Design driven by insights into human behaviors and desires, commercial contexts & technological capabilities.
Human-centered design research informs core strategy and guides intuition in designing what a new experience, service, or product can or ought to do for its users, and how to do that.
Successful design research investigates contemporary and historical contexts: by documenting and analyzing precedents, and by comparing proposals with existing work. It anticipates future outcomes and effects as designed artifacts or systems enter the world.
Research is usually undertaken as part of a generative design process, but the discoveries and imperatives stand on their own once verbalized or visualized.
esign research methodologies—contextual interviews, digital and visual ethnographies, participatory research, cognitive walkthroughs, heuristic evaluations, role play, improv and “informance”—borrow from established research practices in the social sciences, software engineering and marketing.
Research using these methods is documented in my graduate work and in my work as an embedded designer in the People and Practices Research group at Intel. These approaches are part of the underlying process in my design work.
