My favourite show Rick and Morty triggers memories of working at consultancies. It follows a mad scientist Rick who takes his fretful grandson Morty on adventures to different planets and dimensions. Much like Rick and Morty, design consultants advise clients from different industries by immersing ourselves in their cultures and environments: we interview stakeholders, conduct field and desk research, create insights and prototypes, speculate futures, test hypotheses, and subsequently advise and implement strategies.

Throughout the years, I have had a collection of dossiers on Notion and Trello, which shambolically encapsulate my observations and thoughts of my past adventures through cultures. I keep words, pictures, stories, quotes, aphorisms, and links I found interesting. I use tables, sketches, and mind maps to scribble down my thoughts and ideas. I create a new dossier whenever I explore new topics like post-pandemic healthcare and multi-sensory storytelling.

Dossier (noun): a collection of information about a particular person or subject. Detectives compile dossiers on cases and recruiters build dossiers on candidates.

Unfortunately, I haven’t done a great job managing and organising my dossiers and it has become a sprawling mess—it’s very difficult to navigate and find what I need. Since I have more free time after moving to London, I decided to create order from the chaos and slowly turn my dossiers into articles—to make them more consumable for myself and others. This is the first one, an organised dossier on “insight”.

Insights as new eyes

Marcel Proust wrote in his novel La Prisonnière “The only true voyage of discovery, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” He suggested that le seul véritable voyage (the only real voyage) was not as simple as transporting to physical locations, but also to imaginative places—to experience the world through the perceptions of others, i.e. the new eyes.

As designers, we are not so different. We are fond of understanding and experiencing the world (and the pluriverse) as others perceive and feel it. We immerse ourselves in the cultural lives of people, interact with them, and study their emotions and behaviours. We read articles, gather data, and discover patterns and tensions. We scrutinize processes and systems, disassemble complexities and relationships, and question definitive decisions and principles. We imperceptibly develop insights, which encompass our understandings, critiques, and discoveries in the forms of words, visuals, multimedia, or experiences.

What is an insight?

Before discussing the how and why of insight, it’s instructive to construct a definition of insight in the context of design.

An insight is a means of seeking profound knowledge, a path of discovering opportunities, and an act of challenging design paradigms.

Profound knowledge, opportunity, and design paradigm are the three key concepts here:

• Profound knowledge is a realisation or understanding of people, organisations, or the world from a new and deeper perspective. An epiphany (or an “aha” moment) occurs when profound knowledge is acquired.
• An opportunity is more a question instead of an answer that inspires and encourages people’s imaginations of new products, services, systems, and worlds that fulfil an unmet need.
• A design paradigm is an established framework, pattern, or system—of theories, methods, standards, or concepts. It refers to an archetype rather than an individual unit, a system or pattern of ideas rather than a particular solution, or an organization or eco-system rather than a particular person or object. A paradigm shift arises when there is a fundamental change in a design paradigm (which consequently creates innovation).

Insights are the new eyes for designers—to empathize with people, comprehend the systems, and understand the world; to uncover unmet needs, identify opportunities, and develop ideas; and to explore the pasts, immerse in the presents, and have a glimpse at the futures.

Why insight?

As designers in the business world, we create insights to help businesses win and stand out from the crowd. Here is a look at some reasons why successful businesses invested in creating insights:

1. Identify and contemplate problems. Einstein was emphatic about the importance of problem “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” Insights expose and challenge assumptions, uncover interesting problems, and redefine existing problems.
2. Develop empathy and unearth human needs. Insights reveal the behaviours, pains, and needs of our users. Insights unearth their underlying desires, beliefs, and values. Insights help us empathise with them and experience their emotions: joy, sadness, trust, disguise, fear, anger, anticipation, and surprise.
3. Inspire ideas and drive paradigm shifts. Conventional questions often lead to conventional ideas. Businesses need interesting questions to generate original ideas. Insights provide the right ingredients to forge inspirational questions that trigger epiphanies.
4. Envisage and anticipate the future. Insights do not only expose the issues of today, but also exhibit the challenges of the future. It encourages us to rethink the world of today and creates space for speculative discussion and fictional dreaming about possible futures.

How to develop great insights?

It’s not always easy to create great insights—it takes practice, experience, perseverance, and resources. If you are new to this, take heed of these tips:

1. Write everything down. Bronisław Malinowski, arguably the most influential social anthropologist, once said “Write everything down”. Good insights take time to craft, however, we rarely have the time to start from scratch in a fast-paced project. The trick is to build a collection of non-confidential knowledge gradually over the years. I create dossiers on Trello and Notion to capture my observations and thoughts with words, pictures, stories, links, and more.
2. Gather data and information from all sources. Designers are trained to conduct qualitative field research to gain firsthand stories, experience, and knowledge. However, we tend to de-emphasize the importance of desk and quantitative research from open sources, such as news, articles, books, journals, open data, trends, reports, forums, and social media. It’s a more time and cost-effective technique which offers the baseline understanding of the topics, quantitative data to support the observations from field research, and market and consumer data on a larger scale. (Judging the quality of data and the source is a whole article in itself.)
3. Analyse with an interdisciplinary mindset: Design is multidisciplinary in its root, and it takes an interdisciplinary mindset to analyse the data, articulate the whys, and generate insights via different schools of thought: design methods (e.g. territory mapping, experience mapping, affinity diagramming, and code cracking), inferences (e.g. induction, deduction, and abduction), ethnographic lenses (e.g. micro- & macro-sociology, portraying characters, and depicting mechanisms), business techniques (e.g. PESTLE, SWOT, and VPEC-T), philosophical methods (e.g. linguistic, conceptual, dialectic, and socratic), etc. Besides, it’s always helpful to have others—such as clients and other teams—involved to have a fresh look at the data and emerging patterns, which may help fill the knowledge gap, challenge assumptions, recognise personal biases, and more.
4. Reflect on our own attributes. Our own experiences and backgrounds influence how we shape insights. Rather than viewing our presence as a source of bias, designers can reflect on our own attributes and thoughts to have a unique understanding of the data. I usually have reflexivity sessions with my team during the synthesis process to recognise, write down, and discuss our own attributes, assumptions, and biases.
5. Ask questions. Questioning is a powerful tool for developing great insights. Asking questions and having constructive discussion makes people open up, encourages the exchange of ideas, and results in an improved quality of the supposed insights.
6. Explore different formats. Yehuda Berg asserted the power of words “Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate and to humble.” It’s indubitably why we started to explore insights in words of many forms, like statement, poetry, fiction, and prose. However, it’s sometimes more engaging, provoking, and memorable to communicate insights in other formats, such as audio, visual (e.g. graph, picture, map, and photo journal), video (e.g. live, recorded, motion graphic, and animation) and experience (e.g. interactive, immersive, and game).

Closing

There are still many unsettled discussions about insight and research among the design community, such as philosophical vs scientific approach to subjectivity, human- vs planet-centric design, effectiveness of virtual ethnography, romanticising vs undervaluing ethnography, pragmatism vs idealism, preventing vs embracing structural biases, what is vs what is not ethnography, and so on.

Therefore, by writing this article, I hope to inspire others and myself to study, discuss, and rethink the what, how, and why of insight, and envision how it might be beneficial to businesses, organisations—and, perhaps, the world and humanity.

Thank you for reading.