I’m going to try chiming in on this thread too, at the risk of rehashing unnecessarily. I’m seeing something of a theory of “multiple creativities” (a la multiple intelligences) emerging here. I think that both researchers and designers engage in different versions of Liz’s “highest” form of creativity.
Researchers do this by combining bits and traces of users’ everyday lives into a representation of those lives that draws out key guiding principles of those lives. This representation is ideally made in such a way that others (e.g. designers, marketers) can gain empathy, understanding, and even (dare I say it) some degree of predictive capacity for the target population. But, many researchers are primarily trained in using prose to create those representations, and they are often guided to some degree by a general interest in “what makes people tick” that doesn’t necessarily pertain to the specific pragmatic/commercial project they’re engaged in. This creates the risk of unintelligibility and/or irrelevance for their research.
Designers combine bits of shape, color, materials, etc. into objects that embody aesthetic and functional principles. Two metrics I’ve seen for this kind of creativity are whether it evokes the epithet “cool” or is seen as producing a “wow” among the designers themselves or, secondarily, their colleagues. This evaluation seems to be based on whether a design is innovative in either its visual presentation, its functional elegance (how easily and efficiently, and often in how small a package, it accomplishes what it’s supposed to do), or a combination of the two.
Researchers complain that designers don’t listen to them, and designers complain that researchers are trying to tell them what to do. In the first case, the researchers feel their creativity is not being recognized by the designers, and in the second, the designers feel that the researchers are pulling them down from “creating” to “making” by providing a recipe or set of directions. I think both of these reactions stem from different emphases for the creative process: the researcher’s emphasis is on depicting the world of the user with fidelity to the reality of that world, while the designers emphasize difference from the current world in favor of forward-looking aesthetic and technological development.
It makes sense that there should be a sweet spot between these two orientations. New, and especially innovative, products aren’t likely to come from a literal focus on the users’ status quo. Successful innovations that are actually adopted by people aren’t likely to come from a detached exercise in design creativity. Research helps designers know who they’re designing for, while design helps researchers figure out how to translate their knowledge of people into new products. Working together throughout the entire process should help each to become more attuned to the emphases, needs, and strengths, of the other.