Past and Future

Mixed methods research

Research can happen at any time throughout the design process. Using qualitative, generative or evaluative research methods with a subset of quantitative data literacy, I conduct research to understand the context and the users, garner the situated knowledge and translate the learnings into design actions.

Design research should lead to actions. In my previous, non-design life as a researcher, qualitative research was about gathering information, getting to the stem of a topic and arguing a point-of-view. However, when doing design research for innovation challenges, research outcomes should be action-driven. It’s also important to use simplified language and clear visual structures to communicate learnings and provide directions.

Give emphasis on analysis and synthesis. Data analysis and synthesis is a big part of qualitative research that’s often overlooked. Human mind is taught to be good at taking things apart, and converging disparate information in an un-biased way is often more challenging. As a structure geek, I bring in or develop design frameworks to structure data, make sense of the information, and construct compelling narratives.

Progress with the right methods. The fast-paced nature of my work requires an agile approach to the challenges: whether the it’s within a short timeframe, or it’s the kind of under-resourced project that’s believed to have sufficient knowledge, but still requires more non-technological studies to support or challenge the argument. Therefore, depending on the reality, we have to pivot quickly, choose the right methods to make progress.

Reckon the quantitative and qualitative approaches. Often times we over emphasize one type of approach over the other. As my background and the majority of my work emphasize on the qualitative side, I am learning to be comfortable with quantitative methods and choose what works best depending on types of challenge, project stages and research constraints.

Design the engagement with clear purposes. Sometimes workshop facilitations are misused and reduced to “feel-good“ democratization, not leading to the desired co-design outcome. I believe that workshops should be carefully designed to: a. broker the knowledge; b. gain stakeholders’ buy-in. The design effort before the actual session is crucial, directly affecting the engagement and the outcome.

Dedicate time and space for post-session synthesis. A common myth of co-design is the expected outcome. When facilitating any co-design activities, I put strong emphasis on the synthesis after each session and bring together learnings from different perspectives. Usually the challenges are so complex that we have to bring in different view points from diverse groups, hence we cannot expect to solve the problem during the sessions only. We should put more effort in getting to the bottom of the thinking behind the stand-alone ideas.

Facilitate as an intermediate knowledge broker. Apart from users, my work often requires me to work with decision makers and subject matter experts, from the scoping phase to making strategic choices. The concept of “knowledge brokering” occurred to me from my experience of large-scale organizational work. Design’s interdisciplinary nature makes it an agent to bring together fragmented domain knowledges from different groups and breakthrough the challenge that disparate efforts cannot.

Flip the process-driven approach and start sooner. Prototyping is a way of learning fast with minimum resource commitment. The ideas made tangible allow people to feel and interact with key touch points, give feedback to more than the prototypes themselves, but more importantly, their prior, unarticulated opinions and needs.The prototypes can be as low-fidelity as quick storyboarding, paper app demonstrations and card-board boxes.

Manage the fidelity and resolution. Depending on the desired outcome and project timeline, we need to manage the fidelity and resolution of the prototypes accordingly. While my digital and physical prototypes are usually at low to mid fidelity level, the resolution varies a lot depending on the project need. High resolution is not always better, because it draws people’s attention to details. On the other hand, maintaining the acceptable level of resolution is much needed to make the interaction feel real. At the later phase of realization and presentation, methods like contextual role-playing and gallery walk-through can be introduced to create more immersive experience for the audience.

Visualizing Complexity

Effective communication is a significant part of a designer’s work. It’s not solely verbal, written or graphical, it is a well-balanced combination of all that drives constructive thinking and conveys a sharp point of view to the audience. In my opinion, visualization for communication purposes is a process of deconstruction and reconstruction of mental understanding that moves beyond words. Visualizing complexity allows us to tell, think and guide.

Visualization is a way to tell. Telling compelling stories with sharp point-of-view’s to stakeholders requires the ability of simplifying complexity and getting to the points with concise narratives. At the most obvious level, visualizing makes concepts clearer, more tangible and engaging.

Visualization is a way to think. I am in particularly inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s eureka moment of watching lawyers demonstrating the car crash incident with toy cars, toy trucks and dolls. As someone with a text-heavy background prior to design, I learned to work with visual mapping and see how we can construct ideas and notions beyond the limitation of words, with lines, shapes, colors, shades and sizes.

Visualization is a way to guide. As a design facilitator who often finds herself needing to explain the design process, I would make simple diagrams on 1-to-3 slides to visualize the process flow, planned activities and the expected outcomes of workshops, and how outcomes contribute to the bigger picture. Other times when playing a consultant role to projects that have enormous amount of information, I typically start by mapping the systems to make sense of the complexity, and helping teams find paths of their narratives.