Design and Research

As a problem solver, I’m interested in the similarity and difference of design and research. Paul Graham has also written an article to discuss this issue. He summarized as the following:

Design doesn’t have to be new, but it has to be good. Research doesn’t have to be good, but it has to be new. I think these two paths converge at the top: the best design surpasses its predecessors by using new ideas, and the best research solves problems that are not only new, but actually worth solving.

Basically I agree with him, but I would like to address some personal thoughts here. Having both academic and industrial background, sometimes I feel academia doesn’t offer enough recognition to the design approach. Even if you can solve a problem in a more elegant way than any other previous works, say invent a web browser that’s greater than any current browser, it’s hard for you to publish as long as your work lacks enough “technical originality” in terms of algorithm, etc.

Of course the two approaches converge at the top. I’m not claiming one way is better than the other. However, I would like to have the freedom to set my own priority toward research or design according to the essence of the problem. In the area of computer science, I suspect the design approach even have a slight advantage. For instance, big companies in this filed, Google, Facebook, Apple solve our problem mostly by apply idea that already exists but put them in a different or more elaborated way (Yes, I know Google has PageRank, so I say it’s “mostly”).

Take iPad as an example. A pretty similar idea has already been published in 1972 by Alan Kay. But not until the release of iPad can we enjoy digital reading. It’s because the advance of hardware and software technology, but also more importantly, is the good design made it possible. It’s also true for many other technology products, say MAC OS X. GUI is not a notion invented by Apple. In some sense maybe many people put it right: MAC OS X is UNIX with a sugarcoat. But the sugarcoat was so elegantly designed so that it outperformed other operating systems, at least favorite by many hackers.

Again, I’m not claiming it’s more valuable to research. But it would be great if people in academia also have the freedom to set their own priorities for “new v.s good”. In such a way that they can do something that really influence the world rather than making prototypes that will eventually be borrowed (if it’s great) by the industry several years or even several decades later.

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