Design Research and Strategy
DT has a great post over at Design Sojourn that discusses Six Sigma methodology and how it relates to design. He cites Tim Brown at IDEO who argues that Six Sigma is essentially Newtonian, while design thinking is quantum. In his own design work, DT expressed doubts about using Six Sigma:
After studying the Six Sigma [...]
Categories: Research Methods · anthropology · design · discourse analysis · ethnography · product design · qualitative research · quantitative research · surveys
The technology consulting firm Gartner is predicting that social scientists will be very much in demand by businesses. Eweek summarizes Gartner’s outline of four types of roles for social scientists:
Web User Experience roles that include UI designers, virtual-assistant designers and interaction directors.
Behavior Analysis roles that include Web psychologists, community designers, and Web/social network miners.
Information Specialist [...]
Categories: anthropology · design · sociology · technology design · user experience
The New York Times reports that the American Medical Association is considering doing away with the venerable symbol of the physician: the lab coat. There’s a very good reason to get rid of lab coats: they’re dirty. But the symbol of the lab coat is far more important. The New York Times reports the empirical [...]
Categories: Research Methods · anthropology · design · ethnography · goffman · qualitative research · quantitative research · sociology
In an earlier post, I examined how text is transformed when it is created and shared in digital form. In this post, I argue that time itself is transformed when it is represented in digital format. To illustrate, consider my experiment with my Filofax.
Yes, I said Filofax. I still have one. I haven’t filled it [...]
Categories: design · discourse analysis · product design · qualitative research · technology design · time · user experience
Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro had a great post on Interactions magazine about designing for conversations. They propose to use how a conversation actually works to make interactions better. They rely heavily on Claude Shannon’s conversation model to help guide the conceptual model of interaction designs.
In Shannon’s model an information source selects a message [...]
Categories: design · discourse analysis · ethnography · qualitative research · technology design