Intra‐organizational user‐centred design practices: The impact of design research departments at design consultancies

Abstract

The user is a critical factor in design and innovation. Firms experiment with different approaches to involving the user in design processes, which results in new forms of intra- and extra-organizational collaboration. The establishment of in-house design research units within design consultancies is one such intra-organizational user-centred design practice that targets designer-researcher collaboration. This paper addresses this issue and reports on the findings from multiple case study research exploring the impact of in-house design research teams on designers' user knowledge construction. We utilized constructivist learning theory to assess major aspects of these intra-organizational user-centred design practices. Ethnographically informed field studies were conducted at six design consultancies representing three design fields (i.e., architecture, industrial design and interaction design) in the Northwestern United States. Three of the consultancies have design research departments and three do not. The findings indicate that in-house design research units play a role in designers' user knowledge construction via their results, processes and human resources. Among these, the active participation of designers in the research process was observed to have the largest impact because of its contribution to designers' contextual and collaborative learning about users.