The secret to groundbreaking design isn’t found in the latest software, but in discovering untold stories and unheard voices.
Design Research—the practice of asking questions that help us understand users, their needs, and their context—is the foundation of our work at IDEO. The way we ask questions and what we do with the answers really matters. Our intake includes white papers, data sets, expert consultants, historical reviews, in-the-field interviews, contextual observation, and analogous research experiences. In all of those inputs, there is a lot that can get ethically murky.
To identify first principles and set some guardrails, we put together the Little Book of Design Research Ethics back in 2015. Yesterday’s…
