Member-only story

Democratization won’t save research

It is a band-aid for a deeper problem

David Tang
UX Collective
13 min readJun 19, 2023

Democratizing research is still a debated topic at the moment. There doesn’t seem to be a clear answer about whether or not it should be done, and from what I can tell, that’s because people are having different arguments on top of each other. Simplifying the argument into the Yays and the Nays, the discussion is oddly skewed. People against democratization say it’s too much time and effort that doesn’t produce much value, but a good amount of harm. Interestingly, even those in favor admit the possible dangers but say that the value to the practice and the organization outweighs them. The stakes of this argument have gotten higher given recent global industry and technological shifts, so I wanted to disentangle the different arguments to get a bit of clarity.

Generally, the disagreements about democratization seem to come from two sources:

  • How people explicitly or implicitly define the term “democratization”
  • What problem democratization is being used to solve

Let’s break them down.

People going to vote
Photo by Ernie Journeys on Unsplash

What the heck is research democratization?

If you are a researcher at an organization or you work with or around some of them, you’re probably familiar with the…

Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by David Tang

PhD turned UX/Design researcher. I talk about science, innovation, and finding your career path after PhD here: https://davidtangux.com

No responses yet

What are your thoughts?