Design Research and Strategy
Lies are an important source of design insight. Design research ought to embrace lies as potential sources of creative inspiration. Lies are indicators of a gap between what we are and what we think we ought to be. Well-designed products soften and assuage the effects of this gap.
The other day, one interviewee asked me, near [...]
Categories: Blog · anthropology · culture · design · ethnography · home · innovation · interaction design · market research · qualitative research · sociology
I was recently invited to speak at Ottawa’s Social Media Breakfast. The organizers, Simon Chen, Rob Lane and Ryan Anderson, asked me specifically to bring a sociologist’s understanding to social media. Below is my presentation. For the full version, with the notes, visit the full slideshare version.
My essential argument for the presentation was that we [...]
Categories: Blog · bourdieu · design · facebook · goffman · home · interaction design · market research · social capital · social media · social networks · sociology · technology design · user experience
Roger Martin has a great post on Harvard Business Review that summarizes how ethnographic research differs from quantitative surveys.
Martin writes:
Qualitative, and especially observational or ethnographic, research enables us to delve much more deeply into the relationship between our firm and its product/service and the customer. Because we aren’t obsessed about adding all the responses together [...]
Categories: Blog · ethnography · home · market research · qualitative research · quantitative research · surveys · time
Few would disagree that fundamental economic change is upon us. Business models are crumbling daily. From the auto industry to the banking industry, it is clear that old ways of doing things are no longer working. The market research industry is just as vulnerable to this shift, yet, like the auto industry before it, it [...]
Categories: Blog · Qualitative Research & Design · Research Methods · design · ethnography · home · market research · product design · qualitative research · quantitative research · survey · surveys