Why Design Research is Stuck

In January 2024, Danny Spitzberg and Humphrey Obuobi wrote the Q&A article below to share their personal and professional perspectives on design research and why it's stuck. Then, in February 2024, Danny and Humphrey spoke with Lee-Sean Huang for AIGA's podcast to go deeper into a few topics.

Overview

Why do designer researchers rediscover catchphrases like "design with, not for" while the profession stays the same? Is the gap between individual and professional learning growing wider? In this conversation, Danny Spitzberg and Humphrey Obuobi, two design researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area, share their experiences bridging the learning gap. They discuss why design projects fail to deliver on their promise, and compare cases of enabling community ownership. While language and frameworks come and go, this conversation focuses on professional practices to sustain: focusing on relationships over projects, creating a container and process for ongoing discussions, and learning from care professions that operate more as a network of peers than a field of competitors.

Humphrey Obuobi: One open secret I know in design research is that ongoing education really only happens individually and among peers. Compared to other professions, we learn a ton as individuals, constantly identifying pitfalls and better paths for our work. So, why doesn't our field move forward?

Danny Spitzberg: The field is stuck, or definitely failing to keep up! The gap between individual skills and professional education keeps growing wider. For example, some of our peers give keynote talks proudly introducing “design with, not for” and other co-design catchphrases that you and I heard 10 years ago. Why is that?

Humphrey: So many catchphrases, so few lessons learned! So, let's talk about what we've learned. And, who are we? What makes us think we're so special to have this conversation?

Danny: For better or worse, we've worked in design for over a decade. We have a perspective on what practices have become standard, and opinions on what we should sustain and what we should let go.

Humphrey: I hear what you're saying. It reminds me of the corporate response to the George Floyd protests, when every company under the sun was promising to solve racial equity through an enhanced focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Meanwhile, individuals in those companies were talking amongst themselves, or out on the streets. There was a lot of free education but it wasn't evenly distributed. But let's back up and do introductions before getting deeper.

Danny: Yes, peer conversations build our profession and inspire our organizing. So, I'd love to hear about your background and education in this field. How did you come to develop your perspective on design work, professionally as well as politically?

Humphrey: I came to design for reasons similar to other designers I've met along the way: I liked making things that "worked" and "looked pretty," and I enjoyed the process of problem-solving too.

I grew up and also got my education all over the place. I was born in Ghana. My family moved to Chicago when I was two years old, then rural Arkansas, then Houston. I studied bioengineering at Harvard, and got my introduction to design from a friend at IDEO CoLab, now defunct. I really resonated with the art and science of problem solving and ended up interning there too. After that, I spent a lot of time freelancing and learning independently in branding and web design, and eventually leaned into digital product design via a Harvard Student Agency, also now defunct.

But, carrying lessons forward on your own is a real struggle. And on top of that, there are real professional and workplace realities that affect our ability to do the work. For example, why do designers keep making so many toolkits? I think it's out of shame or guilt about our inability to share lessons interpersonally or institutionally; instead, we make and sell toolkits, and expect others to do what we did, but better, somehow.

Danny: Let's talk more about that struggle, about sharing lessons learned over the course of a career.

Humphrey: Well, I believe people need spaces for sense-making in groups. That often happens in relation to some kind of design object. So, while we have ideals and principles for how to facilitate that process, the containers we create don't embody our values.

I think it's also important to say that I've built the foundation of my career in product management roles rather than design since that's where I figured I would have more input on strategy.

Danny: I appreciate your point about influencing strategy. I believe designers have a duty to enable users to take over, to transition whole projects to community ownership.

My perspective also comes from a few disparate sources and places. I was born and raised in Boston and went to a Jewish K-12 school where half of my classmates were from Egypt, Morocco, Iran, Iraq, Syria, France, Russia, and Israel. In this process of assimilation and becoming whiter, we learned a kind of defense mentality common in top-down Jewish institutions but none of our radical, anarchist history.

I got my training in economic sociology, focused on innovation narratives in commercial aerospace. I actually started in public policy but getting frustrated with the narrow benefit-cost analysis. And coming from field research for rural energy projects in India and environmental design in New York, I wanted to build relationships through more systematic inquiry.

But the big shift for me was helping start a student-run cafe and farm outreach program in 2010, which got me into cooperative business and training. And then in 2015, I transitioned from doing co-op development to doing user research. What's interesting is how both duties involve engaging people who make up organizations — co-ops belong to their member-owners, whereas platforms depend on users but never include them in governance.

Humphrey: I've done a fair amount of work in tech and outside of it, through community organizing. I've learned more from organizing and watching people engage with neighbors and work towards a society that works for them. And despite all the talk about "empathy" in design, I think community organizers are much, much more in touch with what the most vulnerable members of society are actually facing. But professional designers don't see that, or don't want to see a duty to organizers, let alone their peers.

My professional politics developed when I came to San Francisco to start my first job at Google. By then, people were talking about how Silicon Valley technology companies were screwing up our social health. I was eager to avoid enabling that as a technologist. That led me to question how we design technology, within what reward systems and accountability structures. After I determined that design is oriented towards a privileged few, I began looking elsewhere for answers, and corporate ethics isn't enough.

The "ethics" obsession bothers me, and I can't quite figure out why. "Ethical AI" is hot right now, but labeling things ethical doesn't do much. Is discussing "ethics" actually more harmful than helpful?

Danny: "Ethical AI" is everywhere right now, especially on LinkedIn profiles! It's very revealing. Ethics is like empathy back in 2009, when IDEO popularized it in their human-centered design toolkit. But as software companies broke public trust, empathy wasn't enough.

So now, everyone is selling ethics. And I think we can see how ethics-washing affects the design profession by looking at "care" language, which is starting to replace recent calls for "trauma-informed" practices from professions like social work, therapy, and counseling. This is unfortunate, because designers can learn a lot about the duty of care from care professions. And not just trauma-informed practices, but the code of ethics that brings care workers together to support one another.

Just like ethics, the use of "care" language is deeply unserious, for at least two reasons. First, professional care workers regularly discuss cases and refer clients, but a designer will almost never confer with a peer about a difficult client, let alone hand off an account. Second, there are now consultants interested in "care" and trying to help designers overcome toxic, traumatizing workplace experiences, but this bleeds into what Tad Hirsch calls "practicing without a license," a critique of design research as psychotherapy. At best, it's a vibe, and at worst, it's harm for profit.

While ethics is a cottage industry, it is still true that ethics are vitally important for us to discuss! The question, however, is about how we influence organizations to design and software production overall. For example, IDEO's Little Book of Design Research Ethics from 2015 makes direct references to human rights, because human rights law has myriad accountability mechanisms that are external to any project or firm. But at just 55 pages, the book only offers a preliminary guide to ethics. It's easier to see it as a marketing collateral. By contrast, seeing how IDEO selects clients or scopes projects might enable us to evaluate them as an agency.

Humphrey: I think that what you're saying – and, I agree – is that the use of "ethics" and "care" comes from individualist or careerist interests in selling services, and those interests undermine our ability to improve the design profession, let alone to create positive outcomes in our work. Is that right? Can you say more about that?

Danny: That's right. It should be obvious that discussing ethics isn't enough to shift the profit incentives or shareholder primacy driving production. Designers need power. Besides the IDEO book, I think I've seen 100, maybe 150 "ethics" products and services ranging from checklists to workshops, and none of them mention the role of power to advance ethics in practice. How can you offer a resource without discussing the reality of office politics or corporate governance that makes ethical interventions necessary in the first place?

The overwhelming lack of useful resources inspired me and a few colleagues to do a study in 2020 that asked, "Do design collaborations that influence production focus more on decision-making power than ethics?" We conducted a narrative survey and facilitated scenario-based workshops with around 80 people, and concluded, "Yes." The majority of designers and researchers use macro-level strategies such as stakeholders mapping and identifying gatekeepers to change production; only a minority of responses focused on micro-level interventions such as checklists or book clubs, and almost all of these were proposed in the context of finding co-conspirators and influencing peers.

Since then, we've done a dozen workshops with over 800 participants total. But maybe these workshops need to become a container and a process, like you said, to bridge the learning gap between individuals and the profession as a whole.

Humphrey: In a similar vein, a lot of my work is about consistently holding the space for people, and making sure that people felt genuinely empowered to plug in however it made sense for them to take it over. In particular, when I was working with the SF Reparations effort, we were trying to organize a set of interim demands that would go to the Board of Supervisors before the final set of policy recommendations was complete. Knowing the potential harm of trying to "solve" a problem from the outside or in a way that privileged certain knowledge, there were a lot of things I was hesitant about going into that space.

I'm Black, but I'm not an African American from San Francisco with a history of generational harm. It took time to build good relationships. Specifically, I had to unlearn the principles of efficiency that my tech industry training has embedded in me, and I had to balance a "data-driven" mindset with the lived experience and wisdom of multi-generational San Franciscans that I was holding space for.

It was humbling work that helped to clarify my role as a designer in a space like that. There's also a lot of value in distilling knowledge into actionable insights, helping groups of people figure out what's most important, and communicating ideas effectively to an audience.

Danny: Holding space for participants to take ownership is really complex. We both know many smart designers who are too eager to offer solutions and make decisions. We also know others who are too hesitant to get involved in community initiatives, because they don't want to interfere. But as professionals, we need to show up and form accountable relationships to offer our technical skills.

My most formative experience started in 2019 when a friend invited me to support ridehail drivers organizing a union. We had previously hosted a know-your-rights training with two legal specialists, and now he was renting a community space in San Francisco where drivers met every Thursday to meet, and to use the bathroom and rest. For months, I attended almost every meeting and helped with text banking. There were no efficiency shortcuts to building the trust necessary to propose to drivers that we try filing wage claims as a campaign strategy to enforce California employment law. They were into it but wanted to see value at every step.

Over another few months, I organized a team of designers and legal aid workers to help drivers build something worth scaling. Eventually, we turned the 2-hour wage claim form and process into a 45-min spreadsheet prototype, and then a 15-minute web app task. Our success came from a leadership pivot, when one driver used his insight into pay and schedule data to create a new spreadsheet that produced more reliable claim estimates. Then, drivers used the app to file 5,600 claims worth $1.3B, triggering a 2020 wage theft lawsuit California brought against Uber and Lyft. In the pandemic, the drivers repurposed the approach to win unemployment benefits too.

Now, I'm part of a team creating The Workers' Algorithm Observatory. We help workers audit black box platform algorithms and AI systems. By crowdsourcing their own data, workers and allies can demand better working conditions and advance better policies.

Humphrey: I love that so much. A lot of civic technology projects that I've seen don't have nearly as big of an intended impact because they're not in conversation with the communities affected, or connected to a real lever for change.

When I joined Recidiviz, a nonprofit using data to help government agencies reduce incarceration, I oversaw the public data team. There, we found that our dashboards couldn't have an impact just by making the data publicly available. Instead, it was the relationships that we built with people who had experience in the system, either impacted by it or working in it, that identified opportunities to move people out of the system faster than ever before. We worked with organizations serving incarcerated or formerly incarcerated individuals to get direction on our strategy. We also formed a "Trusted Tester Network" to modify our tools according to their feedback. And based on that, we produced dashboards, policy memos, and other infrastructure to help agencies make data more accessible and standardized.

Something that I see in both of our experiences is how we value spaces for discussing complex realities. There's something about sustained dialogue that's key to developing any design artifact. And sure, design projects often start where opportunities exist, but by bringing people together and creating the space for them to talk to each other, we can ensure so many other insights and dreams come forth.

Danny: So, speaking of dreams, let's try to name what we're taking away from this conversation. What are you seeing ahead for your career?

Humphrey: Putting all of this talk about "participation" into practice is where my head's at these days. I think that comes back to the ways we organize ourselves.

This fall, I'm heading to policy school to figure out how we can create genuinely inclusive, democratic institutions. While folks in government and nonprofit spaces haven't figured out how to create accountable spaces for sensemaking, at least it's a community with a history of building social programs to address homelessness or public health. I figure there's a lot that designers like myself can learn from that, and a lot that policy folks could learn from this emergent practice that we're discussing.

Danny: I'm especially interested in ways our profession can improve by becoming more intimate, and also more humble overall – especially in appreciating that not everything can be "designed." I think limits of design can be described simply as "policy."

I still believe in people bringing their skills and experiences to large collaborations, with design professionals working to build and support community leadership. But amongst ourselves, I value these kinds of conversations. I co-organize a monthly gathering for design researchers to discuss projects with peers in a private, trusted space. My hope is that small gatherings like these can link with larger efforts to move design education beyond catch-phrases, possibly learning from how social workers commit to mutual support, and so our field can learn from our successes and failures.