Presumptive Design: Design Research Through the Looking Glass

By Leo Frishberg and Charles Lambdin Published: August 24, 2015 “You haven’t done any user research, but various internal stakeholders already strongly feel they know what the solution should be. They’re wrong, of course, but how can you dissuade them from believing in their assumptions and ideas?” You’re on a project team. The team has just formed, so you haven’t done any user research, but various internal stakeholders already strongly feel they know what the solution should be. They’re wrong, of course, but how can you dissuade them from believing in their assumptions and ideas? You could protest, stressing the need for up-front user research, but that would generate thrash. You could wait until you’ve prototyped something, then have the stakeholders watch usability testing with users, but the time that would take would likely be too much of an investment—especially given how early in the development cycle it is and how little there is to go on. As our new book Presumptive Design argues, there is a third way—a middle way. Instead of telling the stakeholders they’re not going about things right or allowing them to overinvest in what’s most likely a bad idea, you can accept their ideas without judgment, get them to unpack the assumptions that lie behind them, build junk artifacts representing their current assumptions, then, without hesitating, test these artifacts with users and watch them fail.

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