 Have you ever felt that you wanted more time to do proper design research but couldn't get your client to see it too? Well, you're not alone and in this video I'm going to show you how you can explain design research and its value in a way that clients understand by focusing on just one key aspect of design research. That's what's coming up. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about helping you to do work that makes you proud by designing and delivering services that have a positive impact on people and are good for business. And a key element to design these services is of course design research. And I see a lot of people struggling to explain design research to clients in a way that clients actually understand the value of design research. In order to explain design research we have to understand that the word research has a completely different annotation for most people compared to how designers look at the word research. Most people, including our clients, consider research as a way to get answers. And we know that the nature of design research is not so much to give answers but rather to find the right question that we need to be solving. Now, when you fail to explain design research and don't get the time to actually do it you'll end up as we know with subpar solutions that eventually will lead to disappointment with our clients and that eventually means that the next time we're going to ask for budget to do design research the chances are even slimmer that we'll get it. So you come up into a pretty negative spiral which we really have to break out of. One of the ways I explain design research is by using a story from one of our projects we did at 31 Volts and that is where we worked on finding ways to attract more tourists to the local museum here in the hometown of Utrecht. The notion was that the solution to getting more people through the museum doors would lie inside the museum so a better collection, a better coffee machine and we challenged that notion and said let's do some design research and let's figure out if that's really the issue why not all of the people not all of the tourists who could go to the museum go to the museum. So what we did is we went outside, we followed tourists through the city as they went to and left the museum to see what they were doing we made a photo study out of that and alongside we interviewed people, museum visitors to see what their motivation was to go to the museum and what we found in this design research is that a museum visit for most people is just part of a bigger day out it's like they're having a nice day where they just tend to visit the museum so we found that for instance in the city of Utrecht there are three major landmarks where most of the tourists come together because it's the place where you can make a really scenic photo like the Kodak moment and one of the ideas for that was if you want to get more tourists in your museum you as a museum should be at these landmarks so instead of improving your coffee or your collection or maybe next to improving your coffee and collection there were also some really interesting opportunities outside of the doors of the museum but the only way we found this is by exploring the opportunities in this early stages of this project if we wouldn't have gone out, if we wouldn't have followed these tourists if we wouldn't have talked to them, we probably never would have realized that it might be as simple as just putting up a sign at three places in the city so this is a really good way for me to sort of show the nature of design research and where it might lead to so when I explain design research and its value to my clients I usually talk about that design research is about exploration that's the very nature of design research it's about finding opportunities it's like finding or creating your Lego bricks before you actually start creating your Lego castle the more bricks you have, the more diverse they are the more interesting your solution might be the more sort of opportunity directions you'll find so design research is not about validation it's not about coming to conclusions design research is really about expanding the choices that you have as a designer so why do we actually do design research? I already hinted upon this but for me it's about two things one is figuring out if the challenge we're working on is actually a problem worth solving or is there something else that is more interesting and more valuable to solve that's one key reason why we do design research the other one is like I just mentioned to create opportunities to expand the choices we have like again with the Lego bricks if we have to work with a small unlimited set of Lego bricks the solutions that will come up with the castles that we'll build will probably be pretty boring so the more Lego bricks we have in the beginning the more interesting our solutions will be so to summarize this in one sentence design research is about exploration not validation it's about creating choices it's about finding clues it's not about finding the best answer or coming to conclusions and now the big question why should your client care about doing design research investing in design research well for one are they interested in finding out if the challenge they're working on is actually the right challenge is it the challenge worth solving or do they want to run the risk that they will be finding solutions for a problem that really isn't the problem or isn't the root cause or is the big problem so do they want to run the risk or do they want to sort of buy an insurance through design research and the other thing is the more choices you have the more clues you have at the beginning the more informed your eventual solution will be so again more Lego bricks leads to more interesting solutions with design research more opportunities more insights more clues in the beginning lead to better and more informed decisions better and more informed solutions I'd really like to know was this a helpful video should I be making more videos like this and if so which topic should I cover leave a comment down below and let's see what pops up this was about the explaining design research I also have a free training for you about explaining service design check out the link to that course that's over here if you haven't done so already be sure to subscribe so you'll be notified with new videos like this come out thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you in the next video