This was originally posted on LinkedIn 7 June 2022… it struck a bit of a chord, so seemed worth reposting here.
There have been a few recent articles comparing behavioral design to human centered design that position HCD as play-acting at problem-solving, and qualitative research akin to adopting home remedies in an era of modern medicine.
So, first, a few quick things about design/qualitative research:
🌟 Characterizing it as a naïve exercise in taking what people say at face value is just inaccurate. No design researcher I know goes straight from user quote to solution, like, ever.
🌟 Rejecting it as bad science misunderstands its purpose. It’s not intended to uncover first principles or The Truth. Its value lies not in dis/proving hypotheses but in illuminating the mental models and language people use to make sense of their world, in ways surveys can't (spoiler: you can learn *a lot* from questions you didn’t think to ask!).
🌟 We know stories are powerful. Good design research plays a critical role in humanizing abstract 'segments' and 'populations' and 'consumers' for clients, converting data and Excel rows into real, live human beings whose lived experience matters.
But more importantly, I get squirrelly when pieces angle so hard to position disciplines as better-than. #HumanCenteredDesign has its flaws, without question, but #BehavioralDesign (and science more broadly) has its own limitations. And I’d argue that given our need to design for diverse people and contexts in a complex world that’s constantly evolving, design’s strengths in strategically speculating about what *could* be and system design’s ability to design at infrastructural levels promise to extend the scale and value of #BehavioralScience beyond what it's already really good at.
Ih short: integrating #Design and #BehaviouralScience has scads of potential, but doing this requires thinking of these fields as collaborators rather than rivals. A while back I wrote about how we might integrate #BehaviouralDesign's depth of knowledge about how people make decisions with strategic design’s strengths in problem framing and deep contextual inquiry. Sharing it here not because it’s perfect — both the field and my thinking have advanced in the few years since I wrote this! — but in the hope it might prompt more productive discussion about how to effectively cross-pollinate (and less about who’s better :)