Design Research and Strategy
I recently gave a guest lecture to the Master’s of Design students at OCADU on how to research culture. Don’t worry if you missed it, because you can now listen to the same lecture and get the presentation!
Below is the audio and presentation from that lecture. Are you interested in more? Consider Culture Coaching, a new [...]
Categories: Blog · anthropology · culture · design · home · methods · qualitative research · sociology
The Essence of Interaction Design Research: A Call for Consistency
This post is reproduced from the original Interactions magazine article
It started with an innocent query to the IxDA listserv. Someone was sure they had read an article in Interactions magazine once but could not find it again: Wasn’t there something written sometime by someone about something [...]
Categories: Blog · Research Methods · culture · design · home · interaction design · management · organizations · personas · qualitative research · quantitative research · sample size
I am a new home owner. Like many new home owners, I am both fascinated and repelled by the most terrifying show on television: Holmes on Homes. This show demonstrates a key aspect to understanding social life: normativity or what “should be.”
For those unfamiliar with the show, allow me to summarize the narrative arc of [...]
Categories: Blog · anthropology · culture · design · home · market research · product design · sociology
I am currently writing a grant proposal for a research project on mobile phones. This is the (very) short version:
All too often, technology designers create systems that unwittingly expose social actors to socially awkward situations. Companies like Facebook struggle to satisfy their users’ needs to present different selves in different social contexts. The dreaded “My [...]
Categories: Blog · Research Methods · anthropology · design · ethnography · goffman · product design · qualitative research · sociology · technology design · user experience
Consumers are “time starved,” as many designers and marketers may know, but there is more to the story than simply not having enough time. The very concept of “down time” carries an important lesson about technology design.
In this post, I analyze the idea of “down time” and the activity of “cottaging” as a Canadian (and [...]
Categories: Blog · anthropology · culture · design · home · interaction design · sociology · technology design · time · time use · user experience