Design in Research — How do you use design to support and shape R&D?

Corporate Research and Development is evolving, and it increasingly incorporates user experience design, design research, and service design into the earliest stages. The historical separation between basic research, applied research and productization erodes as research horizons shorten, technology diffuses more rapidly, and companies want to take bigger risks sooner. When this changing market is coupled with rapidly changing technology that blurs the boundaries between hardware, software, materials and processes, the role of design fundamentally changes.

Design influences technology research earlier in the creation of a novel technology, whether it’s a new application of artificial intelligence, or a new material. In this PARC Forum, Mike Kuniavsky and other members of PARC’s Innovation Services Group will present how they participate in early-stage research and development, and discuss the methods they developed when working alongside PARC’s researchers in developing printed sensors, AI-enabled IoT services, and deep learning computer vision products. We will show how we systematically explore the impact of technologies before they exist and how we try to look beyond hype and our own excitement to see how a new technology can actually solve business and human problems.

Presenter(s)

Mike Kuniavsky is a user experience designer, researcher, and author. A twenty-year veteran of digital product development, Mike designs products, business processes, and services at the leading edge of technological change. He specializes in multi-device interactions, cloud-based service design, and design of hardware products connected to cloud-based services. He has worked with some of the world’s top technology companies, such as Samsung, Sony, Nokia, Whirlpool, and Qualcomm, to design new products, guide product strategy, and create user-centered design and development cultures. He is the author of “Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research” and “Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design” both of which are used as standard university textbooks. He received a dual major B.S./B.A. in Computer Science and Film/Video Studies from the University of Michigan.