I’m familiar with some of the “modern” forms of research and how they attempt to innovate—but at the place I’m learning them they tend to emphasize the research to the exclusion of the designer and creativity. That’s just not right.

In a larger sense, the issues raised by that article are things that I think about all the time. If we are always basing our design solutions on data gathered from contemporary users, where will the major innovative next steps come from? Where will that intuitive, illogical leap come from that makes a huge leap forward come from? We NEED those visionaries to come in and ignore the status quo sometimes. As Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”