Hypothesis-driven Design Research

Navigating Academic-needs Vs Personal Practice

Hey John Baxter,

Thanks so much for your response, and for the provocation to write a little more.

It’s been an interesting process as I stepped into my Masters, to make sure I deliver the essence of my research in the way which it can be best received by my supervisors and other peers on the Postgrad programme. Sometimes that’s meant changing my language a little, as you picked up from the previous post from my MDes critique.

I’m definitely still a big proponent of hypothesis-driven research. In fact I think it’s very important in the synthesis of complex challenges — understanding what you’re trying to learn, through articulating them as hypotheses can be a useful process, as long as we don’t slip back into shaping the results of the research around our hypotheses. It feels like before jumping to hypotheses, we need to do a period of mapping and synthesis, which is less shaped by these ideas though.

I’ve been reading a little about how designers work differently to some other disciplines, and keep coming across the idea of abductive thinking as a key differentiator.

“Synthesis is an abductive sensemaking process. Through efforts of data manipulation, organization, pruning, and filtering, designers produce information and knowledge.” — John Kolko (1)

I really love the observation that Sherlock Holmes rarely deduces anything in this article on Quora (2). The majority of Sherlock Holmes’ insights are gained from inferring the likely reason for something happening from the surrounding context. This is abductive thinking, yet it’s rarely talked about from my perspective.

Honing this skill is particularly important in a complex world where we’ll never have all the information to analyse a problem. Partly as information is growing exponentially, and partially as living systems are dynamic and all information is essentially out of date.

So what is the value of a hypothesis? “Hypothesis” is of course a loaded term, most associated with scientific research. From my observations, it seems less used in the social sciences, and was popularised again in the entrepreneurship community through ‘Lean Startup’ (3)(4).

I intend to use hypotheses to help improve the quality of design research, whilst trying to avoid confirmation bias.

The value that I can see, is naming something you’re seeing. Much like the d.School Point Of View (POV) statement (5) is used to make a design direction explicit, a hypothesis is a falsifiable statement which aims to articulate a repeatable action and expected result.

Image by Strategyzer — see the original here

As you mentioned, I’ve outlined my personal practice of using ‘learning experiments’ as a way to shape an activity or prototype (6)(7).

I intend to carry on using this approach throughout my Masters, and in fact I had already outlined hypotheses to give me a starting point — it was suggested by a supervisor to change these to ‘design questions’ for the MDes Critique audience. To clarify, these are medium-term shapers of the project, and I will write specific hypotheses for each prototype. It’s also helpful to remind myself that we’re as much searching for evidence which denies these hypotheses, rather than confirming them.

They are:

By automating admin and simple creative tasks, we will allow Environmental Rangers/Project Coordinators more time to focus on creating better experiences for volunteers, which will improve social and environmental outcomes.

and

By creating feedback loops for environmental volunteers, we will increase their understanding of their impact, and thereby increase their motivation and commitment to environmental volunteering, over time.

Translating these into actionable prototypes is the next, more interesting challenge.

Currently my thinking is to do non-linear prototyping for the next few months to help explore a range of directions. A rough outline for these would be:

• A simple prototype of a reporting tool for environmental conservation coordinators, to help capture, analyse and generate visual reports for funders, committees and volunteers.
• A simple prototype of a media collection and presentation tool for environmental groups, which increases their visual storytelling abilities.
• A simple prototype of a reporting dashboard for funders which allows them to see multiple projects’ data.

It feels like this is going to be a busy time!!

Inviting Critical Thinking

I’m always open for feedback if you feel like you have any perspectives on the hypotheses, or the prototypes I’m proposing?

Books/Articles which are shaping my thinking at the moment:

• Convivial Toolbox — Liz Sanders (8)
• Design As Participation — Kevin Slavin (9)

References:

1. Kolko, Jon (2010), “Abductive Thinking and Sensemaking: The Drivers of Design Synthesis.” In MIT’s Design Issues: Volume 26, Number 1, 2010. Read the article here.
2. Coleman, Neil (2015), “What is a good example of abductive reasoning?”. On Quora. Read the article here.
3. Maurya, Ash (2015), “7 Habits for Running Highly Effective Lean Startup Experiments”. On LeanStack’s blog. Read the article here.
4. Reis, Eric (2011), “Lean Startup Methodology”. On The Lean Startup site. Read the article here.
5. d.School (2010), “Point Of View Madlib”. Published by d.School. Read the article here (PDF).
6. Rye, Sam (2015), “How We Use Experiments To Drive Insight”. Read the medium article here.
7. Rye, Sam (2016), “Embracing Cognitive Dissonance”. Read the article here.
8. Sanders, Liz (2013), “Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design”. BIS Publishers. See it on MakeTools here.
9. Slavin, Kevin (2016), “Design As Participation”. MIT Media Lab’s Journal of Design and Science. Read the article here.