Category: design process
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How to Conduct Research Workshops in Design
Workshops are fun and can act as collaborative research experiences to elicit rich insights about your audience. Through hands-on activities or active discussion, workshops help participants discover unknown and undefined needs or identify specific steps in the way they perform a task that can then inform the design process by generating ideas and opportunities. Contextual…
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How to Conduct Contextual Interviews in Design
Contextual interviews is one of the most frequently used method in design research. However, many students and designers underestimate the amount of preparation and practice needed to conduct effective interviews and elicit useful insights. This is because contextual interviews are more than a sequence of questions and answers. Rather, this type of interview resembles a…
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How to Conduct Observational Studies in Design
In design, observational studies are useful when you cannot talk to people directly or to better understand how people perform a task. This is because it is easier for people to perform a task than to explain how they perform it. As a design researcher, your goal will be to directly watch how people behave…
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Conceptual information design made easy!
The need for information design is even greater than before: explain COVID-19 rules, explain how to use masks properly, explain the many ways you can vote, explain new rules for flying, visualize COVID-19 numbers, etc. The list can go on and on. As information designers, it is imperative that we gain a deep understanding of…
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Maybe you don’t need design thinking
Design thinking has become a buzz word. Everyone wants to learn it and use it. And if you Googled the term, you get more than 863,000,000 results in under 50 seconds! However, in some cases people don’t know what design thinking is and why they want to work with it. I witnessed this phenomenon first…
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Understanding the use of Field Research in Design
Last month, I attended the Decipher Conference organized by AIGA Design Educators Community and hosted by the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (Michigan). The conference was focused on themes related to defining, doing, disseminating, supporting, and teaching design research. In addition to the holistic approach…
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Transforming Research into Action with Visualizations Workshop!
Next month, I will be facilitating a workshop on the intersection of field research and information design at the forthcoming Design Educators Research Conference (Decipher) conference organised by AIGA Design Educators Community and the new DARIA Network (Design as Research in the Americas). This will be a hands-on design research conference including activity groups, workshops and conversations.…
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Reflections on applying information design to the writing process
Each person experiences writing is a different way: while for some people writing comes naturally and words flow one after the others for others writing can take more time and be a harder journey. But, in general, when it is part of an extensive project, like a book or thesis, the writing process can be…
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Everything info designers need to know about field research, but never ask!
Since I started my journey as a design researcher, I realized that there was a big gap in the literature about using research–particularly qualitative research (i.e. not marketing research!)–in design practice, and even more in the field of information design. Simultaneously, as an information designer, I have always wanted to make research methods and my…
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Field Research in Information Design
If you are an information designer you can enhance your work by using field research. However, this type of research is still frequently overlooked in information design professional practice (the research community does conduct research studies, but that reality is very different from what occurs in the daily design practice). Traditional market research methods (surveys, online…
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Five things I learnt from my students
For the last two years, I have been teaching various flavours of design (information design, design thinking, interaction design) in non-design institutions. So far, the experience has been extremely eye opening but also challenging as when I started, I didn’t know how different it would be from previous years of teaching similar courses in design…
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Creative Designers, A Needed Oxymoron
The final project of my undergraduate creativity and design class is a quite vague and broad assignment. Students are asked to create something (we call it “Personal Creativity Manifesto”) to show how creative they have become but also how their creative and design selves would have a role and make an impact in the future. The…
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