PopTech : Blog : Jan Chipchase on design methodologies and imperialistic inclinations

Jan Chipchase on design methodologies and imperialistic inclinations

Emily Spivack ( Bio / Posts ) | Tuesday, January 17, 2012 UTC

When Jan Chipchase, head of research for frog Design, spoke at PopTech 2011 he described how his team spends weeks on the ground, living with participants around the globe and observing the activities and rules of their daily lives in order to design products, services, and technologies based on their findings. His talk provoked a series of questions from the audience about the ethics and integrity of his work and this past Friday he responded, at length, in an essay on his blog entitled Imperialist Tendencies. He introduces the piece by setting forth the following framework:

I enjoyed going to the recent Pop!Tech conference – the combination of bright minds, warm hearts and the Maine autumn is highly conducive to reflecting on what has been and imagining on what will be next.

During the event, I gave a talk to the audience about my research work, and in the panel session at the end of my talk I took two questions from a member of the audience relating to personal motivations of doing this kind of research and whether anyone has the moral right to extract knowledge from a community for corporate gain. Given the asker’s frustrated-politeness I’ll paraphrase what I (and a bunch of folks that came up to me after the talk) took as the intent of his questions:

What is it like working for BigCorps pillaging the intellect of people around the world for commercial gain?

How do you sleep at night as the corporations you work for pump their worthless products into the world?

Short answer is that I sleep just fine*.

Those with a desire to go beyond the 110 character headlines should draw a fresh mug of their favourite brew, find a comfy armchair and read on.

After you watch his PopTech talk, continue reading Chipchase's full response to some tough questions around design methodology, globalization, and social good.

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