design research

The Sense-making Winter

Winter provides a literal and metaphorical season ripe for sense-making if the other seasons are different Winter creates a natural opportunity to reflect. The cold weather, darkness, and general lack of ability to grow crops has meant that people traditionally spent this season telling stories and making sense of the world as they awaited the …

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Listening Matters

Shared events do not always yield common experiences or perceptions: our design research must keep that in mind. Prior to the global pandemic of 2020 design philosophies tended to view research as ’rounding out’ or ‘filling the gaps’ in our knowledge about someone or something. Designers would assume they had a good read on what …

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Design | Sprint

Design sprints are created for technical systems, not human ones. We need better research and attention to human-centred principles if we are to achieve the aims of rapid innovation in a responsible manner.

The Empathy Gap

Empathy is considered to be at the bedrock of good design. But what if how we’re thinking about empathy is wrong? Empathy is certainly having its moment. Anywhere you look for writing on design and innovation and you’ll likely find a big role for empathy. Designers are encouraged to empathize with their potential customers and …

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The Hyberbole and Exaggerated Demise of Design Thinking

It is time to pull design thinking from the embers of hyperbole and placed under the microscope and macroscope of reflective practice and research. Once there, we might better comment on what this idea means for business, social innovation, human services and our overall wellbeing by pointing to something other than an exclamation mark to make our point.

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