How to Lie with Design Research

I just gave this talk at the 2007 Design Research conference. Since I can’t imagine a better combination of audience, conference subject, presentation topic, and program placement (I was the last speaker of the day), it’s unlikely I’ll ever give it again although it certainly is a lot of fun and the crowd seemed to enjoy it.

David Armano filmed the opening couple of minutes of the performance, so you can get a flavor of the presentation. Watch the video before looking at the slides, otherwise, you might have no idea what is going on.


Supposedly a podcast will eventually be released as well.

Here are the presentation slides with my notes (9.5mb pdf). Realize that half of this presentation is in the performance. It might be like reading a transcript of The Colbert Report and wondering what was so funny about it.

3 thoughts on “How to Lie with Design Research

  1. Always nice to try out new material on the road, huh? Be sure to tip your waitresses.
    I think that most good talks work out to be at least 50% performance; if the audience could get 100% of your talk out of the slides, they wouldn’t need to travel to Chicago. But if people are in the audience bootlegging the whole thing…

  2. I just watched Lawrence Lessig’s alpha version (http://lessig.org/blog/2007/10/corruption_lecture_alpha_versi_1.html ) of his new “corruption” presentation. It is a perfect follow-up to this talk. The influence of money on design is probably a moot point, though. The more pertinent issue is more like, are principles like “human-centered” really better, or are they the words of designers who want remove themselves from the pressures of their clients by setting up an external third party that can break ties, but is really under their own control (i.e. Dan’s presentation).
    Oh, ethics…

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