I used a very similar dichotomy for some time, informing research vs validating research. I used to think the two dichotomies were more or less synonymous and interchangeable, but now I am realizing they are not. In fact, they are complementary — in an important way.

The distinction falls along the lines of holism and atomism.

Before I launch in, here is a short primer on holism and atomism: Holism understands realities essentially as wholes, within which features can be articulated by a variety of schema. Atomism understands realities essentially as parts, which combine and build up into wholes. “Right-brainers” tend to perceive things in holistic terms, grabbing things in big gestalt impressions. Holism tends to have a subjective character. “Left-brainers” are more often atomistic, dissecting things into small, manageable elements. Atomism tends to be have an objective character. There is actually no necessary conflict between holism and atomism — as long as they are seen as ways to perceive and schematize reality. But most people, without noticing, tend to project them into reality as metaphysical truths, and then succumb to reductionism, understanding the world to be essentially constituted of parts, or essentially constituted of a whole, and then further confounding their understanding of truth with truth itself. Once this occurs, the complementary view is experienced as defective. In my view, the antidote to reductionism is  pluralism, the understanding that multiple valid ways exist to make sense of reality, each a particular pattern of perceptiveness, blindness, competence and incompetence, and all with the potential to complement the others. (This is why teams are so important, and why they must be seen as collaborative pluralities and not primarily as a sum of labor-power resources…)

Back to the forms of research. Oddly, each dichotomy has one atomistic and one holistic term. In generative-evaluative, generative is holistic and evaluative is atomistic. In informing-validating, informing is atomistic and validating is holistic.

Viewing research through this lens, here is how it looks to me:

Informing research is atomistic pre-design research focused on gathering information about the research participants, which is used to inform strategic decisions concerning requirements.

Generative research is holistic pre-design research, which pursues the perspectives of research participants. The researcher looks for insights that can help a design team intuitively see from the perspective of those who will experience their work. The reason such an approach is generative is that perspective shifts tend to free those who undergo them from inhibiting prejudices and causes new possibilities to become obvious. When this happens research is inspiring (meant in a non-romantic, almost technical sense).

Evaluative research is atomistic mid-post-design research which essentially QA tests a candidate design, to see if the team has designed something that works as intended, and if not, correcting errors and optimizing it. This seems to be the approach more analytical and systematic information architects tend to take.

Validating research is holistic mid-post-design research which treats a design artifact as a hypothesis. The hypothesis takes this form: “If we understand how this person sees, feels and responds to things, this design will be makes sense to them, they will know how to interact with it, and they will respond to in a particular way.”

Notice, the holistic approaches tend to tell us about the person experiencing the design where the atomistic approaches tend to tell us about the thing experienced  by the person. And of course, an experience is determined by the interaction of that which is experienced and the one who experiences. This is the first reason I’ve come to see the distinction between informing and generative and validating and evaluative as important. But another reason is even more important.

Nearly everything in the business world — and in fact the entire world — has this dual dimension to it, and is often subjected to reductionistic thought. And the more important the thing is, the more likely this is to happen.

The two examples I have in mind are people and brands. I’ve already discussed people, but business is all about people, not only customers but employees, investors, gossipers, legislators, etc. There’s a strong tendency in institutions to reduce people to statistically behaving masses or an individually behaving entity, and to think of design as a means to modify behaviors. But people are really only understood when the experience that motivates these behaviors are understood as well, and this has practical and moral implications. This topic alone could expand into a multi-volume work.

But brand is significant for being the newest and most conspicuous convergence of holism and atomism at work in the world today. And you see the reductionistic split in approaches to brand strategy. Half the world wants to treat it as entirely irrational, subjective, emotional and subject only to the laws of intuition, at least until the brand is formalized into a brand identity system. And the other half of the world wants to reduce brand to a series of statements and attributes, documented and forgotten, except for the really tangible, enforceable parts, formalized in the brand identity system. About all everyone agrees on is that brand is at least somehow bound up with brand identity systems, and the simple fact that brand is much more than that. But precisely what that “more” is is practically impossible to think about and discuss. Until we learn to think about and talk about what brand really is and how it works, the existence of living, inside-out brands will happen more or less accidentally, and merely formal skin-deep branding will be the norm.

“What is this research going to give us that we can’t get from analytics and iterative design?”

“Don’t you need to ask all your interviewees the same set of questions so you can compare their answers?”

“Can you quantify these findings?”

And with qualitative research, the dreaded: “That’s an awfully small sample. Are these findings statistically significant?”

These questions can be difficult to answer clearly, succinctly and definitively. Wouldn’t it be helpful to have some kind of framework or model to help people understand how the various kinds of research (especially qualitative and quantitative fit together) to provide an organization what it needs to effectively engage and serve their customers?

James Spradley in The Ethnographic Interview provides such a framework. His approach is the identification of four different roles a research participant can play, each with a different relationship between researcher and participant and each producing a different kind of finding:

• Informant – In ethnography, a participant is related to as an informant. Informants are “engaged by the ethnographer to speak in their own language or dialect”, providing “a model for the ethnographer to imitate” so that “the ethnographer can learn to use the native language in the way informants do.” The informant is related to as a teacher. What is learned is how the participant conceptualizes and verbalizes his experience. Informants give the researcher not answers to fixed predetermined questions, but the questions themselves. Informants help define what the researcher needs to learn in subsequent research. (Examples of research techniques with informants: unstructured and semi-structured interviews, diary studies, open card sorting, collaborative design exercises.)
• Subject – Subjects are participants in social science research, upon whom hypotheses are tested. “Investigators are not primarily interested in discovering the cultural knowledge of the subjects; they seek to confirm or disconfirm a specific hypothesis by studying the subject’s responses. Work with subjects begins with preconceived ideas; work with informants begins with a naive ignorance. Subjects do not define what it is important for the investigator to find out; informants do.” (Examples of research techniques with subjects: usability testing, split testing, concept testing.)
• Respondent – A respondent is any person who responds to a survey questionnaire or to queries presented by an investigator. “Survey research with respondents almost always employs the language of the social scientist. The questions arise out of the social scientist’s culture. Ethnographic research, on the other hand, depends more fully on the language of the informant. The questions arise out of the informant’s culture.” (Examples of research techniques with respondents: surveys, questionaires, structured interviews, closed card sorting.)
• Actor – “An actor is someone who becomes the object of observation in a natural setting.” As with subjects and respondents, when participants are related to as actors, the terms of the description of the actor’s behaviors are those of the researcher, not of the participant. It should be noted, however, that in ethnographic research (and also in contextual inquiry, participants are interviewed as they are observed, which means the participant is still understood  primarily as an informant. The actor-informant teaches the researcher through showing and explaining in his own terms the significance of his actions, which allows the researcher to give (to use Clifford Geertz’s term) “thickness” to his descriptions of what he observes. (Examples of research techniques with actors: site analytics, business intelligence analysis, silent observation.)

Over the course of a research program, research participants may at various times be regarded as subjects, actors or respondents — but if the goal is to know what really motivates the participants, to understand how to engage them at an emotional level, and to cultivate an enduring relationship with them, it makes a lot of sense to begin by relating to research participants as informants, beginning with unstructured or semi-structured interviews.

By starting with an informant relationship with research participants researchers can develop a better idea of what matters to the participants, how they conceptualize and speak about these things, and most importantly how this motivates observable behavior. These insights (that is, findings that illuminate the inner life of participants) can focus subsequent research on the most relevant and impactful questions. It also improves the execution of the research by helping researchers use language that’s natural and understandable to participants, earning greater trust and cooperation, and minimizing misunderstandings. And in analysis researchers and planners will mine more valid insights from the data, since they understand the motives, thought process and language behind the responses and behaviors of the respondents, actors and subjects. And the insights will be accurate because they rely far more on fact than (often unconscious) assumptions.

The other types of research can then report in more quantifiable terms, using much larger samples, how many subjects or actors perform certain behaviors or how many respondents give one answer or another to certain questions on a survey or questionnaire — and these actions and responses will now carry much more meaning because now the researchers have subjective insights to complement the objective data.

Two more points worth making: 1) I haven’t mentioned segmentation in this article, but anywhere where I mention learning about research participants, I am talking about learning about segments of participants (defined by goals, needs, attitudes and behaviors), and understanding the similarities and differences among them. 2) Generally, it is in the role of informant that research participants provide findings that drive design and creative. Informants inspire empathy and creative approaches. Subjects, respondents and actors tend to yield information useful in making strategy decisions. Using the full range of qualitative and quantitative research methods together intelligently can enable strategists and designers to work together more effectively to harness the full power of experience design.

By understanding research better — recognizing the difference between research that produces subjective insights and research that produces objective data, by not mistaking them for rival methods for producing the same kinds of findings, and by understanding how they can be used together to gain a holistic picture of one’s customers that is far more than the sum of the facts — an organization becomes more capable of understanding its customers without sacrificing their individuality to empty statistics.

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No idea of any value is constructed systematically. Good ideas are born whole, and the details develop within them as they mature. Ideas behave like life.

The most reliable way to see and understand differently is to learn from other people with divergent perspectives. This kind of learning differs from factual learning. It is insight — learning  to see familiar things in an unfamiliar way and understanding what is seen in new ways.

These other person’s way seeing and understanding does not replace our old perspective. We are not (often) converted over to the other person’s perspective. Rather we incorporate both our old perspective and the other’s perspective and find a new and more comprehensive perspective. We expand our horizons.

Looking back, we see that we weren’t exactly wrong, but we were certainly unaware of how we could be even more right. And looking forward, we discover lying in plain sight possibilities that were invisible prior to the perspectival shift.

But here’s the rub: between familiarity and the new vision is painful perplexity that cannot be overcome through any linear process. It is this perplexity that many people find intolerable, and which kills innovation before it can even begin. This is why most so-called innovation is mere experimentation with recombinations of “best practices” — groping for novelty, sparks of ingenuity, incremental improvements, clever inventions. What intoxicates, surprises, inspires and compels, though, is conceived differently.

Deep innovation requires courage. However, investing in a new, untried offering is the easy part. The hard part is coming to the kind of understanding that yields innovation.

We still have to design artifacts as a means to “designing an experience”. It is not as if we stop designing artifacts and start designing experiences. It is not artifact OR experience. It is artifact AND experience.

With experience design, both the artifact and the experience are designed together. To speak of “experiences” instead of “artifacts” — to lose the distinction between the artifact and some person’s experience of the artifact — the concept of experience will be garbled, degraded and leveled down and made more and more identical to artifact.

Before we know it we will find ourselves designing things or strategizing about technologies and channels and processes — with no reference to anyone’s experience of anything — and calling them “experiences”.

To design an experience means to design artifacts in such a way that the designer never loses sight of one key truth: the experiencer of the artifact will certainly experience it differently than the designer. The point of the artifact we are designing is to provide a particular kind of experience to particular people. And this difference cannot be a general fact that a difference exists. That is only relativism. And it can’t be mere goodwill. That is only sentimentality. The difference must be taken seriously — seriously enough that the specific differences are researched, that the insights from the research guide the design, and that the design is tested with those who will encounter it, interact with it and experience it.

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One more important point: a lot of craftsmanship  goes into the design of an artifact wonderful enough to provide a wonderful experience. In the end, craft has everything to do with whether we experience love or indifference or annoyance when we interact with a designed artifact. Real craft cannot be researched or tested or processed into existence. It is not the mere absence of flaws. But part of great craft is the ability to respond not only to what is being crafted, but also to the person for whom the artifact is crafted.

(This line of thought is borrowed from James Spradley: Learning about means learning facts — attributes, behaviors, affinities, etc. Learning from means turning away from the informant toward their world and learning about things as the informant sees them. Some of what is learned will remain connected with the informant as belonging to their own quirky vision, but some of it find its way into the researcher’s own view of things. It might change his view of the sponsor’s brand, or one of their offerings, or the meaning of the project he is informing.)

So, I rely on reality to compensate for these deficiencies: To compensate for my memory I use reality as a cheat sheet to remind me of the truth. To compensate for my lack of acting talent, I draw my inspiration from reality as I experience it, and allow the reality of my inspiration to carry my credibility. And I buttress my self-respect by always staying faithful to reality as I see it, and I try to get others to do the same in order to cultivate mutual respect.

Notice — I haven’t even touched on any of the advantages of scientific soundness, which are also very important. But those are well-recognized.

The importance of subjective and social truth is under-recognized, and we’re suffering for it.

We’re forced to pretend in stuff we just don’t believe. We suffer the effects of having to tell little moral and aesthetic lies, just to get along with the people around us. We suffer from the strain of having to act all the time. Free, spontaneous action might carry us away and cause us to reveal what we really think and feel about things. Or we try to squint and blur what we see, or re-engineer our attitudes to make them line up better to what’s expected, and consequently we lose contact with our own immediate sense of reality become self-alienated. And worse of all, we become cynical as we lose our capacity for respect. There’s this belief that nothing is true or real or felt. We don’t even expect things to be as people say — much less for any of it to line up with what we value.

The reason I care about brand is this: People are noticing that companies that learn to shake cynicism are more charismatic to customers, and the shaking of cynicism takes the form of great brands. Through the discourse of brand the business world is rediscovering the objective truth: Subjective truth is not a mere nicety, it is a competitive necessity.

I don’t have good defenses against soul-sucking. I think it’s a consequence of the state of openness I have to be in to do inspired work. I’m ok if the work itself has a soul, because then soul flows into me, instead of the reverse — but when a client is trying to fake a soul and forces everyone to work in a strictly systematic manner without any guidance of meaning, it is soul-killing.

It is a matter of truth and lies. If a brand has a real perspective on truth, we’re free to just say the truth from the brand’s perspective. We can speak from that place, nearly spontaneously, and feel pleasure in seeing things in a new, and sometimes better, way. I’ve tried and seen it for myself: some brands show us new truths.

But if a company’s brand is a big lie it is the same as it is with all lies — whether the lie is a matter of fact or of a whole life — we are forced to pay excessive attention to all the details, keep our story straight, make sure we don’t self-contradict, calculate up the effect of each little detail and make sure it’s properly manipulative. This is the soullessness people feel when they call something “corporate”.

To tell coherent lies is both difficult and exhausting and compromising, and frankly I’m not smart enough to pull it off. I’m spiritually honest partly because I’m too dumb to be spiritually dishonest.

At any rate, lies are not an option for me. I have to look out and see the world according to the brand, and be able to simply say it as I see it, and work with my eyes and intuition wide-open. The world serves as my reference. I don’t have to memorize what the truth is supposed to be.

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Brands are not invented any more than truths are.

But that does not mean they are not collaborative or personal. They are highly personal, but communicable, sharable, truths about value and fact.

The usual language of perspective maps perfectly to what I am saying:

There is a factual state of affairs. It is what it is. We, however, are intellectually mobile. We are situated within a situation, and we play a part in the truth of this situation through our active moving about and looking. We are free to move about and see things from many angles, like photographers. Like photographers we will and should prefer some angles to others because of what they emphasize or reveal. If other people are willing to stand together with us and look out at what we are seeing, they can see what we are seeing for themselves. This sharing of seeing is vision.

But, continuing the photography allusion, if we doctor a photograph, the picture is not an image of truth, but a made-up thing that does not represent reality. You won’t find the truth of a doctored photograph no matter where you stand. It’s just an image. So a vision is not a verbal image, painted in the air arbitrarily for others to imagine. It is a showing — or potential showing — of a new way to actually see things, by someone who has already seen it.

We stand on common ground, seeing from the same point-of-view, the same perspective. And from where we stand, we will naturally approach the situation from the same angle.

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Obviously, there is one purely theoretical “Truth”, represented by innumerable concrete human “truths”. These human truths are all we have, but each must attempt to be as faithful as possible to the one unattainable but indispensable Truth. The faithful (and futile) pursuit of Truth is what separates human truths from lies.

For every human truth there is an infinite number of lies, many of which are told out of innocence. Often the subjective liar does not know subjective truth even exists, and has never developed subjective honesty. Many people equate truth with objectivity, and this can turn truth into a perspectiveless inventory of discrete facts, connected with near-arbitrary spasms of logic, so the whole looks like a cubist nightmare.  Or worse, the whole thing can be perfectly consistent and arguable and really come from one perspective, but a perspective where people have to stand on inhuman ground to see it. We cannot care. We are not at home. We adhere to an alienated truth, and our hearts have to be elsewhere.

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We’ve got to learn to discern between human truths and human lies, especially in the subjective realm.

A true brand is the subjective truth of an organization that gives objective truth coherence, relevance and moral meaning.

A bullshit brand is an assertion about an organization that is either not true, or not relevant, or not valuable. People don’t believe it, or they don’t care about believing it. If nobody cares, the brand is bullshit.

A real brand is felt.

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We can’t go on thinking we can invent brands, or assemble brands like machines. True brands are discovered like the personality of a baby or a fact, and developed in some direction or another, hopefully toward even greater truth.

If companies are providing services similar enough that customers see no difference, the services are also commodities. And if companies aim at the same “good experience” based on talking to customers and arriving at the same understanding customers needs and expectations, then conforming their offerings around that understanding — or worse, imitating one another’s best practices — that experience will also become a commodity.

The only way to avoid becoming a commodity is to do something the other guys can’t do — and hopefully won’t even try to do after you’ve laid claim to it. That something might take the form of making a product nobody else can make like you make, serving customers in some way nobody else can serve them, or providing a unique experience nobody else can deliver.

It’s got to come out of the unique capabilities of the organization, or it the difference will be swallowed up immediately by competitors and made into commodity table-stakes.

Any organization on earth can do UX, and/or hire a flash animator, or invent a brand definition. Developing the separate pieces of a brand experience in isolation is pretty trivial, which is why it’s usually done that way. The whole “experience” is processed assembly-line style, bolted together step-by-step. But getting it all to line up around the uniqueness of the organization and the known and latent needs and wants of customers is much, much harder.

Artist’s ambition. – The Greek artists, the tragedians for example, poetized in order to conquer; their whole art cannot be thought of apart from contest: Hesiod’s good Eris, ambition, gave their genius its wings. Now this ambition demands above all that their work should preserve the highest excellence in their own eyes, as they understand excellence, that is to say, without reference to a dominating taste or the general opinion as to what constitutes excellence in a work of art; and thus Aeschylus and Euripides were for a long time unsuccessful until they had finally educated judges of art who assessed their work according to the standards they themselves laid down. It is thus they aspire to victory over their competitors as they understand victory, a victory before their own seat of judgment, they want actually to be more excellent; then they exact agreement from others as to their own assessment of themselves and confirmation of their own judgment. To aspire to honor here means: “to make oneself superior and to wish this superiority to be publicly acknowledged.” If the former is lacking and the latter nonetheless still demanded, one speaks of vanity. If the latter is lacking and its absence not regretted, one speaks of pride.

Most companies act like ordinary people and just brainlessly pursue the common ideal and make themselves into commodities. They miss the opportunity to look at who they are as a culture, what they have at their disposal to create unique, sustainable competitive advantage. They make themselves and their offerings generic up to the point where they present themselves to the public, at which point they look for ways to pain themselves as unique and attractive.