Doing Design Research

Dr. Will Kurlinkus

 Key Terms to Look Out For

¤  Users, Stakeholders, SME’s

¤  Design thinking steps: inspiration (the problem/opportunity),

ideation (the process of developing and testing ideas),
implementation (the real world production)

¤  Prototyping (early and often)

¤  Constraints: feasibility (what can we actually do given money,

time, and manpower in the near future), viability (what makes
sense for a long term future success), desirability (what makes
sense to real people)

¤  Brief: “Reinvent bathroom cleaning with an emphasis on what

was enigmatically called ‘the everyday clean’” (24).
What should we call ourselves?

¤  Platypus

¤  R+D

¤  Skunkworks

¤  Shadow
Division
7 Minutes: What Did You Read?
 Ethnography
¤  Graphing an Ethnos: What/why/how are the insider logics/expertise of this community?
¤  Combines emic (objective outsider accounts) and etic (insider accounts) data
¤  “Behaviors are never right or wrong but they are always meaningful” (39).

¤  How is collective identity created? Who are insiders and outsiders?

¤  What are the activities, events, and genres occurring?

¤  What are the different types of participants? What does difference/diversity of

membership look like?

¤  How is power wielded or equalized?

¤  How does space transformed into place?

¤  How is place created? What kind of place? What are it’s rules? (public vs. private)

¤  What do violations, rejections, ruptures, and fights look like?

¤  How does this community operate over time (change or stay the same)?
 Interview
¤  Allowing real human beings to have a real voice and real say.

¤  Closed vs. Open-ended questions.

¤  Avoiding leading questions—Asking not inducing.

¤  Bad: So many English majors don’t know what they want to do after they graduate, why become
an English major?
¤  Better: Why become an English Major in 2019?
¤  Best: Can you tell me about how you got into writing?

¤  Tell me a story about…

¤  Structure the interview from less to more specific questions to avoid skewing later
answers.

¤  Start with a softball/easy story to tell.

¤  Ettiquete: Always record, always take notes, always give positive feedback cues, avoid
interrupting, always use callbacks (earlier you said...)
User
Persona
¤  Humanize and storify
your problem.

¤  A persona is a fictional
user archetype—a
composite model you
create from the data
you’ve gathered by
talking to real people—
that represents a group
of needs and behaviors

¤  Personas usually contain

a photo, name,
demographics, role,
quote, goals, behavior/
habits, skills,
environment,
relationship, and
scenario

¤  Journey across time is

particularly important
Empathic Modeling/Mapping
Journey Map
 Future Workshops
1.  Prep: who is invited?
How is power
balanced?

2.  Critique: What is the

problem and what
are it’s numerous
causes? No solution
or criticizing others.
Quantity and
categorization.

3.  Fantasy: What is our

ideal world—
divorced from our
problems and from
any constraints.

4.  Implement: How

can we achieve this
ideal in reality?

5.  Follow-Up
Making as Research: Cultural Probes
 Metaphorical Design
¤  English major
as…
¤  Internship
¤  Hospital
¤  Art Studio
¤  Buffet
Assets Mapping
Think About Your Problem
What are you going to do in this project and where will you start?