Design Research and Strategy
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 interesting study, researchers at UBC have found that customers express higher satisfaction when they’re served by white men than by women or people of colour — even when their behaviour is exactly the same. Marketing professor Karl Aquino expressed surprise at the findings, as he told The Globe and Mail
“We had thought there [...]
Categories: Research Methods · customer satisfaction · feminism · methods · qualitative research · quantitative research · sociology · surveys
Data-driven social experience is an entirely new manner of social interaction, one that obscures our emotional connections to people. Data makes social relationships visible, knowable, and countable in unprecedented ways. But it does not — and cannot — convey the emotional experience of social interaction. I’ve already discussed how digital technologies transform text and time. [...]
Categories: anthropology · ethnography · facebook · qualitative research · quantitative research · social media · social networks · 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