come up with creative design solutions. Anyways, I'm all for trying to learn from successful folks like Apple, but we need to keep in mind the context and purpose, IMO, when doing so. We might also need to keep in mind that, simply put, we're not Apple. -ambrose ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
