Creating a Playground for the Curious
Happy birthday to our design research initiative, Octoscope!
When I first told our team about an opportunity to build a community around research, more than 15 people with various backgrounds volunteered. And now, as the design research community fellows of IBM iX Istanbul, we are excited to announce the very first birthday of our initiative, Octoscope!
Everything we do thrives from curiosity and self-driven motivation to explore!
IBM iX İstanbul Studio
Our story as IBM iX Istanbul started in 2017 as a very small team. In just two years we grew into a big family, working on a wide range of projects with our clients from various industries. We figured the timing was right to take action, and we brought our research capabilities to a next level to embrace a more structured approach.
What is Octoscope?
Octoscope is a voluntary, multi-disciplinary research initiative. IBM has a well-known history of putting human-centered design in the heart of its processes. Design research, as a huge part of that legacy, is a practice of utmost importance throughout all IBM organizations. We also want to reflect these values in our work in the best way possible by creating the local research initiative.
We decided to focus our efforts mainly on four areas.
1. Research as a Team
Our goal has always been to improve the quality of our work progressively and maintain a standardized level of excellence in every output. One of the proven methods we embraced was to apply the research roles in IBM Design.
IBM Design defines two roles in research activities; explorers and guides. While explorers have little experience in applied research, they participate with their domain knowledge. Guides are the experienced researchers who drive the activities and take ownership of a shared understanding of user needs in the team. By assigning the explorer and guide roles, we managed to achieve high quality in our research process while improving the skills of our team.
2. Global Connection
The design research community of IBM works all over the world in almost every industry; which provides us an amazing network of professionals who are extremely open to share & learn from each other. Feyza, Asli, and I organize a series of research guild events to cherish the network by boosting the knowledge transaction and strengthening the connection. In guilds, we host a guest from this community each month to talk about their experiences and learnings from a project or a research activity.
3. Continuous Learning
This might be the core motivation that brought us together: the never-ending curiosity and love of learning. We use our buzzing slack channel for sharing inspiring content instantly. Our weekly meetings transformed into casual seminars; where we discussed a pre-selected research article thoroughly and lost track of time.
Now, learning has turned into a game. We enjoy the “Octoquest” game in our regular online-meetups, a trivia game created in Mural by Murat. When it is your turn, preparing the questions is also a challenge! It is our special get-together time we look forward to.
4. Local Community
In time Octoscope became a home for our community of curious people. We support each other by sharing and learning together. We show up and take ownership. Octoscope is a ground for our team to build their ideas with the support of others.
We built our playground together from scratch; setting our guiding principles, finding our name with an internal workshop, and eventually creating a brand to unite under. Deciding everything together from day one helped everyone feel the ownership and take responsibility for the progress.
As I look back, I am both proud and astonished at what we have accomplished in our first year as a continuously evolving and iterating team.
Happy birthday Octoscope!
A special thank you to Maja Barel for giving us the space to create and play.
Bilgenur Öztürk is a Design Research Lead & Sr. UX Designer at IBM based in İstanbul. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
