Design Research Methods and Tools

It’s about how you use them…

As I may have mentioned, I’m now embarking on my Masters of Design (MDes) focused on improving the environmental and social outcomes of environmental volunteering.

One of the key parts of any design process, is working out how you’re going to address the problem.

This is where methodology-driven design falls down for me — many are too formulaic to use for a variety of problems.

It’s like going into a kitchen knowing you’re going to fry something, then asking what meal someone wants to eat.

So, I’m focused on my own practice of designing, which is driven by non linear prototyping, rigorous learning and iterative development of the outputs.

One area I’ve always dabbled, but never had enough time to explore deeply, is a range of approaches to design research — behavioural insights about people’s lives which can be threaded into the design process to influence the outcome.

The main areas I’m looking to explore at this stage are:

Offline

Ethnography and Journey Mapping

It feels like this is an important way to explore environmental volunteering, because so much of the experience happens away from the digital realm. I’m glad to say this means I get back out into the field, get my hands in the soil, and do some good work to restore the environment, as well as talking with other volunteers about their own experiences. I then intend to map these experiences in a range of ways, with my old friends ‘chalk pens’ and ‘post it notes’.

Card Sorting

I’m also intrigued by the possibility of using a range of card sorting methods to help me understand volunteer and volunteer manager priorities, and see if I can find overlaps for areas to intervene for high impact. Potentially I could also use some of the MethodKit cards which are soon to be making their way into my life, courtesy of some seed funding from an Enspiral venture I used to work with.

Mental Models

Increasingly I find myself interested in working with existing mental models, and understanding how to create new shared ones which may help two or three parties to come together and create shared direction. I’m still working out how best to explore this area — suggestions welcome!

Hybrid Offline / Digital

Cultural Probes Go Mobile

I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of ‘Cultural Probes’ — despite the alarming name, they seem like one of the more interesting ways of gaining insights into people’s lives and culture, without projecting my understanding onto the collection of the data:

Research participants are given kits for self-documentation of meaningful thoughts, events, experiences, places, people, etc. using various materials or forms (e.g. journals, diaries, annotated maps, disposable cameras, etc.). This technique offers exploratory insight into participants’ cultural contexts.

via Design Research Techniques

When I found Experience Fellow a couple of years back, I was excited as it offered a way to leverage the smartphones in a lot of people’s pockets to run cultural probes, collect and analyse the data in a simplified manner. In short, it seemed like c21st version of the ‘disposable camera and notepad’ probes of yesteryear. I’m looking forward to seeing how best to leverage this in my MDes.

Cultural Probes Go Moving Image

When you want higher resolution research content than simply notes and photos, you can hardly ask a participant to walk around holding their smartphone all day, but you could see if they’re keen to use ‘the world’s most wearable camera’ — a Narrative camera.

These handy little lapel-clip-devices are akin to 1960’s Soviet Spy cams, can help you record hours of video — particularly useful for not just capturing what people notice and log (a la cultural probes), but for seeing what they see including other people’s reactions, peripheral events and the like.

I’m envisioning recruiting environmental volunteers to wear a narrative, and using this as an extra layer of data to build more effective research, interventions and testing programmes.

Digital

Survey & Positioning

The importance of statements and positions is often swapped for questions in surveys, which often leaves you with reams of data which then need to be analysed deeply to find trends and themes.

I like how some platforms are flipping this model in order to try to do high quality pattern spotting, or even help groups move toward consensus. A while back I encountered Pol.is and immediately feel in love with this style of ‘open surveying’ and have used it several times since. Check out the Pol.is Overview for more info.

I see this method as a way of regularly involving people in a low touch way with the project, and to help build understanding of language and culture surrounding the project.

Online Chat

Short of in person interviews / user observation, when it comes to getting contextual feedback on a prototype (such as a website, or software) there’s really nothing better than live chat.

A year or so ago, I stumbled on an awesome little startup which was rivalling the power house that is Intercom, with a neat tool called Drift. With the ability to do chat-style support, full screen takeovers and more, it’s an amazingly versatile tool (with a generous free plan) which I feel may play a vital part in user feedback and communication as my MDes unfolds.

Space To Think

I’ve increasingly recognised that thinking about complex problems whether it’s alone or collaboratively, requires spatial thinking.

By this I mean that often concepts, models and representations of these for your own thinking, or thinking as a group, requires multiple dimensions — for example when I talk about volunteer experiences, I may want to talk about time as one dimension, emotion as another, and impact as another. This is almost impossible to do without flexible tools to support that thinking process.

One of the most flexible is the age old sketchpad, sharpie and post it notes. I’m aiming to spend at least 4 hours a week completely analog, possibly even using ‘space’ and ‘movement’ as ways to help me process my thinking and move it forward. One of my greatest ‘studio spaces’ is the local forest around Warburton, Victoria!

I’ve also settled on Mural as my online tool, thanks to their educational plan, to help make that happen, especially helpful considering my MDes is conducted remotely from Australia, with an NZ University. In addition, I’m exploring Nuclino as a knowledge management tool to help me analyse and visualise things I write about over time.

So I hope this is helpful for others, it’s one of my first posts in a series of ‘thinking out loud’ whilst doing my MDes with Massey University.

Books that have been influencing my thinking about Design this week:

Design For Real Life — Eric Meyer & Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Embracing Complexity: Strategic Perspectives for an Age of Turbulence — Jean G. Boulton, Peter M. Allen, Cliff Bowman

If you’d like to find out more about my MDes:

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I’d also love to hear your thoughts about methods and Design practice, so feel free to respond to this post on Medium, or tweet me some thoughts!