What Being a Design Researcher Feels Like

Standing in the streets of Bhubaneswar, I was waiting for my colleagues to finish talking to the pharmacist, as part of our testing research, when someone tapped my shoulder. I turned around to see a familiar face with a familiar scar. “Hiiii!,” said an excited Soniya* and we hugged like old friends while her companion watched awkwardly. “I saw you from there,” she pointed in the distance, “and thought that it is that sister only, so I came to check. What are you doing in Bhubaneswar?” I told her that I was in the city for a few days, asked how she was doing and knew not to bring up questions about her life in front of her friend. We bid each other goodbye and I turned around facing the pharmacy, with a smile. One of my colleagues who had witnessed the short exchange asked,

“Did you meet a college or school friend?” “No,” I replied, “a respondent from the last time we were here for research.”

I felt what being a design researcher feels like.

As part of my first project at TinkerLabs, we were understanding the behaviours of youth around contraceptives. Before proceeding for the research, we knew we would face a challenge getting girls to talk to us freely and openly about their sexual lives.

Whether you are a practitioner of design thinking or a student or have simply taken Ideo’s course on Human Centred Design (which I strongly recommend), you would have read about a step in the interview process, called Build Rapport. It is one of those basics that are easy to ignore while skimming through text while your eyes seek those visual tools, unique to design research. Those tools are great conversation starters and have helped me start difficult conversations but building rapport is what helps build empathy, the foundation of the design thinking process.

Empathy (noun): the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Soniya had been one of the respondents I had had a two-hour-long conversation with. After an hour of talking to Soniya, I rephrased a question she had previously avoided and this time she replied,

“I will tell you since you are like my sister, I haven’t even told my best friend about this.”

I felt what being a design researcher feels like.

The conversation unfurled stories of violence at home and an unwanted pregnancy she had witnessed at college. It had tears followed by a hug and moments of silence. It gave me insights into where girls get their information and where they don’t, into mismatches and missing links. When we returned from the field and shared findings, I could hear Soniya in the verbatim on the post-it and had Soniya as a reference when we designed our solutions. But that’s not it-Soniya’s was a story that stayed with me, a story of domestic violence and molestation, of verbal abuse and scars, of innocence and vulnerability.

Soniya became a girl to be informed, a girl to be empowered, a girl to design for.

Soniya was a reminder to understand the female lens that is often ignored, a story that fuelled other discussions on potential projects to be undertaken.

Soniya became the inspiration for a poem on my blog, a conversation with a gathering, and a justification for the feminist movement. And Soniya was just one of the girls I spoke to during that particular phase of that particular research.

And that’s what being a design researcher feels like.

*name changed for confidentiality