Design Research and Strategy
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
Autumn Rituals: Buying Jeans
Ritual plays an important role in our lives. Emile Durkheim noted in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that ritual bookends our experience of time:
The division into days, weeks, months, years, etc., correspond to the periodical recurrence of rites, feasts, and public ceremonies.
Time passes, in part, because we create rituals to signal [...]
Categories: Blog · anthropology · brand · culture · home · market research · sociology · time
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 · Popular · ethnography · home · market research · qualitative research · quantitative research · surveys · time
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
We all seem to be running out of time. Time use is an important but often overlooked aspect of design. What do designers need to know about time and time use?
Types of Time
We don’t all use or experience time in the same way. Scholars call two types of time “monochroncity” and “polychronicity.” Polychronicity is defined [...]
Categories: customer satisfaction · design · technology design · time · time use · user experience