Designing Products or Designing Ideas: Which Has More Value?

From time to time, I like to pretend I’m an academic. After many years as a practicing designer, design researcher, and educator, I’ve seen the importance of integrating academic knowledge into a designer’s practice alongside drawing, building wireframes, and the other tangible skills most utilize daily.

While I’ve taught at four universities, built curricula, and my own school, I think of an academic as someone who spends their time researching, teaching, and guiding, with an end goal of knowledge production and mentorship. But the word “academic” comes with a lot of baggage. For many, that word implies someone whose actions and opinions are theoretical and without real-world value. An argument described as “purely academic” is seen as one that’s impractical or even a waste of time.

Consider the distinction between these situations:

1. I’ve been hired by a large corporation to understand areas where they can introduce new and innovative products into the market. I conduct research with customers, identify opportunities, sketch them, prototype them, and then help the corporation build them.
2. I’ve been awarded a grant by the same corporation to understand how ideas emerge and shape the market. I conduct research with the various teams at the corporation, identify the processes they use to create new products by watching them launch new innovations, prototype a model of innovation, author a paper describing my findings, and publish it in a well-known academic or industry journal.

The overlap between these two approaches is strong. In both cases, my activities are focused on research, synthesis, and prototyping. In the first case, I’m aiming my process at making a new thing. In the second, I’m aiming my process at creating new knowledge.

In both cases, the corporation derives value from the activities whether that value is revenue or market share — as in the first example — or introspection and industry thought-leadership — as seen in the second.

But the difference is apparent, too. The tangible output of the first situation is a new thing: something that a mass market uses, relatively quickly.

A digital product comes to market within a few months; a physical product often ships in as little as six. In a consumer market, the impact of a successful new product is observable because it is large and consequential. A new innovation changes behavior, which in turn changes culture. That change is often absorbed into the larger context of all innovations in the market segment — but we only need to look around to see how innovative new products have changed the way we interact with each other and the world around us.

The tangible output of the more “academic” endeavor is a journal article. It takes a long time for an article to end up in the world, including a process of submission, peer review, revision, acceptance (or rejection), and eventually, publishing. When compared to the audience for a new product, the audience reading even a popular industry journal is relatively small — especially since many publications lock their content behind a paywall.

Sometimes, this article can also change behavior, becoming a cornerstone for further research and innovations, or a foundational citation for future work. Hybrid journals, like Harvard Business Review or The Economist, publish academic content to an audience of executives and decision makers who in turn integrate the findings, processes, and ideas into their organizations.

But often, this type of article has very little influence. While 88% of medical articles are cited at least once, only about 66% of social science articles are cited, and almost 90% of humanities papers are never cited at all. These articles may be read once, but after the current journal issue is seen by its audience, they usually don’t see the light of day again.

I subscribe to an email called the PhD Design List which is about the path towards attaining a doctorate degree in design. While most practitioners view design as something you do, a doctorate in design is about researching the practice of design itself. It’s about studying how design works, why it works, the value of design in the world, and most importantly, how to generate new knowledge about design. It’s strange to think about creating knowledge about design without actually practicing design — and that’s one of the largest disconnects that leads to something being labeled as “purely academic” in the context of the design profession.

Here are some examples of themes discussed in the PhD Design list.

• How scientists do or do not understand beauty
• Understanding human collective ecologies
• Why public discourse based on personal belief will always be contentious

Though interesting to consider, these discussions often lack a recognition of what designers are actually doing in their daily jobs. Just as some designers misunderstand what it means to be “an academic,” some researchers haven’t spent any time observing real design work being created — and even fewer appear to have actually done design work in a practical context.

Would an executive who read one of the above headlines in the latest issue of Fast Company see applicability to their practice? It’s unlikely, and it points to the problem of the divide between academia and “real life.” Many of the smartest researchers, who are committed to advancing the knowledge of design, are producing knowledge that a very small audience will see — and neither the authors nor the audience have any real influence on the products being made.

When research is valued and understood by corporations, partnerships between an academic institution and a company can push the limits of both by incorporating academic research in material sciences, manufacturing, and other engineering practices. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Intel, have internal research labs that can influence the decisions made on product development. And, when academics are or have been practicing designers, they can offer a great amount of value to a company because they can straddle the worlds of making knowledge and making things.

In a lot of the work I’ve done, I find knowledge production to have a more influential long-term value than making “things.” But that’s only possible with mass adoption — or at least adoption by decision makers and leadership. The path towards adoption has to start with design practitioners going out of their way to explore and read academic content. Designers should be able to integrate academic design knowledge into their work with as much ease as drawing, building wireframes, creating service maps, or doing all the other things they do on a daily basis.

And so, to get started, you can subscribe to the PhD Design list here. And you can also subscribe to Modernist’s Design Futures for a combination of making, doing, and researching in the design realm.