The Clash between ‘Traditional’ Research and Design Research

Most of our projects here at the MENA Design Research Center are collaborative and multidisciplinary; this means that sometimes, while working with psychologists, social scientists or education professors, we experience a typical conflict between our methods and theirs. The relatively new design research approach is unorthodox and in many cases the complete opposite of what a scientist has learned to obey as rules of research. In fact, it could be exactly this rigidity in scientific and statistical research that has lead to the birth of design research and its focus on intuitive analysis. Basically,  the main difference between the two is that traditional research depends more quantitative data (numbers, measurements, statistics…) while design research favors qualitative information (observation, sounds, images, subjective interpretations…). This methodology is not the invention of designers, in fact most of it is borrowed from ethnography; Geertz defined this multifaceted and multi-sensual concentration on the object of research as “thick description”. Moreover, relying partly on your intuition while researching is not considered wrong, because even intuition is based on an innate human logic.


Design research is NOT so much about how many people bought a certain product or used a service, what age group they were or whether they were male or female. It is more about  how they felt about their experiences using the product or service, where they encountered problems, and how they dealt with them. It is the various creative ways to see solutions that didn’t really fit in the ritual problem solving scenario, and it is mostly about the input of a single person that can offer more insight to the designer than all the silent accurate statistics and demographics ever could.

“So the next time someone asks you, ‘how many people did you talk to?’, you can answer them with an hour-long treatise about why that doesn’t matter.”

Inspired by Sam Ladner’s ‘The essence of Qualitative Research: Verstehen’, 2009