Design Research and Strategy
Canadians love spring. If you’re not Canadian, I bet you’re thinking, “Of course they do; everyone does.” Ah but you do not “verstehen” Canada if you say such things. Indeed, I didn’t even “verstehen” Canada growing up on the West Coast — we didn’t even have snow!
Spring is approaching in Canada, and we feel it. [...]
Categories: Blog · anthropology · class · discourse analysis · goffman · social networks · technology design · web analytics
I am a big fan of MUJI, the simple Japanese housewares company. So I was quite interested to read a post by their art director Kenya Hara on the New York Times’s “Room for Debate.” Hara argues that Japanese people have
…a special ability to focus fully on what’s right in front of our eyes. We [...]
Categories: anthropology · culture · design · discourse analysis · food · product design · sociology
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
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