As UX Designers and UX Researchers, we often talk about problems and user needs as “found”, “uncovered” and “arrived at”.

I was going through a guide on Design Thinking⁶ and the language used suggested that the process of design research is like going through a landscape¹:

• The Method will “put you on the path to continuous innovation” (Introduction)
• “you’ll come closer and closer to a market-ready solution” (Introduction)
• ”the energy and drive that you need to navigate the thorniest problems.” (Mindsets–Optimism)

A landscape is obviously independent of a single person who tries to find a way. That results are framed as preexisting, too²:

• “…explore lots of different possibilities so that the right answer can reveal itself." (Mindsets – Embrace Ambiguity)
• “…making something reveals opportunities and complexities that we’d never have guessed were there.” (Mindsets – Make it)
• “…we quickly uncover what’s most desirable.” (Introduction)

This way of framing problems and research suggests that both problems and research results independently of us exist, somewhere “out there” and are seen from nowhere particular by an uninfluenced observer. However, this hides that people have a large part in constructing what they “find”, “uncover” and “arrive at”: The decide what and where to research and make interpretations of what they experiences, make assumptions and change them.

This could be framed as a bad thing: Do I assume that problems and user needs are arbitrary? No. I only assume they are (co-) created by the people who work with them, based on their observations and interpretations. This does not make them arbitrary. When there are multiple ways to do something, it does not mean that any way is valid and that any valid way is equally helpful in a given situation. And interpretations can and should still be given an account of why that interpretation is plausible, based on what was observed³.

Instead of describing our work as if we just bring to light what was there all along, we could highlight mutual sensemaking, interpretation and other aspects of user research and show how it connects the social worlds of people who build tools and services the social world of people who might use them later.

However, I understand that there are strong incentives or framing our research as “finding things out there”. User need research needs to compete with other methods that seem to show how and why our users really act. Researchers need to sell the advantages of interviews and observations. The framing as exploring a space and seeing the solution reveal itself makes it possible to sell what is real as well as making the research make immediate sense in digital economies where people believe that problems have technological solutions that determine our future⁴.

Notes:

• 4.4.2020: Alba Villamil, a fellow UX researcher, (linkedIn) asked me two questions, which I answered in a message. With her consent, I share them here. I wrote her my answers on twitter. The answers here are edited by me.
  
  Alba: What do you see as the benefits (for design output and maybe even stakeholders) of moving away from this positivist view of research to an emphasis on sense-making?
  Jan: I hope it has advantages that it (im my eyes) describes better what design researchers do. Also, the framing I described above has the advantage of being more design-like. As design (as in “I design a…”) can not meaningfully be framed as “about truth”, since it is about making something. Thus, sensemaking and seening-things-as is important ⁵. A single truth (as in “what something is ”) is not the focus of design (but multiple possible ways of “what something could be”)¹⁶. This design-likeness could be already reflected in the research itself already when refraining from framing it in positivist vocabulary (Aside from the fact that findings like “users need X” are hard to defend as single truth anyway). I hope that this design-likeness of research could help people to participate in it, make sense of it and criticize it in a meaningful way; all together with others and thus created a mutual understanding that is helpful in the next steps.
  
  Alba: To your quote: “When there are multiple ways to do something, it does not mean that any way is valid and that any valid way is equally helpful in a given situation. And interpretations can and should still be given an account of why that interpretation is plausible, based on what was observed.” How can researchers demonstrate the plausibility of their interpretations?
  Jan: I guess probably the same way as the demonstrate the “truthness” of their observations now: User quotations, descriptions of their methods and thought processes, showing alternatives and why they were discarded…

Notes:

• 2021-01-25: Media Scholar Fred Turner suggested (personal communication) that the focus on “potential” and “unlocking” it is related the 1960 Human Potential Movement and the idea of exploring at the frontier (In his book “From Cyberculture to Counterculture” Turner does not dive into the human potential movement, but discusses the frontier concept and its influence. The early use of the frontier-rhetoric is on p74ff, while the digital frontier is discussed e.g. on 142ff and 229ff )
• 2021-05-20: The frontier idea in tech culture is are also discussed in Christina Dunbar-Hester’s CCC20 talk on “The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures” starting at 9:34
• 2024-04-05: In “The Quest for Certainty” (Later Works, Vol 4, 1929, University of Southern Illinois Press, 1988), Dewey proposes that philosophy often assumes that pure thinking, untouched be the material and its changes can lead people to universal, unchanging truths. Thus, it is similar to religion (p.12). He praises science for connecting action and thought in the experimental method: The situation is changed to learn how it can be influenced. However, he warns to treat science as “disclosure of the inherent properties of the ultimate truth” (p.83). However, when doing what Dewey rejects, one can have the cake and eat it too—Experimental method and universality. And this is what is also happening here: The metaphorical landscape and the preexisting truth can be navigated, found, revealed by using experimental methods.
• See also “The Myth of the Comfort Zone” and “The problem of gaps, biases and barriers”