Sacrificial Concepts 2

All This ChittahChattah

Suzanne reminded us that “we can’t possibly be all of the people we need to design for,” and related some of IDEO’s experience using “sacrificial concepts:” early, raw, potentially flawed concepts made visual/physical and used as a medium for creating reaction, response and discussion among users and design teams.

Their method
* learn from extremes
* visit natural contexts
* building deep empathy
* Discovering latent needs
* Create prototypes for feedback
* Considering the holistic experience

She then pointed out that all is not perfect in Human Centered Design. In one case, a sketch on a napkin became the product (with no human centered process). IDEO designers complain they don’t have time to design, and they have to justify every choice. So they added a new step to their process “informing our intuition” and a technique of sacrificial concepts, where they create purposefully extreme concepts…intentionally “wrong” ideas to show to people. The key here is that the research they conduct seems to be about using carefully designed props to provoke; that’s a bit of a change of process for us, where we start off naive and let the data lead us; we don’t have the cultural contrast of having a bunch of designers feeling left out of the process. I agree it’s an effective method and one we’ve used but it seems like this method is very IDEO-specific, and that by leading with a research process that is more exploratory, you can use this tangible prop tool as a way to take that first set of research further. IDEO is a design firm and so their process seems to be to begin designing immediately and they’ve worked their research process around that.